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From Mansion to Minimalism
John Haberin New York City
The Frick Madison
Henry Clay Frick did not allow his collection to go out on loan. It belonged to him, on his terms, and to the mansion that he built on Fifth Avenue to house them both. A century later, the Frick Collection has doubled, but his strictures remain. It has traveled all the same, just five blocks north but a world away.
It will remain there for a full year, too, as the Frick Madison. It may never look the same again—not even in early 2022, when it returns after the mansion's restoration and expansion. Nor will the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art on Madison, built in 1966. Against all odds, they shed light on one another, in every sense of the phrase. You can get to know the Frick's paintings anew, as an unfolding history of European art, and its decorative art as more than just backdrop to painting. You can rediscover the Brutalist architecture as a home for art of the past as well. 
A marriage of convenience
It was a marriage of convenience. The Whitney had departed for its new home in the Meatpacking District, by Renzo Piano, and the Met had spent heavily on cleaning house, before setting up shop in 2016 as the Met Breuer. In the process, it blew its budget, massively—and that was before the plight of art after Covid-19. It needed a subtenant on its eight-year lease, and the Frick needed somewhere else to go. Voilà. A bust of Frick himself stands in the lobby.
A marriage of convenience is not often a happy one. They call this Brutalism for a reason. The building becomes more and more massive as it rises, each story wider than the one below. Hostile critics compare it to a bunker and the sunken area separating it from Madison Avenue to a moat. And the architect, Marcel Breuer, meant war—on traditional art and architecture in favor of modern and contemporary American art. And he won, too.
Those loyal to the collection might be dubious for another reason. Tastes have changed, and you might not want to live amid Frick's luxury, but many who care about art have made the mansion a second home. Which painting hangs above a fireplace, flanked by portraits by Hans Memling—Sir Thomas More still sly and commanding before his fall, Thomas Cromwell more flaccid but not worth crossing? Saint Jerome by El Greco, of course, towering above his Bible's electric pages. Who looms at the end of the mansion's longest room, between mythical lovers by Veronese? Saint John by Piero della Francesca, barely looking up from his reading to cast his stern reproach, but you knew that, too.
The Frick is not out to replicate that experience on Madison Avenue. How could it? It has gone instead for an arrangement by time and place, with a floor apiece for Northern Europe, Italy and Spain, and Britain and France. Rooms here and there gather decorative art by medium, including porcelain, enamels, and clocks. The fifth floor and former lobby gallery are closed, but the Frick does reserve space for its reference library, the door always open, and at last it has a decent café downstairs. In place of interminable wall text, numbers next to each work point online to the Bloomberg Connects app, which serves other museums as well.
It bows to its temporary home in another way, too—with what the chief curators, Xavier Salomon and Aimee Ng, describe as minimalism. This is a big building for a modest collection, and they make full use of it, with rooms to themselves for Jan Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Anthony van Dyck. (Their works do not hang together in the mansion.) For the first two, that means a whole room for just three paintings, one to a wall. If Vermeer's interiors and Rembrandt's introspection were not intimate enough, you can now enter each as a world in itself.
Tourists may prefer the Guggenheim Museum's spirals by Frank Lloyd Wright, but the Breuer building is a second home for savvy New Yorkers, too. If this be a bunker, embattled soldiers would sure envy its gray stone, wide-open spaces, movable walls, trapezoidal windows, and measured artificial light. One window now has the wall adjacent to Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini, the sole painting with a room to itself. Is it a coincidence that they are almost exactly the same size? Maybe, but Breuer had painting in mind all along. In a bitter irony, the building's future after the Frick remains in doubt.
Media and histories
Does the collection look different than ever before? It can hardly help it in such strange surroundings, but it also looks great. Bellini's landscape and the window beside it might almost both be lit from within, and that matters a great deal for a painting all about light. In one of the first things I wrote for HaberArts.com, more than twenty-five years ago, 
I argued that it shows Francis, arms outstretched, mouth wide open in astonishment or song, receiving the stigmata—but with sunlight in Italy rather than painted rays in the desert. Nature itself, in a rabbit or an ass, shares the saint's humility, patience, and surprise, while a peasant takes his cues from sunlight as well in driving his flock. Thanks to oil paint, still new to Italy, one can no longer distinguish art, life, and a miracle.
Other paintings gain from the light as well—and from not having to keep one's distance in front of Frick's furniture. I think of John Constable as more solid and subtle than a fellow British Romantic, J. M. W. Turner, but his vegetation sparkles. I do not think of Joshua Reynolds in eighteenth-century England as at all sparkling, but blue and white traces of light behind a portrait look fully imagined or closely observed. Without his formidable isolation, Piero's saint is at least a little more approachable. One could take his scowl personally, if not call him a friend. Titian mixes humanity and reserve as well, from the faint scratches of a mustache to a man's hand resting on his sword.
A plain old arrangement by period also argues for contexts in history. When Petrus Christus collaborates with Jan van Eyck at the dawn of the Renaissance, one can see Saint Barbara's tower as part of a contemporary city. A pitcher for Vermeer, the curators point out, is either from China or from Delft in imitation of China, attesting to Europe's new global presence quite as much as a soldier's uniform or a map on the wall. Men here belong to the outside world and interiors to women, with Vermeer's light conveying one to another. I think of the mansion's period room for Jean Honoré Fragonard as the ultimate in context. Actually, though, Fragonard painted for two sites, and the Frick Madison restores the distinction.
The Frick begs for context, too, in taking decorative art as more than room decor. Two floors start with portrait busts and the third with a bronze angel, by Jean Barbet in 1475. Set together, bronze figurines might be in collective motion. Wall after wall of porcelain, arranged by color, can get silly or overbearing, but it is hard to ignore. You may think of the collection as exclusively European art, but it includes two Indian Mughal carpets as well. Speaking of other art forms, I had forgotten that the titles of all four paintings by James McNeill Whistler refer to music, as harmony, symphony, and arrangement.
Heightened attention to the decorative arts is duly fashionable (and the very point of the Gregory gift to the Frick), as museums question the divide between art and craft. There are limits, though, to how contemporary the Frick can become. Brutalism might be a fine term for Henry Clay Frick himself, with his money in steel and his possessive ego. The collection has, by my count, exactly one woman artist in Rosabla Carriera, a portraitist in late Baroque Venice. Its forays into Impressionism are misty and light. They and Fragonard represent the wealth and privilege that Breuer's Brutalism did all it could to oppose.
Still, more than any other New York museum's, it is your collection and mine, and it will be back home one day soon. That will help Diego Velázquez, whose sharp-eyed king with a phallic scepter and the discretion of a hat over his crotch loses out for now to a face-off between El Greco and Francisco de Goya on opposite walls. Rembrandt's late self-portrait and The Polish Rider will be as provocative as ever. So will the arm emerging from a woman's stomach by J. A. D. Ingres, but no less composed for that. By then, those who know the collection best will know it that much better. And a great building's future will still be in doubt.
The Frick Madison opened to the public on March 18, 2021.