Latest news with #FrickCollection
The Star
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Star
In New York, Vermeer delivers the art of the love letter - sealed with a brush
Vermeer's 'Mistress And Maid' draws a visitor's gaze at The Frick Collection preview in New York, part of a three-painting exhibit exploring the art of seduction through the written word. Photo: AFP In a special exhibit featuring just three paintings, the Frick Collection in New York is inviting viewers to contemplate the age and the art of seduction by the written word. The show brings together a trio of paintings by 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer: the Frick's own Mistress And Maid, The Love Letter on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Woman Writing A Letter With Her Maid from the National Gallery of Ireland. They are three of six paintings by Vermeer (1632-1675) that focus on the reading and writing of letters. They also depict interactions between women of different classes. Each painting features a woman and a female servant who has likely become a confidante and an intermediary as her mistress conducts a romantic relationship, said exhibit curator Robert Fucci. "While the contents of the letters in Vermeer's paintings are not made clear, they are most likely amorous," he said. "Courtship and love letters were an important part of the artist's social context and a prevalent artistic theme." In Vermeer's era, women had increasing autonomy in choosing their life partners, Fucci noted. "Servants played a crucial role. Employers entrusted them with delivery, especially when messages needed to be shared covertly," he added. A debt with the baker Vermeer's Love Letters, on view until the end of August, is the first show on offer since the Frick reopened its doors in April following a top-to-bottom, US$330mil (RM1.4bil) renovation. The 20th century mansion filled with paintings, sculptures, and decorative pieces dating from the Renaissance to the 19th century now has 10 new galleries on its second floor, in what used to be the Frick family's private quarters. Two of the Vermeer paintings – worth a fortune today – helped the artist's wife, Catharina Bolnes, settle a debt with a baker after she was widowed with 11 children. The show is the first of the Dutch master's works in New York since 2001. The intimate offering is in sharp contrast to the sprawling Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in 2023. Featuring 28 of his 35 known paintings, that was the largest collection of Vermeer's work ever assembled in one place, and drew thousands of art lovers. "Vermeer certainly continues to compel people and to inspire people today," said Aimee Ng, another curator at the Frick. – AFP
Vancouver Sun
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vancouver Sun
At the Frick in New York, a grand Gilded Age collection shows its intimate side
NEW YORK — For decades, visitors to the Frick Collection passed a magnificent staircase with an ornamental railing and giant candelabras on the landing, flanking an elaborate screen hiding the museum's pipe organ. The second floor of the old mansion on Fifth Avenue was where the Frick family once carried on with domestic life, above the monumental rooms of the ground floor, which housed one of the finest collections of art ever assembled by a private individual. What was up those stairs? The office of the museum's director, and smaller, more humanly scaled rooms that had been off-limits to the public since the mansion opened as a museum in 1935. After a four-year, $220 million renovation, the second floor is now open for the first time, revealing more of the Frick's rich holdings, including portrait medals, timepieces and ceramics, along with smaller paintings that live more happily in intimate rooms with lower ceilings. Plan your next getaway with Travel Time, featuring travel deals, destinations and gear. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Travel Time will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The renovation also added an underground concert and lecture hall, a new cafe, a larger reception area, conservation labs, and some 30 percent more gallery space, including a more gracious and amenable venue for temporary exhibitions. It is a thorough refresh and update, including greater accessibility for people with mobility issues, yet it has been done with a light hand and a deft sense of the building's history, design and materials. Everything that is essential to the Frick – the art, the architecture and the time-warp sense that you have left the modern world and the bustling city for a serene fantasy of the late Gilded Age – is the same as it always was. But it is now easier to navigate and there is more to explore. The opening of the second floor offers visitors much more than just additional gallery space. This was the domestic habitat of the Frick family, including the Breakfast Room with its 19th-century French landscapes (an early collecting passion of Henry Clay Frick) and the Boucher Room, which was part of a suite used by Frick's wife, Adelaide. The upper-level chambers are surprisingly modest, sumptuously appointed but not much larger than one would find in a typical McMansion today. They also add a complex dynamic to the museum: They humanize the building, but they also foreground the collectors, especially Frick himself, who was in many ways an odious figure. Frick was a union buster and in 1892, he hired hundreds of Pinkerton detectives – a private army of thugs with guns – to quell a strike against a Pennsylvania steel mill. Ten men were killed, dozens injured, and the situation became so inflamed that the state militia was called in to break the workers' resistance. Frick, who made a fortune supplying the coal derivative known as coke to Andrew Carnegie's steel company, where Frick later served as chairman, was left with a tattered reputation for years. Only amnesia – and art – could repair the damage, generations later. Three years after the strike, Frick began collecting art in earnest, turning from the occasional purchase of fashionable contemporary French works by the Barbizon school and American landscape artists to the diligent pursuit of the finest old masters. He was canny, focused and well advised by some of the best art dealers of the age, and his collection (augmented by the family and later donations) is one of the best in the world. Anyone who has seen it will remember the magnificent Giovanni Bellini panel of 'St. Francis in the Desert,' the Holbein portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, the jaunty boy dressed for romance painted by Bronzino, the giant canvases of Veronese, the three Vermeers (an embarrassment of riches), and the showstopper of them all, Rembrandt's late-in-life self-portrait depicting the bankrupt genius clinging to his last possession, visceral honesty. In 1906, when the Rembrandt self-portrait came on the market, Frick hesitated over the $225,000 price tag, which was $25,000 more than he wanted to pay. His dealer, Charles Carstairs, suggested it would be a bargain even at more than twice the price: 'If you could only see the picture over your mantel dominating the entire gallery just as you dominate those you come into contact with, you wouldn't let it pass for $500,000.' This is about as naked and direct an expression of the ugly core of art collecting as ever put on paper. Collecting is articulated as domination, and by purchasing the Rembrandt, Frick himself would become a masterpiece among men. Frick was among the richest and most powerful men on the planet, yet vulnerable to the most egregious flattery. But it worked, and the painting came to America, where Americans remain grateful to have it. Art washing is as old as the pyramids, or older, and Henry Clay Frick has been scrubbed clean. The second-floor galleries raise these issues in a way that the lower galleries, which are more public and feel more institutional, do not. In Adelaide Frick's suite, the paintings of chubby infants and children pretending to be scientists and artists (made by the studio of the 18th-century French artist Francois Boucher) are delightfully silly and playful. But we must also reckon with the fact that these are the images that Adelaide chose to see every day in her most intimate space. She could have looked upon almost anything the art world had to offer, but she chose these insouciant masterpieces of pure insipidity. Why? The Boucher babies, masquerading as thinkers and makers, suggest an analogy parallel to the one about Rembrandt offered by Frick's dealer: Mothers make babies like these babies make art, thus motherhood is art. The logic is imperfect, but it must have been gratifying. These views into the inner lives of the Fricks are a welcome institutional honesty. And the gain to visitors by the opening of congenial spaces for the Frick's smaller and more idiosyncratic treasures is invaluable. A second-floor guest room now displays a diverse and abundant collection of medals, including portraits and commemorative medallions, donated by Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher. Medals are easily overlooked in larger museums, and rarely are they so well displayed as they are here, with perfect lighting revealing magnificent relief and detail. Another room, formerly a butler's pantry, displays a great curiosity, a 'decimal' watch made by the Breguet shop, sometime around the French Revolution, including one of the revolution's less successful innovations: a division of the day into 10 hours, each divided into 100 decimal minutes. This did not catch on. The success of this renovation is a testament to the power of public engagement, and the near fanatical love of the Frick's dedicated audience for the institution. The museum has always been hungry for more space, and in 2014 Frick leaders unveiled an expansion plan that would have destroyed a beloved garden that fronted East 70th Street. Opposition was immediate and vehement and, to the leadership's credit, they rethought the entire project. The current expansion, by Selldorf Architects, captured some underutilized space on the ground level, placed the new auditorium underground and preserved the footprint of the garden, which has been replanted with its original design. The rooms of the historic mansion, designed by Carrere Hastings as a private home for the Fricks in 1914 and expanded by John Russell Pope in 1935 to serve as a museum, have been refreshed, in many cases using materials, including wall covers, sourced from the original vendors. Improved lighting in the main exhibition space, known as the West Gallery, flatters the paintings even on an overcast day. The flow of spaces has been improved with new access and connection points, including a passage from the domestic rooms of the second floor into a new meeting and gathering space outside the new gift shop. Despite intense public interest in the reopening of the museum, which relocated from 2021 to 2024 to the old Whitney Building on the Upper East Side, the Frick didn't feel overly crowded on a weekday morning in May when the city was flooded with visitors for college graduations. Among the new galleries on the second floor is the Walnut Room, which was originally the bedroom of Henry Clay Frick, who lived in the mansion for only five years before his death in 1919. When I visited, a Frick staffer pointed to a 1782 work by the English painter George Romney, depicting a young woman holding a lapdog just below the plunging neckline of her red dress. She is Emma Hart, who would marry into wealth and become Lady Hamilton, as well as the lover of the naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson. She was about 17 when Romney painted her, looking lovely and gazing endearingly at the viewer, as if you are the thing she most wants in the world. 'That is very likely the last artwork Frick ever saw,' said the longtime Frick staffer. Romney's painting hangs above the mantel in the bedroom, with views of Central Park. Above a mantel – like the mantel where the great Rembrandt self-portrait was meant to hang, lording it over all the other works in the collection. Frick owned Emma Hart's image, but he didn't own her, and that may be what drives all collectors: the illusion that we could have the thing itself, the landscape, the sumptuous clothes of a long-dead prince, the youth and physique of a god, the power of the church, the intelligence of Rembrandt, the beautiful face of an adolescent girl. This room, up the stairs that visitors were never allowed to use, feels a bit like the proverbial attic, where the secrets are stored, and this above all: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The Frick Collection is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday. For more information visit .
National Post
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- National Post
At the Frick in New York, a grand Gilded Age collection shows its intimate side
Article content NEW YORK — For decades, visitors to the Frick Collection passed a magnificent staircase with an ornamental railing and giant candelabras on the landing, flanking an elaborate screen hiding the museum's pipe organ. The second floor of the old mansion on Fifth Avenue was where the Frick family once carried on with domestic life, above the monumental rooms of the ground floor, which housed one of the finest collections of art ever assembled by a private individual. Article content Article content What was up those stairs? The office of the museum's director, and smaller, more humanly scaled rooms that had been off-limits to the public since the mansion opened as a museum in 1935. After a four-year, $220 million renovation, the second floor is now open for the first time, revealing more of the Frick's rich holdings, including portrait medals, timepieces and ceramics, along with smaller paintings that live more happily in intimate rooms with lower ceilings. Article content Article content The renovation also added an underground concert and lecture hall, a new cafe, a larger reception area, conservation labs, and some 30 percent more gallery space, including a more gracious and amenable venue for temporary exhibitions. It is a thorough refresh and update, including greater accessibility for people with mobility issues, yet it has been done with a light hand and a deft sense of the building's history, design and materials. Everything that is essential to the Frick – the art, the architecture and the time-warp sense that you have left the modern world and the bustling city for a serene fantasy of the late Gilded Age – is the same as it always was. But it is now easier to navigate and there is more to explore. Article content Article content Article content The opening of the second floor offers visitors much more than just additional gallery space. This was the domestic habitat of the Frick family, including the Breakfast Room with its 19th-century French landscapes (an early collecting passion of Henry Clay Frick) and the Boucher Room, which was part of a suite used by Frick's wife, Adelaide. The upper-level chambers are surprisingly modest, sumptuously appointed but not much larger than one would find in a typical McMansion today. They also add a complex dynamic to the museum: They humanize the building, but they also foreground the collectors, especially Frick himself, who was in many ways an odious figure. Article content Frick was a union buster and in 1892, he hired hundreds of Pinkerton detectives – a private army of thugs with guns – to quell a strike against a Pennsylvania steel mill. Ten men were killed, dozens injured, and the situation became so inflamed that the state militia was called in to break the workers' resistance. Frick, who made a fortune supplying the coal derivative known as coke to Andrew Carnegie's steel company, where Frick later served as chairman, was left with a tattered reputation for years. Only amnesia – and art – could repair the damage, generations later.
Toronto Sun
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Toronto Sun
At the Frick in New York, a grand Gilded Age collection shows its intimate side
The Frick Collection is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday Published Jun 24, 2025 • 7 minute read "St. Francis in the Desert," a 1480 panel by Giovanni Bellini. Photo by Michael Bodycomb / Henry Clay Frick bequest Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. NEW YORK — For decades, visitors to the Frick Collection passed a magnificent staircase with an ornamental railing and giant candelabras on the landing, flanking an elaborate screen hiding the museum's pipe organ. The second floor of the old mansion on Fifth Avenue was where the Frick family once carried on with domestic life, above the monumental rooms of the ground floor, which housed one of the finest collections of art ever assembled by a private individual. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account What was up those stairs? The office of the museum's director, and smaller, more humanly scaled rooms that had been off-limits to the public since the mansion opened as a museum in 1935. After a four-year, $220 million renovation, the second floor is now open for the first time, revealing more of the Frick's rich holdings, including portrait medals, timepieces and ceramics, along with smaller paintings that live more happily in intimate rooms with lower ceilings. The renovation also added an underground concert and lecture hall, a new cafe, a larger reception area, conservation labs, and some 30 percent more gallery space, including a more gracious and amenable venue for temporary exhibitions. It is a thorough refresh and update, including greater accessibility for people with mobility issues, yet it has been done with a light hand and a deft sense of the building's history, design and materials. Everything that is essential to the Frick – the art, the architecture and the time-warp sense that you have left the modern world and the bustling city for a serene fantasy of the late Gilded Age – is the same as it always was. But it is now easier to navigate and there is more to explore. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The opening of the second floor offers visitors much more than just additional gallery space. This was the domestic habitat of the Frick family, including the Breakfast Room with its 19th-century French landscapes (an early collecting passion of Henry Clay Frick) and the Boucher Room, which was part of a suite used by Frick's wife, Adelaide. The upper-level chambers are surprisingly modest, sumptuously appointed but not much larger than one would find in a typical McMansion today. They also add a complex dynamic to the museum: They humanize the building, but they also foreground the collectors, especially Frick himself, who was in many ways an odious figure. Frick was a union buster and in 1892, he hired hundreds of Pinkerton detectives – a private army of thugs with guns – to quell a strike against a Pennsylvania steel mill. Ten men were killed, dozens injured, and the situation became so inflamed that the state militia was called in to break the workers' resistance. Frick, who made a fortune supplying the coal derivative known as coke to Andrew Carnegie's steel company, where Frick later served as chairman, was left with a tattered reputation for years. Only amnesia – and art – could repair the damage, generations later. Plan your next getaway with Travel Time, featuring travel deals, destinations and gear. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Three years after the strike, Frick began collecting art in earnest, turning from the occasional purchase of fashionable contemporary French works by the Barbizon school and American landscape artists to the diligent pursuit of the finest old masters. He was canny, focused and well advised by some of the best art dealers of the age, and his collection (augmented by the family and later donations) is one of the best in the world. Anyone who has seen it will remember the magnificent Giovanni Bellini panel of 'St. Francis in the Desert,' the Holbein portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, the jaunty boy dressed for romance painted by Bronzino, the giant canvases of Veronese, the three Vermeers (an embarrassment of riches), and the showstopper of them all, Rembrandt's late-in-life self-portrait depicting the bankrupt genius clinging to his last possession, visceral honesty. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. In 1906, when the Rembrandt self-portrait came on the market, Frick hesitated over the $225,000 price tag, which was $25,000 more than he wanted to pay. His dealer, Charles Carstairs, suggested it would be a bargain even at more than twice the price: 'If you could only see the picture over your mantel dominating the entire gallery just as you dominate those you come into contact with, you wouldn't let it pass for $500,000.' This is about as naked and direct an expression of the ugly core of art collecting as ever put on paper. Collecting is articulated as domination, and by purchasing the Rembrandt, Frick himself would become a masterpiece among men. Frick was among the richest and most powerful men on the planet, yet vulnerable to the most egregious flattery. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. But it worked, and the painting came to America, where Americans remain grateful to have it. Art washing is as old as the pyramids, or older, and Henry Clay Frick has been scrubbed clean. The second-floor galleries raise these issues in a way that the lower galleries, which are more public and feel more institutional, do not. In Adelaide Frick's suite, the paintings of chubby infants and children pretending to be scientists and artists (made by the studio of the 18th-century French artist Francois Boucher) are delightfully silly and playful. But we must also reckon with the fact that these are the images that Adelaide chose to see every day in her most intimate space. She could have looked upon almost anything the art world had to offer, but she chose these insouciant masterpieces of pure insipidity. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Why? The Boucher babies, masquerading as thinkers and makers, suggest an analogy parallel to the one about Rembrandt offered by Frick's dealer: Mothers make babies like these babies make art, thus motherhood is art. The logic is imperfect, but it must have been gratifying. These views into the inner lives of the Fricks are a welcome institutional honesty. And the gain to visitors by the opening of congenial spaces for the Frick's smaller and more idiosyncratic treasures is invaluable. A second-floor guest room now displays a diverse and abundant collection of medals, including portraits and commemorative medallions, donated by Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher. Medals are easily overlooked in larger museums, and rarely are they so well displayed as they are here, with perfect lighting revealing magnificent relief and detail. Another room, formerly a butler's pantry, displays a great curiosity, a 'decimal' watch made by the Breguet shop, sometime around the French Revolution, including one of the revolution's less successful innovations: a division of the day into 10 hours, each divided into 100 decimal minutes. This did not catch on. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The success of this renovation is a testament to the power of public engagement, and the near fanatical love of the Frick's dedicated audience for the institution. The museum has always been hungry for more space, and in 2014 Frick leaders unveiled an expansion plan that would have destroyed a beloved garden that fronted East 70th Street. Opposition was immediate and vehement and, to the leadership's credit, they rethought the entire project. The current expansion, by Selldorf Architects, captured some underutilized space on the ground level, placed the new auditorium underground and preserved the footprint of the garden, which has been replanted with its original design. The rooms of the historic mansion, designed by Carrere Hastings as a private home for the Fricks in 1914 and expanded by John Russell Pope in 1935 to serve as a museum, have been refreshed, in many cases using materials, including wall covers, sourced from the original vendors. Improved lighting in the main exhibition space, known as the West Gallery, flatters the paintings even on an overcast day. The flow of spaces has been improved with new access and connection points, including a passage from the domestic rooms of the second floor into a new meeting and gathering space outside the new gift shop. Despite intense public interest in the reopening of the museum, which relocated from 2021 to 2024 to the old Whitney Building on the Upper East Side, the Frick didn't feel overly crowded on a weekday morning in May when the city was flooded with visitors for college graduations. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Among the new galleries on the second floor is the Walnut Room, which was originally the bedroom of Henry Clay Frick, who lived in the mansion for only five years before his death in 1919. When I visited, a Frick staffer pointed to a 1782 work by the English painter George Romney, depicting a young woman holding a lapdog just below the plunging neckline of her red dress. She is Emma Hart, who would marry into wealth and become Lady Hamilton, as well as the lover of the naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson. She was about 17 when Romney painted her, looking lovely and gazing endearingly at the viewer, as if you are the thing she most wants in the world. 'That is very likely the last artwork Frick ever saw,' said the longtime Frick staffer. Romney's painting hangs above the mantel in the bedroom, with views of Central Park. Above a mantel – like the mantel where the great Rembrandt self-portrait was meant to hang, lording it over all the other works in the collection. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Frick owned Emma Hart's image, but he didn't own her, and that may be what drives all collectors: the illusion that we could have the thing itself, the landscape, the sumptuous clothes of a long-dead prince, the youth and physique of a god, the power of the church, the intelligence of Rembrandt, the beautiful face of an adolescent girl. This room, up the stairs that visitors were never allowed to use, feels a bit like the proverbial attic, where the secrets are stored, and this above all: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. IF YOU GO The Frick Collection is open to the public Wednesday through Sunday. For more information visit NHL Sunshine Girls Sunshine Girls World Other Sports
Observer
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Observer
In New York, Vermeer show reveals art of the love letter
In a special exhibit featuring just three paintings, the Frick Collection in New York is inviting viewers to contemplate the age and the art of seduction by the written word. The show brings together a trio of paintings by 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer: the Frick's own "Mistress and Maid," "The Love Letter" on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and "Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid" from the National Gallery of Ireland. They are three of six paintings by Vermeer (1632-1675) that focus on the reading and writing of letters. They also depict interactions between women of different classes. Each painting features a woman and a female servant who has likely become a confidante and an intermediary as her mistress conducts a romantic relationship, said exhibit curator Robert Fucci. "While the contents of the letters in Vermeer's paintings are not made clear, they are most likely amorous," he said. "Courtship and love letters were an important part of the artist's social context and a prevalent artistic theme." In Vermeer's era, women had increasing autonomy in choosing their life partners, Fucci noted. "Servants played a crucial role. Employers entrusted them with delivery, especially when messages needed to be shared covertly," he added. - A debt with the baker - "Vermeer's Love Letters," on view until the end of August, is the first show on offer since the Frick reopened its doors in April following a top-to-bottom, $330-million renovation. The 20th century mansion filled with paintings, sculptures, and decorative pieces dating from the Renaissance to the 19th century now has 10 new galleries on its second floor, in what used to be the Frick family's private quarters. Two of the Vermeer paintings -- worth a fortune today -- helped the artist's wife, Catharina Bolnes, settle a debt with a baker after she was widowed with 11 children. The show is the first of the Dutch master's works in New York since 2001. The intimate offering is in sharp contrast to the sprawling Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseum in 2023. Featuring 28 of his 35 known paintings, that was the largest collection of Vermeer's work ever assembled in one place, and drew thousands of art lovers. "Vermeer certainly continues to compel people and to inspire people today," said Aimee Ng, another curator at the Frick. —AFP
