On Monday morning, Xavier Salomon was walking around the empty art-stuffed mansion built by the Gilded Age steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, taking in his favorite views during a rare moment of complete solitude. Were the building still a house, it would be the largest in Manhattan, but since the 1930s it’s been open to the public as the Frick Collection, home to the industrialist’s incredibly stacked collection of Old Masters. Salomon, the dapper chief curator, strolled the marble hallways in silence until reaching the Living Hall, sun streaming in from windows displaying the full vantage of the East Green of Central Park. Two portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger flanked an El Greco above the fireplace. On the other side was Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, perhaps the Italian’s masterpiece, and just about as good as painting gets on earth.
Henry Clay Frick made his fortune in the coke fields outside Pittsburgh and came to Manhattan with a net worth of billions when adjusted for inflation, ready to manipulate the markets with Andrew Carnegie, a fellow Pittsburgh businessman who moved a block down from Frick after becoming the richest man on the planet. St. Francis hangs exactly as it did when Frick lived in the joint 100-plus years ago.
“This room, particularly, is probably the most intact room of the whole house, so here I feel like you really feel the spirit of Frick,” Salomon said. “And we know that in the evening Frick would go in the galleries and sit on a sofa and smoke a cigar, mostly probably in the big gallery. But I can always imagine when I see the sofa in this room that he was smoking a cigar while looking at works of art.”
In a few weeks, Salomon will no longer be padding around the house, luxuriating in Mr. Frick cosplay. After five years of extensive renovations, the museum will reopen to the public April 17, with a $220 million facelift and a new expansion by Annabelle Selldorf that manages to blend seamlessly into the robber baron’s original manse. The new structure will house the offices, auditorium, special exhibitions gallery, and new ticketing venue, freeing up crucial space in the original house—including the living quarters of the Frick family, which has been off-limits to visitors for more than a century.
The board used to hold its meetings in Frick’s bedroom, where he died. (“Almost as if the ghost of Frick is in this room,” Salomon told me while we stood in it.) But now that room has Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville, one of the nation’s most celebrated paintings, according to critic Sebastian Smee. Charles Baudelaire was also a fan.
For much of the half-decade interregnum, The Frick’s masterpieces were hung at the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue, but there was something a bit off about seeing the works outside of their acquired habitat, removed from the context of the temple to Gilded Age opulence. Across a wide spectrum of the art world, from the ultracontemporary artists to the crotchety Old Masters experts, it seems that just about everybody loves The Frick. Poets love The Frick. T.S. Eliot gave a seminal lecture on Milton in front of the Fragonards, and Frank O’Hara mentions Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider in “Having a Coke with You”: “And anyway it’s in the Frick / which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time.”
Lifelong devotees of The Frick include artists as different as David Hockney and Frank Stella, and filmmakers as different as Wim Wenders and John Waters. Stan Lee modeled the Avengers mansion in the Marvel comics after The Frick. A 2021 book, The Sleeve Should Be Illegal, collected Frick fan letters from a motley crew of contributors, among them Victoria Beckham, Lena Dunham, Lydia Davis, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, and the novelist Jonathan Lethem, who used to sneak into The Frick as a teenager. The late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl went to every museum on earth, and The Frick was his favorite.
“You can’t believe how many people have told me that The Frick is their favorite museum,” said Axel Rüger, the new director of the museum, who took over from longtime steward Ian Wardropper just weeks before the reopening.
Rüger was standing in the new subterranean auditorium at the press preview last week, addressing what appeared to be hundreds of arts and culture reporters—an incredible turnout for a museum press conference.
“It is the world’s favorite museum,” he said.
A somewhat outrageous proclamation. But how off is it, really? Let’s talk about the home museums of that era, all of which have a special place among the museum landscape. There’s the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, with its gobsmacking trove of Impressionist and post-Impressionist biggies—but technically it’s no longer in Albert C. Barnes’s home; it’s in downtown Philly. There’s the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a jewel box housing the collection of the turn-of-the-century Boston heiress, and the site of the still-unsolved heist of some of its most iconic paintings: Vermeer’s The Concert, a large double-portrait Rembrandt, and many others. The homes of Sir Richard Wallace in London, Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, and Édouard André in Paris—they are similar in spirit to The Frick, insofar as they are homes of collectors that now operate as museums.
But they are not the Frick Collection. The Frick is in the middle of the most important island in the world, steps away from the 6 train. There are no white cubes, no glass in front of the canvases, no selfies—photography is prohibited—and it has one of the greatest collections of art ever assembled by an American.
“It’s the quality of the pieces—it’s a small house that has three Vermeers, it has three Rembrandts, it has the greatest Bellini in the world, it has El Greco and Titian,” Salomon told me, standing in front of said Bellini. “It has the largest and most important cycle of Fragonard paintings in the world. It has a spectacular collection of Gainsboroughs. I was talking to a curator from The Met the other day who was like, ‘Why don’t we have Gainsboroughs as good as yours?’ And I was like, ‘Well, you don’t.’”
One of those Gainsboroughs, The Mall in St. James’s Park, was acquired for Frick by Joseph Duveen, the greatest art dealer of the 20th century, who extracted Old Masters and Renaissance gems from the fading aristocratic classes of Europe in the decades before and after the Great War. The nobility had paintings on the walls of their ancestral castles but dwindling fortunes; the emergent mega-rich Americans, who sucked oil and steel from the continent and made fortunes speculating on the railroads and industrialized factories, had plenty of money and wanted to spend it.
And Frick spent an outrageous amount of money on art—hundreds of millions in today’s dollars. He also spent $5 million, the equivalent of more than $150 million today when adjusted for inflation, to buy the park-side property and build the house, and left $15 million, worth around $290 million in today’s dollars, to be spent on the maintenance and expansion of his collection. He began collecting as an obsession when he moved his family to New York in 1905, first occupying a house built by William Vanderbilt, on Fifth Avenue in Midtown. (It was torn down in the 1940s to make way for office buildings.) He bought works by Van Eyck, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, paying $225,000 for the Dutch master’s haunting self-portrait that now hangs in the Frick Collection’s West Gallery—the largest private space in New York when completed in 1915.
That Gainsborough purchase earned Frick a Times headline—the way that today it’s global news when Jeff Bezos buys an Ed Ruscha at Christie’s. But it would be a stretch to say that for most of his lifetime the man was mostly known as an art collector. In the 1890s he gained notoriety for his role in the Homestead strike, which resulted in a wave of violence at Carnegie Steel’s mills downriver from Pittsburgh. After workers occupied the factory to prevent scabs from crossing the picket line, Frick sent in 300 gun-toting Pinkerton agents to quell the rebellion. A gunfight ensued. By the time Frick convinced the governor to send in the National Guard, seven workers and three guards had been killed and dozens wounded. The public outcry was such that a few weeks later, the anarchist Alexander Berkman managed to shoot Frick in the shoulder and the neck, hoping his assassination would inspire workers still striking to rise up against capitalist forces. Frick survived and crushed the union, with the government eventually putting the strike organizers on trial.
