FRESH PAINT

The Frick reopens, renovated but resolutely itself.

- ADAM GOPNIK

The Frick Collection, on East Seventieth Street, is, by so many miles, the finest small city museum—less self-consciously eccentric than London's Sir John Soane museum, broader in scope and more distinguished than Paris’s Jac-quemart-André—that its return after a few years away for renovation is a rare blessing in a time short on them. The collection never had any set program, beyond housing Old Master pictures bought by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick with the nudging of the era’s shrewdest tag team: the art historian Bernard Berenson and the dealer Joseph Duveen. But, walking through the place ahead of its official opening, on April 17th, one is reminded—both by one’s eyes and by the new director, Axel Rüger—that the collection does bend toward a point. With scarcely any nudes or still-lifes, it turns on businessmen, bureaucrats, and bishops: rich men dressed for work.

Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell looks like a fastidiously evil Cabinet minister who would never accidentally add a journalist to his text chain; his Sir Thomas More looks like Laurence Olivier made up to play Sir Thomas More. Even St. Francis, caught in ecstasy by Bellini, has his comfortable office-hermitage behind him, as though he has stepped away from his desk just long enough to receive the stigmata. Frick’s people are people like Frick: men of power and influence. Hercules, the ultimate man of power, is, if anything, overdressed in Veronese’s “Choice Between Virtue and Vice”—a callow youth, with an uncanny resemblance to Aaron Paul in “Breaking Bad,” in a tailored silk suit. (He seems, like most of us, to be struggling manfully toward Virtue, though Vice clearly has him in her grip.)