Art review: The Frick Collection

A viewer savors a moment with Bellini's 'St. Francis.' — Art lovers "will feel as if they are experiencing the museum for the first time." (Image credit: Jeenah Moon / Reuters)

"It's the same. Only better," said Eric Gibson in The Wall Street Journal. After a four-year, $330 million renovation and expansion, New York City's Frick Collection reopened to the public in mid-April, and art lovers who already treasure the institution and its astonishing Old Master paintings "will feel as if they are experiencing the museum for the first time." Display space has grown by 30 percent, affording the curators "the chance to not just reinstall but reconceive the collection," and they've done so with a subtle hand. While many of the Frick's greatest paintings hang in familiar places in the 1914 mansion's grand first-floor rooms, the Frick family's upstairs living quarters serve now as additional galleries rather than office space. Those added rooms have been used to provide greater perspective on how industrialist Henry Clay Frick and other family members built the collection. The more intimate spaces also make better showcases for small works, such as a charming 1822 cloud study by John Constable.

The Frick remains, "by so many miles," the finest small urban museum in the world, said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Walk into its grand West Gallery and you'll see a Rembrandt self-portrait, two Turner harborscapes, a Vermeer, a Goya, and a Velázquez. Take in every room and you may discern that Frick favored portraits of "rich men dressed for work," such as Holbein's Thomas Cromwell or Whistler's Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. Even Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert shows the itinerant preacher just steps from an outdoor desk. "Frick's people are people like Frick: men of power and influence." In part for that reason, at this museum, "thoughts inevitably circle back to the vexed questions of wealth and commerce, and their role in making, collecting, and commodifying art." Frick was not a great guy. He exploited immigrant labor and crushed unions. But arts patronage like his does make careers such as Rembrandt's possible. And in exchange for allowing accumulations of wealth on Frick's scale, we are granted "a landscape of shared splendor," including places like this.

The Frick isn't stuck in the past, said Christian K. Kleinbub in ArtNews. It has cultivated an online audience, it proactively raises questions about its founder, and it spotlighted neglected artists while operating out of temporary space these past four years. But the Frick "has always been an oasis of beauty" because it has remained supremely confident that its treasures, including its decorative-arts holdings, don't need to be argued for. You won't even find the distraction of wall labels here, which is what makes today's Frick "more precious than it has ever been." It is special "because it helps us imagine what the world should be. It offers a dream of art, where images enchant as much as instruct."