KEEPING UP with FRICKS

When robber baron Henry Clay Frick built his Fifth Avenue mansion in 1914, it set off a competitive frenzy among the era’s top decorators.

- By INGRID ABRAMOVITCH

On January 27, 1914, the interior designer Elsie de Wolfe sent a brazen business pitch to one of the world’s wealthiest men. “Please don’t forget me!!” she wrote to the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. “I am specially good at detail and the fitting up and the comfort of women’s rooms, the intimate little touches that no mere man, no matter how clever he may be, can ever know.”

The ploy worked, and with that, the doyenne of American decor inserted herself into one of the most coveted commissions of the Gilded Age: the decoration of a suite of rooms in Frick’s newly built neoclassical mansion on Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st streets.

On April 17 the Frick Collection will reopen to the public after a four-year renovation of the museum’s home: an Indiana limestone mansion designed by Carrère and Hastings that has been updated and expanded by Selldorf Architects with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners. There is a refreshed reception hall, an auditorium for lectures and concerts, and a restored Fifth Avenue façade graced by magnolia trees planted in the 1930s that should bloom on cue for the reopening.

A detail from one of eight circa 1760 panels by François Boucher and his workshop on the theme of arts and sciences. BELOW: A 19th-century bust of a young girl resembles the one in the Boucher panel titled Sculpture.