← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Frick is Back!
00:24:09
After years of renovations, The Frick Collection is opening to the public again.
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Amy Eng
Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
The Frick Collection is set to reopen to the public this Thursday after five years of being closed. The backstory is in 1914, steel magnate and robber baron Henry Clay Frick built a beautiful home at 1 East 70th 70th Street. His wealth was enormous and yes, frankly, he earned it in a way that would leave people aghast today. But Frick filled his home with gorgeous figurative and decorative pieces of art, from Vermeers to Marie Antoinette's furniture. Frick left in his will that upon his and his wife's death, it would become a Museum. In 1935, the Frick Collection opened and aside from a few nips and tucks across the years, it remained pretty much the same. To bring the museum into the 21st century, a project was planned, a theme $330 million project, soup to Nuts. To fix some of the problems like leaks in the building, to where to store the art, to opening the second floor of the building for the first time, to museum goers, to creating new performance space in a bunker that was Wednesday, a doomsday bunker. The home closed entirely. While artisans got to work. Some of the art found a new temporary home at the Frick Madison. And some very interesting things happened, maybe a precursor to what was to come at the FR like Barclay L. Hendricks in 2023, curated by my next guest, Amy Eng. She joins us now to talk about the reimagining of the Frick and some of the plans throughout the summer. Thank you for joining us on a very, very busy week.
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Amy Eng
I'm so happy to be here, Alison. Thanks for having me.
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Alison Stewart
You know, so many people go to different museums for different reasons. You go to moma because you want to see contemporary artists. You go to the Met cause maybe you want to look at the sculptures, gardens before the renovations. What made the Frick Collection a place people wanted to go?
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Amy Eng
Well, it I think served a number of purposes and we have various kinds of audiences who've been coming to the Frick for a long time. Some people love the house, simply being in a house that looks nothing like their own home, it looks nothing like mine. And then those who come for those great, you know, the big iconic names of European art history, your Vermeers and your Rembrandts and your Titians. So I think it has this special identity as both an art museum and, and a historic house. So you have both sides of the experience together.
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Alison Stewart
The Fricks had two children that survived into adulthood. Childs Frick and Helen Frick. Childs was a little bit shy. He was a paleontologist. But Helen was kind of the person who oversaw the art that her mother and father left behind. How would you describe her taste, her philosophy around art?
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Amy Eng
Well, what's interesting about Helen, and it's been nice to give her more of a spotlight with our reopening because she actually spent probably more time building the collection after her father's death than he had when he was alive. So she was helping him or aiding him, supporting him when he was building his collection before his death in 1919. And then she became the head of the acquisitions committee for the museum all the way up until 1960. So a lot of things came through and she guided the way the collection would change and grow. And so one of the rooms on the second floor, we just pay tribute a little bit to what Helen Clay for, contributed to the collection. She's the one who brought in a lot of the early Italian Renaissance, the Duccio, Cimabue, Piero della Francesca, the early stuff that her father just wasn't particularly collecting in his time. So we've installed those works that came under her custodianship into the collection in what had been her former bedroom.
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Alison Stewart
When you were thinking about the Frick collection before the renovation.
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Unnamed Interviewer
We're going to talk about that in a minute.
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Alison Stewart
How long did it live in its previous state?
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Amy Eng
So we opened in 1935 and we closed the doors when everybody else did in March 2020.
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Alison Stewart
Honestly, when you thought about the museum and you had to be honest about like, okay, what is this lacking in the 21st century? What was the museum lacking that you.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Were going to be able to address with this reimagination?
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Amy Eng
Honestly, I loved the Frick. It was my favorite place. I didn't think that gallery wise, that it necessarily was lacking anything. But you couldn't buy a bottle of water.
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Alison Stewart
Right.
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Amy Eng
You know, for real? For real. There were just certain 21st century amenities that you couldn't have. And so small things like having a cafe, having an auditorium that we don't have to turn people away at the door because the capacity is so small, that kind of thing, letting people in out of the rain because suddenly the reception hall is just a little bit More generous. All of that, I think, supports the experience of the galleries. And for me, it's just a huge bonus that because of this renovation, we've been able to open an entire other floor of gallery space.
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Unnamed Interviewer
The museum had to be shut down during this period, but there was the Frick Madison, which turned out to be this extraordinary experience for you, I'm sure. First of all, was there any discussion that they were just gonna close the museum for film?
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Amy Eng
Sure there was. You know, that's the cheaper way to do it, Alison.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Right, exactly. It's true.
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Amy Eng
But I think it was immediately decided by our former director, Ian Wardropper, and the board of trustees that we kind of owed it to the City of New York to have some of the collection available for view, for experience. So that's quickly how we got to let's find a space to host us. And then we got to the Breuer building.
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Unnamed Interviewer
So you were at the Breuer Building, which used to be the Madison. I mean, it used to be The Whitney from March 2021 to March 2025.
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Amy Eng
2024.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Yeah, 24. Thank you. What pieces did you want to be included in that version of the Frick's history?
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Amy Eng
So, you know, there were a lot of things that didn't make it into that building. I mean, I think we put three or four Turners in storage just to be able to create the kind of experience in Frick Madison that we wanted to not, you know, to be able to edit it very well. Mainly we put in the works that people are obsessed with the most. Because seriously, if we move something out of the Frick galleries, people notice and they call up and they say, where did you put that coro, et cetera. So we also wanted to give the people what they want, you know, so part of it was really, what are the things that people would really, really miss if they didn't have them on view?
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Unnamed Interviewer
It did give you, though, an incredible curatorial opportunity, like the Barclay Hicks. Tell me a little bit more about what went into that process of marrying sort of the old Frick. Not old, but like the sort of. The classic.
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Amy Eng
Yeah, call it the old Frick.
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Unnamed Interviewer
The classic Frick with this new version of the Frick.
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Amy Eng
So just putting the old master paintings and sculpture and decorative arts into this modernist, brutal as 1960s building just invited a totally different experience of the old works and made it sort of obvious to invite newer art and put the Frick's historic paintings into a new dialogue. And so it was. I mean, you don't get a Berkeley Hendrix very often. I mean, he really was one of a kind. And so that was such an extraordinary experience to bring and Bridge 20th century paintings that were inspired in many ways by the Frick's collection together with the Frick's actual collection.
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Unnamed Interviewer
We are talking about the Frick Collection reopening this Thursday to the public. My guest is Amy Ang John Updike Curator at the Frick Collection. All right, we've heard about it a lot. The second floor is open. Dun, dun, dun. What were the initial conversations about opening the second floor to museum goers? It used to just be the first floor, right?
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Amy Eng
It used to just be the ground floor. And then there was a velvet rope that blocked the grave staircase from anybody going up because the second floor was administrative offices. So I worked on the second floor. My colleagues in curatorial worked on the second floor. It was really a private space and it wasn't particularly beautiful. I had my computer there. So these were office spaces for the last 90 years. When we opened to the public in 1935, they stopped being bedrooms and guest rooms and breakfast rooms. So one of the first conversations about opening the second floor is how do you create a historic feeling in rooms that have not looked historic in a very long time? So where we could. We took a couple of opportunities to restore the two rooms into how the Frick family had it when they lived there. That's the breakfast room and then Mrs. Frick's boudoir. And you were just talking about sexy time food, so.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Well, let's talk about the breakfast. Let's talk food first. Let's talk about the breakfast room because the breakfast room was really interesting. So you go up the stairs and it's a smallish room, which I was surprised. But all the paintings that are in the room were the original paintings that were initially there when they came to eat. Tell us about who's represented in those paintings.
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Amy Eng
Okay, so first of all, most of the rooms on the second floor are somewhat smaller because they are the private living rooms. And remember, there were only three Frick family members who lived there. Right. So they didn't need that much grand space for their. For their private life. We used 1927 photographs to reconstruct how they had the furniture as well as the paintings on the wall. And the paintings on the walls are from the Barbizon School. So 19th century French landscape painters like Corot and Rousseau and Daubigny. Those were some of the earliest historic pictures that Frick started to collect. So that really was part of his early collection. So it Tells a little bit of his story and also a little bit of the family life. Waking up in the morning having your breakfast in that second floor room, the dumb waiters bringing up, you know, eggs and whatever and you're surro with these Serene views of 19th century French countryside.
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Unnamed Interviewer
In the boudoir, as we get sort of a little bit of a lens into what mattered to them, what they thought was beautiful. What did they think was beautiful?
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Amy Eng
Well, I think it was different for each of them. What's interesting is how different when you go into that boudoir, which is just a private sitting room. I mean, I think boudoir takes on a little bit of a we're having fun sensual tone in this country. But it was really just a private room for Mrs. Frick. I think if you contrast that, it's, you know, the chandeliers, the delicacy, the paintings that are in the wall, the porcelains and then you go over to what had been, you know, her husband's bedroom and study. Those are lined in, you know, walnut paneling and very dark and just a little bit of a heavier feeling. Overall, I think what's nice about the second floor is how different each one of them wanted to live.
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Unnamed Interviewer
I sat in one room, I said, Monet went this floor, Manet across the way, like Monet, Manet.
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Amy Eng
And what's interesting too is he kept. So the family, when they lived there, they kept the impressionist paintings upstairs. So those were more contemporary works. Those are some of the most recent works in the collection. The big hitters, the Vermeers, the Holbeins, the Rembrandts. Those were downstairs in the grand receiving rooms upstairs where only really guests who were staying overnight would have been. That's where he kept sort of the more modern stuff. So it's also interesting to see what taste wise, what were things that he kept close to him and his family's private quarters.
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Alison Stewart
If you folks want to take a look at some pictures that I took on Saturday when I went to the sort of members opening, it's on our Instagram right now. Olivetnyc. You can hear what Amy and I are talking about. This is interesting. The Frick. Some visitors who are scholars use the Frick's remarkable library of art history and related topics. How does the library fit into this renovation?
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Amy Eng
So the library is an amazing gem within the gem. And it was, it was started by Helen Clay Frick very soon after her father's death. And she basically wanted it to be a place that supported the art collection. And so the Study of fine art. And so it's one of the premier art research libraries in the world, I would say. It has a beautiful restored reading room now, which is open to the public by point me. You just have to be a member of the library, which is free now. You can actually walk above ground from the museum to the library building. Before, if you were a visitor, you had to go outside, walk around the block in the rain and the snow, and then enter another side. And now. So there's a new join between architectural join between the buildings of the collection and of the library, which is useful for both staff and for visitors.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah, it's interesting because the renovation is remodeling of the old, but also I think it was 27,000 square feet of new space was added to the building. Can you tell us about what are you doing with the new space?
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Amy Eng
Well, it certainly doesn't feel like that now. We've moved in and we're already. We've already filled every crevice at every corner. It was really to give the visitors a little bit more breathing room. I don't know if you remember the old reception hall, but it was like it was always. You were always elbowing somebody out of the way. And so part of it is these public spaces, education rooms, these linkages, for example, between the library and the collection. They're not just hallways, they're beautiful spaces. And Annabelle Selldorf and her team cared about every single contour. You turn a corner and you think you're just going to the library, but you discover this, urn. I don't know if you, if you walk down that way. So we. I think it's just an extension of being in a really cared for environment.
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Unnamed Interviewer
The Selldorf architects, there's about 65 of them in this firm. She started the firm in 1988, which puts her like 28 years old, to start a firm, which is cool.
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Amy Eng
First of all, she's a very cool lady.
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Unnamed Interviewer
She strikes me as a very cool person. What was her vision going into the project?
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Amy Eng
Well, she. I mean, she is very, very clever when it comes to understanding the needs of museums, which is why museums keep calling her to do these projects. And I think she understood that the demand was for grace and consistency and coherence, so that it was both a respect for history and bringing the museum into a new chapter, but just with the same touch that had been given in 1935 and in 19.
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Unnamed Interviewer
It was interesting the way the light on the second floor because you go out of the entrance the. The residence and then you go into the new part and it's like. It sort of just like dawns on you.
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Amy Eng
It's true.
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Unnamed Interviewer
It's kind of interesting.
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Amy Eng
She's created beautiful vistas and. And some of them. Some of the more interesting things, which, you know, as an office worker, I'm just grateful to have, is there are now views from within the building where you can see the friction building from within. And so it's just a totally new experience of a building that's been here for a long time.
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Unnamed Interviewer
When you think about the Frick Garden, it actually isn't for visiting, it's just for looking. I mean, in a beautiful way.
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Amy Eng
Yes. The 70th street garden, the Russell Page Garden, was built as a viewing garden only. Yeah.
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Unnamed Interviewer
And is it going to stay. It's going to stay that way.
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Amy Eng
It's going to stay that way. I mean, it was meant to be, so. And frankly, there's a. There's a little pool in the middle of it, which is a bit of a safety hazard.
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Unnamed Interviewer
True. My guest is Amy Ang. She's a John Updike, curator at the Frick Collection. We are talking about the Frick Collection reopening this week to the general public. All right, let's go downstairs to the first floor. There's marble in there, there's drapery, there's curtains, there's tassels, there's wood. Do you have any sense of how many different artisans worked on the first floor?
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Amy Eng
There's probably a spreadsheet. But, you know, I'm even. I'm shocked at how many people were involved. We had a gathering the other night just for all of those who work directly on the building in some complexity. And it was. What is heartening is that there are specialists and expert makers who are still refining these crafts. And even, you know, the one historical story is some of the wall hangings, the silk wall hangings that line the West Gallery and the Oval Room, et cetera. These are makers in Lyon, in France, that are still in business. And they had the original patterns in their archive for what they produced for the Frick to begin with. And, I mean, that's a survival story of a specialist craft, a luxury craft, of course, which you don't hear so much anymore. You hear things about everybody's going out of business or stopping what they're doing or not having apprentices coming in. And it was wonderful to be able to engage the same ongoing craftspeople.
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Unnamed Interviewer
There's so much marble. Where is the. Is it all from the same place? Is it from the same place that did it originally.
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Amy Eng
No, no, I think and especially Annabelle Saldorf cared very, very much about aesthetically how there's so many different marbles that have been selected. So I think there was a big curation of marbles.
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Alison Stewart
This is a nice shout out to you. It says cocktails with a covet with a curator was one of the most positive developments of COVID The Frick's curators remained raised the bar high. Thanks bunches for the series and a wonderful spell of Frick Boyer which was very nice.
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Amy Eng
Oh wonderful. Well raise the bar high. Haha cocktails and we look forward to having the bar at the Frick open when the cafe opens in June.
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Alison Stewart
Well that's interesting because it's going to.
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Amy Eng
Have a restaurant finally and you can buy not just a bottle of water, you can have a glass of wine.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk about. I think it's 30% more gallery space is in the in now let's talk about the beautiful floral arrangements which are not floral. This is part of your. You look at them, you're like wait, those are not flowers. They're beautiful sculptures throughout the entire exhibit. Will you tell people who the artist is and how he relates to the Frick's history?
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Amy Eng
Yes. Okay, so this is for all those visitors who have their tickets ready for their visits to the frick beginning April 17th. The flowers in the galleries are made of porcelain. They're not real. You don't have to go up and touch them. I can tell you now they're not real. They're produced by a Ukrainian born Russian artist called Vladimir Kanievsky. He works locally in New Jersey and he has produced an unbelievable arrangement of plants and flowers made of porcelain throughout the galleries. And this is a tribute to when the Frick first opened to the public in 1935. Helen Clay Frick arranged to have real flowers in all of the galleries. You can't do that now because of conservation reasons. You know, having live things in the galleries, it's just not best practice. So instead of having live and fresh flowers in the galleries, we decided to commission Vladimir Kanievsky to produce these. Really? And they're also paired interestingly with some of the works in the room. So there's pomegranates underneath the Virgin Mary and artichokes underneath the Bellini St. Francis. So they'll be up for about six months, which is longer than fresh flowers by the way.
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Alison Stewart
Another exhibit that is going to be going on through August 11th are a bunch of drawings by Degas and Rubens. Tell us what we'll see there.
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Amy Eng
So a lot of people don't know that the Frick has a collection of works on paper. It's just not something that is, you know, one of our strongest suits. It's relatively small, but very strong. Drawings are also things that because of the light sensitivity, they can come out for three months and then they go back into their dark boxes for a few years. So this is a really nice moment to celebrate further what's in the Frick's collection by showing objects that Henry Clay Frick collected, works on paper, as well as what the trustees have augmented in the collection.
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Alison Stewart
And then Vermeer's Love Letters is going to open on June 8th. This is a collaboration with other museums.
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Amy Eng
Yep. So we are bringing together three paintings. This is based on the Frick's famous Mistress and maid picture. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin is sending two other pictures of mistress maids and letters that are being exchanged among them. It opens On, I think, June 17th.
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Unnamed Interviewer
17Th. Yeah. And finally, I want to talk about this performance space, which I got a peek at.
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Alison Stewart
It's gorgeous. The acoustics are amazing.
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Unnamed Interviewer
As soon as I stepped in, I thought, these acoustics are amazing. You're going to have terrific performances there. Who's the first up?
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Amy Eng
Oh, gosh, no, don't ask me that. It's a two week festival.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Well, it's a two week festival. No, it's. Wait, I know it's. I know.
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Amy Eng
Anthony Costanza. Oh, Nico Muhleigh. Yes. He's doing a new commission, a new composition. There's a lot that they sold out so quickly this two weeks of opening festival performances. And it is chock a block full of stars.
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Unnamed Interviewer
It's amazing when you think about it, because I think it's Nico Moonli's piece or it's Vijay Ayers, I can't remember. But it's about the portrait. Saint Bellini's Francis in the Desert. That's what it's about. And I thought again about our classic Frick meets our new Frick. Do you think this is the way future, the future for the museum?
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Amy Eng
I think it's always been so. I think the Frick has always served a living contemporary art community and that's what we will continue to do.
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Unnamed Interviewer
All right, I got a question here. I think I know the answer to it, but I'm gonna let you answer it instead. It says, can you talk about the display of works of art and labels or lack thereof?
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Amy Eng
Yes.
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Unnamed Interviewer
And what new features can we expect with audio guides.
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Amy Eng
Sure. Okay. This is, you know, this can be a contentious topic, and in a time of.
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Unnamed Interviewer
I've heard it several times. Several times on Saturday.
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Amy Eng
So the reason we don't have didactic labels, and I mean labels that tell you not only who made it and what it is and when, but what it's about or, you know, the themes and iconography pictured. The reason we don't have that is because this is a historic. And it is part of the mission of the museum to preserve that sense of a home. And in a home, you wouldn't have didactic labels on the walls. What we do have, and I understand that can be. That can feel like something's missing to people who want to learn more. What's very important to us is that every object can be identified. So on every painting, there's a little plaque that tells you the name of the author or the artist and the subject. And so you can look those up both on a guide that's $5 guide where you can look everything up, or the free app where you can look anything up, plus audio commentary, et cetera. I think the more important thing, not only retaining the sense of a house, but it's important for us to have people walk in and not be told what to think. Either that they can let their eye wander and decide what they want to look like, look at and decide what they want to think about it. And if they want to learn more, if they have thoughts, opinions, they can explore those. There are endless amounts of video and aud commentary, but it's very rare that you get a chance to just look at something.
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Unnamed Interviewer
What is your favorite part of the museum now?
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Amy Eng
Oh, this is a tough one. It's a tough one because there are so many aspects of the last five years. I would say that it's just nice to have the paintings feel and look like they're back at home.
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Unnamed Interviewer
Amy Eng is the John Updike curator at the Frick Collection, who, by the way, when I was out and I came back, you wrote me a lovely letter, and I did very much appreciate it. So thank you very much for doing that. I do appreciate that.
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Amy Eng
Thank you, Alison.
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Unnamed Interviewer
The Frick Collection reopens this Thursday.
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