The Frick Goes Back to the Future

Feb 28

The following story was originally published by Ocula.

The museum is determined to continue showing contemporary artists alongside works by past masters when it gets home.

The Frick Collection's three-year residency at the Breuer Building in New York ends on 3 March, concluding a radical test for the institution: could its world-class collection of Old Masters harmonise with contemporary art?

The results are in and the centuries-old masterworks and their modern-day descendants got along swimmingly. In fact, the third and final test, a stunning collection of monumental paintings by 20th-century American portrait artist Barkley L. Hendricks, drew audiences comparable to the Frick's record-setting 2013 show that included Vermeer's beloved masterpiece The Girl with the Pearl Earring (ca. 1665).

'We're not going to stop,' Frick curator Aimee Ng told Ocula in the museum's basement café. 'I do think that ... contemporary art is one great way to continue to allow people to engage with our historic art,' she said.

Frick curator Aimee Ng. Photo: Jamie Lubetkin.

The Frick Collection will return home to the grand 1914 Beaux-Arts mansion just five blocks away on Fifth Avenue and 70th Street, reopening at the end of the year when renovations are complete.

Formally called Henry Clay Frick House after the gilded age industrialist and collector, who amassed a collection of masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bellini, Goya, Holbein, Velázquez, and many others, the mansion is in the midst of its first full renovation since openings its doors as a museum in 1935.

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The time away from home allowed the Frick team to undertake curatorial experimentation, such as showing contemporary art alongside its historic masterpieces.

The Frick's programmes at Breuer have included Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, in which four works by contemporary artists were shown in conversation with iconic paintings from the collection; a collaboration between 17th-century Venetian pastel master Rosalba Carriera and Nicolas Party, the modern-day pastel virtuoso; and Barkley L. Hendricks' life-sized portraits of Black Americans that occupied two full galleries.

'We choose projects that work because they're right for the time,' Ng said. 'But it always comes back to illuminating something about the Frick's historic collection.'

Frick Mansion under construction at 70th and 5th Avenue. Photo: Jamie Lubetkin.

'I don't think this city needs another churning machine for contemporary shows,' she added.

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Nevertheless, the museum is likely already working on its next contemporary art intervention. Ng offered a coy smile when asked about specific plans, noting that there is no shortage of interest in the institution among contemporary artists and their backers.

'As you can imagine, we are approached very often. We're open-minded and so appreciative of all the interest of contemporary artists in the Frick now and in our historic collections and the possibilities of what our model can be,' she said.

After the Frick departs, the Breuer Building—which was the original headquarters of the Whitney Museum of American Art and later an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—will become the new home of Sotheby's come September.