「经济学人」Masterpiece theatre

The recently renovated Frick Collection is a testament to a bygone era

HENRY CLAY FRICK made a very 19th-century fortune in steel and coal, but his passion lay in other materials: canvas and oil paint. When he was a young man, a bank official visiting him observed that Frick “may be a little too enthusiastic about pictures”. In 1935, 16 years after Frick died, his mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side opened as a museum to show the collection he spent decades amassing, with masterpieces by Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer and others.

For the past five years, the Frick Collection has been closed for a renovation costing $330m. Some feared that when the institution reopened it would be unrecognisable. But Annabelle Selldorf, the architect in charge of the renovation, succeeded in her ambition to “fix things in ways that don’t interfere with the things that people love so much”. The new Frick still transports visitors to a bygone New York; it also represents a bygone style of displaying a personal art collection.

The Frick’s Whartonesque atmosphere used to extend to its toilets, lifts, lighting and ventilation. It had no restaurant and its shop was poky. (These can be cash cows for museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art generated $56.7m, about 15% of its total revenue, from its retail operations in the last fiscal year.) The Frick’s music room was charming but small, offering just 147 seats, with better visuals than acoustics. Such oversights have been resolved.

The house’s second storey, where the Frick family had lived, was off-limits to the public and used for office space. Now offices are on the third storey, and viewers can ascend the Grand Staircase and meander through ten new galleries, some linked by a passage with an extraordinary sky-blue vaulted ceiling painted with birds in flight. A beguiling portrait by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres of a coquettish countess hangs in Frick’s former bedroom; works by François Boucher line the walls of his wife’s private sitting room.

Opening these rooms and installing a few new galleries on the ground floor has yielded 30% more gallery space with just a 10% increase in total square metres. It also means that the Frick no longer has to take down works from its permanent collection to make room for special exhibitions.

A view of Jean Barbet's "Angel" seen in the garden court at The Frick Collection press preview in New York City, USA.

Though visitors will doubtless swarm the Frick when it reopens on April 17th, those collectors alive today who are pondering how to show off their work are unlikely to take it as a model, for two main reasons. First, when Frick died, America had fewer and smaller museums. Now people who want to display their personal collection after they die (and also hope to offset their heirs’ inheritance taxes) can leave it to one of many established museums, where it is likely to get lots of foot traffic.

Second, the model of collecting and displaying art has changed. Many capitalists-turned-collectors, especially those fond of contemporary art, prefer sharing their works with the public while they are alive. “Now people are interested in what people think,” Benjamin Godsill, an art adviser, says. “With contemporary art, we’re writing art history in the moment, and the public’s reaction is part of it.”

With the notable exception of Steve Schwarzman, a private-equity titan who is turning a mansion in Newport into a museum, those who would consider establishing their own museum are unlikely to do so in the home where they once lived. That is because contemporary art is bigger than most domestic spaces: multimedia works require vaster galleries than Frick’s small, intricate paintings do. The Frick appears destined to remain a jewel-box reminder of a past era, in more ways than one.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Masterpiece theatre”(Apr 10th 2025)

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