At Long Last, the Frick Gets a Reopening Date
January 28, 2025 | In the PressFrom Artnet (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/frick-reopening-date-2602720 (opens in a new window))
After an over-five-year closure, New York’s Frick Collection (opens in a new window) will once again welcome the public to its Upper East Side Gilded Age mansion—now newly expanded and renovated by Selldorf Architects (opens in a new window)—on April 17.
“Intimate encounters with iconic works of art remain a cornerstone of the Frick experience,” director Ian Wardropper said in a statement (opens in a new window), acknowledging the “many architects, preservation experts, curators, artisans, and innumerable museum and library staff who have collaborated to restore the original mansion while also creating new galleries, program spaces, and public amenities.”
The project—which came to $330 million, including moving, restoration, and maintenance costs—connects the museum with the Frick Art Research Library (opens in a new window) and its now-refurbished reading room, creating a seamless visitor experience between the institution’s two branches. And for the first time, the public will be able to visit the museum’s second floor, originally the living quarters of the Frick family, but until now used as office space by museum employees.
Xavier F. Salomon, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator, has led the efforts to curate the second floor, including painstakingly restoring period details. The former bedroom of museum founder Henry Clay Frick, for instance, was for decades the meeting room for the board of trustees.
George Romney, Lady Hamilton as Nature (1782). Courtesy the Frick Collection, New York.
“It’s now going to be a gallery with works of art,” Salomon said in the Frick’s Renovation Stories (opens in a new window) YouTube series. “I am particularly excited about one work that is coming back to this room, and this is George Romney (opens in a new window)’s Lady Hamilton as ‘Nature.’ It’s a painting that most people would have seen downstairs in our library on the first floor, but used to be here in Frick’s bedroom over the fireplace.… And it was a painting that Frick could have looked at from his bed. And I’d like to think it’s the last work of art he saw, just before he died. So it’s going to be reinstalled where it was.”
Also moving back upstairs is the museum’s famed wood paneled Boucher Room (opens in a new window), by French Rococo painter François Boucher (opens in a new window) (1703–1770), which will be restored to its original home in the private sitting room of Adelaide Childs, Frick’s wife. Their daughter Helen Clay Frick’s bedroom will display Renaissance gold-ground panels, and a guest room is becoming a gallery for the museum’s world-class collection portrait medals.
Johannes Vermeer, Mistress and Maid, (ca. 1665–67). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.
There is a new first floor gallery as well, which will debut in June with “Vermeer’s Love Letters,” an exhibition that will reunite three Johannes Vermeer (opens in a new window) paintings featuring letters: the Frick’s Mistress and Maid; Love Letter from the Rijksmuseum (opens in a new window) in Amsterdam, and Woman Writing a Letter, with Her Maid from the National Gallery of Ireland (opens in a new window) in Dublin. (The Frick’s extended closure notably allowed for an unprecedented loan (opens in a new window) of its three paintings by the Dutch master for the Rijksmuseum’s 2023 blockbuster (opens in a new window) of his work.)
The expansion project also involved transforming an existing underground vault space into a 220-seat auditorium. (The Frick’s former concert space, a circular music room (opens in a new window) on the ground floor, was the main casualty of construction, to the chagrin of some music lovers.)
A rendering of the Frick Collection’s new auditorium. Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects.
The reopening will be the swan song for Wardropper, who has led the Frick since 2011 and announced his impending retirement (opens in a new window) last January. (The 73-year-old’s successor, Axel Rüger (opens in a new window), will take the reins later this spring. He comes to the Frick from the Royal Academy of Arts (opens in a new window) in London, where he has been director since 2019.)
Wardropper overcame significant obstacles in seeing the massive project (opens in a new window), first announced in 2014 (opens in a new window), to its completion. Originally, the museum’s plans called for building a six-story annex from Davis Brody Bond (opens in a new window) on the site of its historic Russell Page-designed garden (opens in a new window). That sparked a successful campaign from preservationists (opens in a new window) that forced the museum to go back to the drawing board.
A rendering of the Frick Collection. Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects.
The final design, led by executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle, was unveiled in 2018, with plans to begin two years of construction in 2020. Saving the garden meant a more modest expansion, with just 27,000 square feet of new construction. But by combining that with 60,000 square feet of repurposed space, the small but beloved institution was ultimately able to add a significant amount of much-needed exhibition galleries and programming space to the institution.
“We have worked carefully to develop an architectural vocabulary for the project that is continuous with the existing historic fabric, yet employs distinct but appropriate contemporary detailing in the façades and interiors,” Annabelle Selldorf, principal of Selldorf Architects, said in a statement. “I believe that this careful blending of old and new will make people feel even more welcome as they return to, or discover for the first time, the Frick, its collection, and its beautiful setting.”
A rendering of the Frick Collection’s new special exhibition gallery. Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects.
The Frick’s closure, of course, was longer than expected. It also began earlier than planned with the sudden onset of the pandemic (opens in a new window) in March 2020.
But there was a silver lining when the neighboring Metropolitan Museum of Art (opens in a new window) decided not to reopen (opens in a new window) its short-lived (opens in a new window) Met Breuer (opens in a new window) at the former home of the the Whitney Museum of American Art (opens in a new window).
The facade of Frick Madison. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.. Photo courtesy The Frick.
Instead, the building (opens in a new window)—soon to become (opens in a new window) the new flagship (opens in a new window) for auction house Sotheby’s—temporarily became home to the Frick Madison (opens in a new window). The museum’s collection of Old Masters, which normally don’t travel, found themselves (opens in a new window) surprisingly at home (opens in a new window) at the Brutalist architectural masterpiece (which preservationists are now lobbying to have landmarked (opens in a new window) ahead of a planned interior renovation from Herzog and de Meuron).
But the Frick’s Breuer Building tenancy ended last March, leaving art-lovers anxious to know when the original mansion would finally reopen. Built by Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings in 1914, the Beaux-Arts Frick home was remodeled by John Russell Pope in 1934 to convert it to a museum.
A rendering of the Frick Collection as seen from East 70th Street. Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects.
The soon-to-be-unveiled expansion represents the biggest upgrade to the Frick since its original opening in 1935. The institution will hearken back to that historic moment with an installation of lifelike porcelain flowers commissioned from Ukrainian sculptor Vladimir Kanevsky (opens in a new window) (b. 1951) that is inspired by the floral arrangements made for the occasion 90 years ago.
The opening festivities will also include the return of live music to the Frick for the first time since before the pandemic with a two-week Spring Music Festival (opens in a new window) curated by Jeremy Ney, the Frick’s head of music and performance.
A rendering of the Frick Collection’s second floor. Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects.
The program, Ney told me, will include both classical and contemporary compositions, “building on a long-standing tradition of chamber music while engaging the opportunities presented by our dynamic new space to explore contemporary perspectives and engage directly with the museum’s collection.”
Running April 26 through May 11, the festival will be headlined by the New York premiere of a contemporary commission by Tyshawn Sorey, the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner for composition and a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. The piece, titled For Julius Eastman, will be performed by pianist Sarah Rothenberg.
