The Frick Invites You Upstairs

The newly renovated museum is bigger and better than ever.

- JERRY SALTZ

SQUARE FOOT FOR square foot, the Frick has the densest concentration of masterpieces in America, installed alongside decorative objects in gloriously stuffy interiors. The art historian Bernard Berenson once sniffed that the Frick, founded by the morally compromised robber-baron philanthropist Henry Clay Frick, was just a “mausoleum.” Not true! Since Frick’s 1919 death, this stupendous museum has added countless gifts and acquisitions, such as a Watteau in 1991 and a Murillo self-portrait painted on a trompe l'oeil stone block in 2014. At the Frick, we commune with the ages.

After a four-year absence for renovations, during which the collection was transported to the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue, the Frick is happily back in its bigger, better Fifth Avenue manse. The cramped Music Room has been reclaimed as gallery space; the 70th Street Garden, created in 1977 by Russell Page, is intact, and although a new look-at-me staircase seems squished inside, there is a sexy underground auditorium and a 60-seat café, and the entire second floor of the mansion is now filled with art. There will be almost twice as much on view. What's not to love?

Born in 1849, Frick was a familiar historical type: a very rich man with a great eye. Voracious and highly competitive, the industrialist moved through galleries “like a streak of lightning,” according to the wonderful new guidebook The Fricks Collect, paying record-setting prices. The collector Isabella Stewart Gardner ruefully proclaimed, “Woe is me! Why am I not Morgan or Frick?” The latter hoovered up Rembrandt's 1655 The Polish Rider