Latest news with #HenryClayFrick
Vancouver Sun
24-06-2025
- 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 .
Epoch Times
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
A Love Letter to Vermeer at The Frick Collection
The Frick Collection's upcoming 'Vermeer's Love Letters' exhibition centers around the last painting Henry Clay Frick acquired before his death: Johannes Vermeer's 'Mistress and Maid.' The Frick's painting forms a trio in the exhibition, with two special Vermeer loans: 'The Love Letter' from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and 'Lady Writing a Letter, With Her Maid' from the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin.
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Yahoo
Summer getaway to Pittsburgh offers history, heritage and hidden gems
Pittsburgh may not be at the top of your list for summer travel, but it should be. With walkable neighborhoods, iconic sports teams (Hello! Steelers, Penguins and Pirates), and virtually every street corner forged by an industrial past, this riverfront city also has a dynamic food and arts scene. It's no wonder Lonely Planet named Pittsburgh as one of its Best in Travel 2025 picks – the only U.S. city to make the list. For a stay that blends luxury with a rich history, along with an unbeatable location, there's no better home base than the Omni William Penn Hotel. From the beginning, when it was opened in 1916 by Pittsburgh industrialist Henry Clay Frick, the hotel was meant to be a showplace. Inside, the two-story lobby glows with opulence, with grand Austrian crystal chandeliers, velvet furnishings and gilded details. Over the decades, it has hosted presidents, celebrities, royalty, and countless special moments -- the experience feels just as special today. One of the hotel's best-kept secrets is The Speakeasy on the basement level. Located behind an unmarked door, this restored Prohibition-style bar was once a hidden watering hole in the 1920s. Step back in time and try one of their classic cocktails, like the Bee's Knees. Thanks to the William Penn's prime downtown location, great food options are within easy reach. In the Strip District, a vibrant area known for its food markets and indie retail shops, you'll find the original Primanti Bros, a 1933 sandwich shop famous for handcrafted sandwiches stacked with meat, cheese, slaw and a heap of seasoned fries -- all between thick slices house-made Italian bread. It's a rite of passage and a Pittsburgh tradition. Beyond iconic eats, Pittsburgh's growing culinary scene is diverse. With 90 different food-filled neighborhoods, there's no shortage of delicious options. A few local go-tos: Con Alma, with Latin-inspired small plates and live jazz; James Beard-nominated Apteka, which reimagines Eastern European classics with a menu of modern, plant-based dishes; Spirit & Tales, a stylish brasserie inside The Oaklander Hotel where seasonal ingredients shine; and for sweeping skyline views paired with fresh seafood, take the incline to Monterey Bay Fish Grotto, perched on Mount Washington. Pittsburgh wears its past with pride – and nowhere is that more evident than in its museums and cultural landmarks. Steel, coal and industrial innovation may have built the city, but its art, education and philanthropy continue to shape its soul. The influence of titans like Carnegie, Mellon and Frick is still visible in the many museums and public institutions they left behind. One of my favorites is The Frick Pittsburgh Museum and Gardens. This serene 10-acre estate and museum complex is one of the city's cultural gems. Stroll through manicured gardens and explore the Frick Art Museum and Car and Carriage Museum. Don't miss the award-winning tour of Clayton, the former home of Henry Clay Frick, who was instrumental in making Pittsburgh one of the nation's greatest commercial centers. The home is the city's last fully preserved mansion of the Gilded Age. Afterwards, have a bite or a sip at the lovely garden café. From masterpieces and pop art to the top dinosaur exhibits worldwide, be sure to visit the Carnegie Museums, which include the Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Science Center and The Andy Warhol Museum. Nature lovers are sure to fall in love with the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. With a 14-room glasshouse and 23 distinct gardens, Phipps blooms year-round, but during the summer, the outdoor gardens steal the show. Whether you're a history buff, foodie, art-and-garden enthusiast, or are simply looking for something fresh and unexpected, the 'Burgh delivers in so many ways. For more info, Thanks to new direct flights from Greenville via Breeze Airways, getting to Pittsburgh for a weekend getaway has never been easier. To plan your trip, visit This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Summer Getaway to Pittsburgh offers history, heritage and hidden gems
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Henry Clay Frick Built His Collection With Passion and Patience
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. In the Gilded Age, when newly wealthy Americans sought to advertise their social status here and abroad, several of them turned to what had long been a practice of the established rich: art collecting. Henry Clay Frick, who made his fortune in coke and steel, had appreciated art even as a young man, particularly prints and sketches. 'Some of them he made himself,' said Colin Bailey, director of the Morgan Library and Museum and an expert on Frick. But Frick's interest ultimately turned toward higher-profile works by Europe's old masters, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as the creations of more modern geniuses like Manet and Degas. Over decades he acquired one of the finest private collections in the world and exhibited them in a Fifth Avenue mansion that is now a major museum. The Frick Collection's home, newly renovated, reopened in April in New York. With the competitive zeal that fueled his success in business, Frick vied for works of art against others who enjoyed tremendous wealth: the banker J.P. Morgan; Peter Widener, a founding organizer of United States Steel and the American Tobacco Company; and Isabella Stewart Gardner, founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. 'He hated losing a painting he wanted,' said Ian Wardropper, who resigned earlier this year after 14 years as director of the Frick Collection, the museum that Frick created. Image Frick's passion for showing off extended to the Fifth Avenue mansion he began building in 1913. Credit... The Frick Collection/Frick Art Research Library Archives Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Bloomberg
09-04-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Inside the Quiet, Extravagant Expansion of the Frick Collection
The Frick Collection, a beloved New York art museum known for its essential European paintings, will reopen on April 17 after a five-year hiatus for a $330 million renovation and expansion. Its magnificence is an artifact of the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Henry Clay Frick built his fortune with a rapidity comparable to today's tech moguls — and spent a considerable amount of his wealth assembling a crown jewel collection of Old Masters and erecting a suitably grand home for it. Though Frick had never been reticent about displaying his wealth, the limestone mansion he completed in 1914 was an austere Beaux Arts take on French classical city houses, designed by the American architect Thomas Hastings. In Manhattan, it stretches a full block along Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, with asymmetrical wings enclosing a garden.
