“Welcome to my house,” I’ve said more than once while introducing people to the Frick Collection, my favorite museum. I’ve had to acknowledge an awkward domestic layout, extending to nine stops on the No. 6 train from the East Village. But I’ve meant it in a way that I share with a lot of art lovers, or even just art likers. The Frick stirs proprietary feelings as, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn’t. Big museums array works by a historical logic that is cold to the eye until thawed by your attention. Everything at the Frick is toasty at first glance. That’s an effect of the place’s having been a home, the mansion of the coke mogul Henry Clay Frick, and of the somewhat fictive sense of the collection’s memorializing one person’s passions: pre-loved, call it. Some works and even whole rooms have been added since Frick died, in 1919. The house opened as a museum in 1935. Now we nervously await the collection’s temporary move to the Breuer building, on Madison Avenue—formerly the Whitney Museum and currently leased by the Met—during an expansion and renovation of the main digs: the museum has promised to return the mansion and its contents to their long-cherished states. We’ll see.
At the Frick, you feel more than welcomed—you feel invited, like a family friend. You needn’t be comfortable with the relationship. Frick was a ruthless capitalist, with mines in Pennsylvania and leading roles in the steel industry and railroads. During the Homestead strike, in 1892, he dispatched armed Pinkerton mercenaries. Several workers and a few Pinkertons were killed (accounts of the number of casualties differ). That year, a would-be assassin, the anarchist Emma Goldman’s boyfriend, Alexander Berkman, attacked Frick in his Pittsburgh office, shooting him twice and stabbing him repeatedly. Frick, forty-two years old at the time, soon recovered. (Berkman was imprisoned for fourteen years.) An insatiable collector, Frick was one of several Gilded Age magnates who vacuumed great art from Europe when it was financially pinched. A depression in British agricultural income in the last decades of the nineteenth century made country estates target-rich environments for swashbuckling dealers like the Briton Joseph Duveen, who, at one point or another, had his hands on much that ended up in Frick’s house. Almost all the amassments were bequeathed by Frick to the public.
Admission was still free when, as a tyro critic ignorant of the Old Masters, I discovered and was transformed by the collection in the late nineteen-sixties. Over the years, I fell in love with specific works one by one—each identified on the walls by little more than the artist’s name, so that I learned from my response to the art before knowing much about it. Likewise self-educated are many of the sixty-two culturati—from fields including literature, music, dance, and film—who contribute short personal essays on favorite works in the collection to a slim illustrated anthology, “The Sleeve Should Be Illegal: & Other Reflections on Art at the Frick.” (The title quotes the novelist Jonathan Lethem’s stunned wonderment at an expanse of black-shadowed red velvet in a 1527 portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein.) It is published by the museum and DelMonico Books with a foreword by Adam Gopnik, one of several authors in the anthology who regularly appear in this magazine. Some of the most appealing contributions are from thunderstruck amateurs. This is a charm of the book. Though now a grizzled professional, I still identify with them in spirit.
My Frick isn’t yours, though yours interests me. The place is a Rorschach for personal meanings, unguided by curatorial programs. (I’ve pitied ambitious curators there, contending with a collection that is both heterogeneous and, as installed, perfect. What needs doing, beyond keeping the lights on?) There’s no overriding historical or institutional narrative to come away with. Most museums have works in storage that can reasonably alternate with those on view, at opportune moments. The Frick boasts no such depth. It is top-heavy with a medley of the simply superb—fantastic icing on not much cake. Its context is itself, occasioning a rat-a-tat of sensations that accumulate but don’t add up. They are episodic, guaranteeing a Babel of individual moods and tastes among viewers on any given day. A visit there is a biographical event: who are you this time? Your alertness to some things and indifference to others will tell you. I’m reminded by nearly every page in the book of my own past and ongoing engagement with the collection, not always agreeing with the contributors but stirred by them to recall bits of the discontinuous stories of how the Frick has affected me.
Keeping in mind that an unprejudiced eye should apply as much to one’s hundredth encounter with a compelling art work as it does to one’s first, I’ll try not to be possessive. I can’t endorse, but I enjoy, the writer Jerome Charyn’s association of Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider” (circa 1655)—a mounted, heavily armed young man, probably at the dawn of a day of battle—with memories of his own boyhood wildness in the South Bronx. He deems the rider “defiant in his orange pants” and “beyond any sense of authority or ownership.” I see the picture differently, perceiving the pathos of a youth who is about to change from somebody’s son or brother or sweetheart into an annealed killer. His eyes are already hard. His mouth, still boyishly soft, will have a harsher set by the day’s end.
Another matter is the best painting in the museum, if not the world: Rembrandt’s fathomlessly self-aware “Self-Portrait” of 1658, made when he was fifty-two and sorely beset by personal and professional woes. He knows that he’s the leading painter in Amsterdam, but he seems to wonder if that’s worth anything. It does nothing for his tiredness. A shadow falls across his eyes. I’m loath to argue with the five contributors who single the work out. It becomes part of each viewer’s life: a talisman. I have my ideas on how the artist achieved it. One feature is the odd placement of the thronelike chair in which he sits. The chair’s arms end snugged up against the picture plane, leaving no forward space for his knees to occupy; only shapeless paint smears mark that zone. We as much as view the artist from his lap—an intimation of physical intimacy that intensifies the work’s psychological amplitude. The late Diana Rigg recalls thinking, when she first saw the picture, “That is how I want to act!” Roz Chast recounts an existential encounter. She writes, “I felt as if he were saying to me: Once I was alive, like you. Sometimes I suffered. Sometimes things seemed funny, or maybe absurd, especially myself. I was a man. I was an artist. I was a great artist. My name was Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn. I painted this painting. I lived. I died. Yet here I am. There you are. We are looking at each other.”
My other chief touchstone in the collection is Diego Velázquez’s “King Philip IV of Spain” (1644), which initiated me into the higher sorceries of the Baroque. The painter George Condo puts the marvellousness well: “There’s a majestic presence here; yet it’s all just paint”—true of any painting, perhaps, but minus the majesty. Space becomes porous behind, around, and in front of the subject: a revolving-door effect, spinning pictorial depth out into the real world. Passages of visible brushwork snap into verisimilitude at a calculated distance: about thirteen feet, as measured by me with baby steps. What seem, up close, to be slight variants of the same grayed white become, from the proper remove, satin, silver, linen, and lace. Is Philip an inbred Habsburg geek? Never mind. A contrast between his tight grip, with one hand, on a silver mace of military command and his dandling of a hat with the other hand poses your choice of treatment from him. The portrait is a treatise on royalty.
Unlike Velázquez, Rembrandt plumbed the mysteries of individual humanity, observant but dismissive of social status. I’ve had moments of feeling that painting has been all downhill since that contemporaneity of a Spanish Catholic courtier and a Dutch Protestant entrepreneur. But elsewhere in the galleries wonders ensue—or predate, as with Duccio di Buoninsegna’s pre-Renaissance, gold-backed “Temptation of Christ on the Mountain” (1308-11), in which Jesus fends off the blandishments of a monstrous, winged Satan on a rocky prominence above miniaturized kingdoms. Humbly barefoot and calm, the Saviour rejects with a gesture the Evil One’s offer of world-ruling power. The choreographer Mark Morris both astutely analyzes the picture and has fun with it: “After those forty terrifying days alone, who wouldn’t be tempted to do something desperate and stupid by such a randy and charcoal-black Satan? It happens all the time.”
My first Frick crush, some fifty-plus years ago, was Ingres’s “Comtesse d’Haussonville” (1845), the lady in blue satin who raises a finger to a pulse point on her throat as if her beauty were a self-charging battery. Since then, I’ve recognized the work’s shameless solecisms, mainly an arm that, when you focus on it, appears to emerge from two or three ribs down the subject’s right side, and the longueur of outsized blue eyes that, far from being windows of the soul, suggest top-of-the-line Tiffany accoutrements. There’s a chair at the lower left that only a stick figure could fit into. With Ingres, style conquered all, starting with common sense. The Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez nails the signature qualities: “glossy, soft, and cold.” The theatre artist Robert Wilson contributes a handwritten Gertrude Steinian rhapsody: “WHAT IT IS IS ALWAYS IS CLASSICAL.” Concerning prosperous women, the great cartoonist Chris Ware, having noted that there “are few uncooler-sounding words than ‘eighteenth-century marble portraiture,’ ” pleases me by selecting Jean-Antoine Houdon’s complexly personable “Madame His” (1775). From her features and expression, you can tell the very tenor of her thoughts. Houdon is one of those artists whose work you may walk past for years until a day that feels fated when you stop.
Masterpieces command a drawing room that is very much as Frick left it. There are two portraits by Titian, two by Holbein, and a religious vision, Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert.” (There’s also a potent El Greco.) Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More” is a miracle of elegance and empathy, coming to a point in the sitter’s prodigiously intelligent gaze. Holbein must have loved him. With apologies to Hilary Mantel, the novelistic defender of the subject of the room’s second Holbein portrait, Thomas Cromwell (1532-33), he looks like a thug to me, sullen in profile. But the singer-songwriter and author Rosanne Cash casts a vote for the picture’s richness of color and cuts Cromwell some compassionate slack for his future consignment by Henry VIII to a headsman’s axe—“on the mountaintop of power until Henry destroys him,” she writes. In a theatrical coup of installation, Cromwell and More, enemies who were doomed to the same end, face each other from either side of a grand fireplace, bracketing a colorful, deadly history.
About Titian, what can be said after you say that he is the finest pure painter ever? Susanna Kaysen, the author of “Girl, Interrupted,” surmises that the subject of “Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap” (circa 1510) “looks to the left, into the past.” Reading that, I see it. The other Titian portrait is of the artist’s best friend and tireless promoter, Pietro Aretino—poet, connoisseur, power broker, feared satirist, author of popular devotional literature and pornography, intimate of rulers including the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and altogether one of the most interesting men of the sixteenth century. (I’m acquainted with Aretino from a bounteous 2012 biography, “Titian: His Life,” by Sheila Hale.) Turning to the Bellini (circa 1476-1478), we behold St. Francis standing outside his cave in a rustic landscape with meadowed sheep nearby and mountains and noble buildings in the distance. He looks skyward and holds out his open hands in a conventional posture of receiving the stigmata. But there’s no other hint of anything supernatural. The married artists John Currin and Rachel Feinstein report years of concentrating, by turns, on the radiant scene’s intricate topographical and botanical details. My favorite element, which mirrors my mystification at the matter-of-factness of the image, is an adorably witless donkey.
I don’t regard the Frick’s three Vermeers as first-rate—for the premium grade, visit the Met—maybe because I’m not beguiled by their possible narrative content. Parts of the pictures aren’t fully integrated and resolved, bespeaking a haste that compromises the artist’s usual—and, for him, indispensable—perfectionism. I am persuaded by the critic and author Vivian Gornick’s speculative interpretation of “Mistress and Maid” (1666-67), in which a seated lady evinces alarm at the approach of her servant holding a letter. Gornick decides that both women suspect that it announces the discovery of an affair the lady is having. I only wish the whole picture were up to the éclat of the lady’s spellbinding yellow dressing gown. Maddeningly, the Frick once passed up a chance to own Vermeer’s supreme “The Art of Painting,” which is now owned by Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. What a baffling artist! He was at his most transcendent with his most quotidian subjects. Vermeer could split the difference between fact and fiction with a tronie—the imagined portrait of a type of person—like the “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” at the Mauritshuis, in the Hague. But when he fell to storytelling, the results tend to weirdness. In the Frick’s “Officer and Laughing Girl” (circa 1657), a young woman grins with some ratio of ingratiation and fear at a cavalier-ish man, who is seen from the back. The ambiguous drama makes the pictured room, with its open window and map on the wall, feel like an arbitrary stage set.
In another space, we confront Agnolo Bronzino’s peak-Mannerist portrait “Lodovico Capponi” (circa 1550-55), of a handsome, arrogant, somehow discontented youth, clad in a gorgeous outfit that features a startlingly projecting codpiece. (That fashion wasn’t Bronzino’s invention, though he surely didn’t mind it. He was notorious for erotic wordplay in his poetry.) The German-born architect Annabelle Selldorf shares her years-long fascination with the painting’s “simultaneous quality of utter impenetrability paired with a provocative invitation to enter, to speculate, and to lose oneself in the ambiguity of the portrait.” I’ve been ambivalent about the work, at times deeming it intolerably arch, but Selldorf persuades me to give it another chance, as does the American man of letters Daniel Mendelsohn, who eruditely speculates about the sitter’s downcast air. Madly romantic, Capponi famously pined for a reciprocally smitten girl whose stepfather forbade her to see him. I’m not used to detecting emotion in works by the icily stylizing Bronzino. But now I look again, and there it is. Score points for the book, opening my eyes and mind.
Less surprising to me, but gratifying, are accounts by the British artist and writer Edmund de Waal and the American choreographer and dance impresario Bill T. Jones, both of whom zero in on the seemingly humble, but sneakily powerful, small painting “Still Life with Plums” (circa 1730), by Jean-Siméon Chardin. I have urged friends to contemplate it for several minutes. It’s less about how a jug, a glass of water, and some fruit appear—the description is perfunctory and the palette drab—than how they are what they are: instances of matter as densely actual as matter can be. The longer you gaze, the more sensitized you’ll be to quiddities of painting in relation to the real—and in relation to yourself as a viewer. Jones calls the painting “a peculiar mirror through which to ‘watch oneself watching.’ ” Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin. That doesn’t sound rare, but, oh, it is. No other still-life painter until the twentieth century’s Giorgio Morandi is so profound.
James McNeill Whistler’s full-length “Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux” (1881-82) and “Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac” (1891-92) usually hang, with two others, in the Frick’s beautiful wood-panelled Oval Room, constituting a decorative scheme that is platonically perfect. I’m always annoyed when some temporary show displaces them. Adam Gopnik writes of the “X-ray of emotion” in Whistler’s portraiture. “Anxiety, doubt, self-reflection, sexual ambiguity: we feel it all,” Gopnik says of the rendering of the Count. The artist Ida Applebroog admires Lady Meux, a banjo-playing barmaid who married a brewing heir and repeatedly scandalized London high society. Both paintings are about glamour as an ethic and almost a morality, defiantly accepting the attendant psychological strains. Whistler communes with his subjects’ audacities of dress as well as attitude—the Count in svelte black and Lady Meux in a dress that looks corseted from the outside. Taste, as taste, had never risen to equivalent eloquence.
My own taste skates past the Frick’s abundance of genteel English portraiture—an Anglophilic craze on the part of Gilded Age American collectors who, lacking distinguished ancestry, as much as bought some. Regarding portraits by Gainsborough that line the Frick’s dining room, I’m not insensible to the “delicacy, poise, restraint, and a certain kind of cool” that puts the English musician Bryan Ferry in mind of “a Miles Davis trumpet solo.” It’s just that I find the manner smugly self-congratulatory. But Alexandra Horowitz, a scientist who heads the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab, arouses my interest in a Gainsborough park scene by identifying three pooches that frisk amid perambulating ladies: a setter mix, a terrier, and a Pomeranian—“the eighteenth-century version, with longer legs and nose, less of a stuffed toy than a vulpine variant of ‘dog.’ ”
We look at paintings, which are specific objects in specific places, as individuals, alone. We may then turn, with excitement or anxiety, to others in the hope of having our responses confirmed. Those conversations are the test of any art’s cultural vitality—commonplace regarding books and movies but rarer, and a mite self-consciously special, in cases of visual art, where undertones of rarity and brute expensiveness intrude. “The Sleeve Should Be Illegal” models for us the starts of such invigorating talk. What’s nice about the book is the variety of personality, extending to eccentricity, of the voices heard and awaiting rejoinders. A contributor occasionally veers into sentimentality, which is easily understandable. The museum’s sacredness to many, including me, can cloy a little. The book could do with more jokes like Mark Morris’s. What is at issue, after all, is only art, a holiday of the spirit on the crowded calendar of life lived. Nor is all the art worthy of reverence. Mixed and even negative opinions can serve as control rods for the fission of overly pious engrossment.
I am not a fan of Joseph Mallord William Turner, though I savor Simon Schama’s nostalgic affection for the British showoff’s relatively muted “Mortlake Terrace: Early Summer Morning” (1826), which, as the critic points out, deploys a watercolor-like use of oils to convey sights along a bank of the Thames. He writes, “The limpid light washing the scene is the light of my memories, the happy ones anyway.” I’m distracted by the calculatedness of the work’s technique, which counts on an emotional appeal that doesn’t strike me as earned. For his big sea and harbor scenes—there are two harbors at the Frick—Turner applied splooshes of paint that we are expected to interpret as an accurate capturing of light and atmosphere. (Contrary to some opinion, these paintings don’t anticipate Impressionism, which coheres in the eye; Turner’s visual fictions require complicities of the imagination.) Then he drew in paint on top of them, with an occasional effect like that of bathroom-tile decals. I much prefer John Constable. If I were to choose only one painting at the Frick to write about, it might well be “The White Horse” (1819), which gets everything right about a rural setting—meadow, stream, sky, clouds, woods, path, farm buildings—at a time of day that is signalled by the homeward transfer, by raft, of a workhorse. Constable conducts me into a specific part of his world and tactfully leaves me alone there. I like that.
I suppose that I know the paintings at the Frick better than any others (including some that are superior) by the respective artists. The collection anchors my art love as pocket editions of the Constitution can seem to serve certain politicians—except I’m honest. By the way, would I be a collector if I could afford it? You bet. The very few purchases that my wife and I have made instruct me that writing a check is intrinsically more sincere than writing a review, because the expense hurts. I would pass on a big Goya, “The Forge” (1815-20), in which a blacksmith is about to strike an anvil. It excites the American painter, sculptor, author, and photographer Tom Bianchi as “an intensely modern painting, based as it is on a specific, near-photographic moment.” The picture seems to me more akin to the artist’s anecdotal etchings—unnecessarily large for its content of a discrete muscular action—than to Goya’s more complexly inspired oils.
But Goya! The Israeli-born American artist, author, and designer Maira Kalman attributes the haunting—or is it haunted?—mood of his “Portrait of a Lady (María Martínez de Puga?)” (1824) to its slightly elfin subject’s “neutral gaze,” scalloped hair, and black dress against a taupe background. “Pensive? Uncomfortable? Indifferent?” Kalman can’t decide. Nor can I. This example of Goya’s unsettling gifts is a minor painting. But sometimes you may be in the mood for inconspicuous works. Thus the photographic artist Duane Michals comes to rest on an uncharacteristic painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau, “The Portal of Valenciennes” (circa 1710-11), of soldiers lounging outside a city or fortress wall. The master of ceremonious Eros is, for once, hanging out with random guys. This testifies to the eighteenth-century France that Watteau actually lived in while he conjured visions of aristocratic dalliance. A bonus of such oddities is that you can usually have them to yourself on days when the museum is crowded with fellow-viewers.
Crowds can’t vitiate the almost violent charm of the Frick’s Fragonard Room, which incorporates a suite of paintings, “The Progress of Love,” that was commissioned in 1771 by Madame du Barry for a new pavilion outside Paris (she later decided against the paintings, deeming them out of fashion). After the Revolution, the suite, with additions, ended up in the home of a cousin of the artist, in Grasse. The British dealers Agnew’s acquired it for J. P. Morgan. Following Morgan’s death, in 1913, Joseph Duveen sold it to Frick on behalf of the banker’s estate. Duveen arranged for the room’s installation, enhanced with gems of furniture, ceramics, and small sculpture. (However you may judge the sly dealer, he merits lasting honor for this tour de force.) In Frick’s day, women would gather in the room after dinner while the men consumed cigars in a basement space that is still equipped with a billiard table and bowling alleys.
As a mot juste for “The Progress of Love,” I nominate “silly.” Great art essentializes qualities of human experience, of which silliness is a capital instance. The big paintings theatricalize stages of adolescent amour—resisted seduction, furtive intimacy, triumphant union, and subsequent nostalgia—among young people at court who were given nothing to do in life except to dress up and to play at love. At a heroic scale under sumptuously soaring trees, the tableaux both amuse and overwhelm. “It’s like being blown away by a French love bomb,” the musician Donald Fagen, a co-founder of the band Steely Dan, writes, adding a confessional rue for the common course of romance in real life: “the feverish rush of desire, the euphoric first months when lovers are compelled to idealize each other, followed by the inevitable crash when the levels of serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine in the brain start to plunge.”
Fragonard didn’t neglect love’s downside. A final addition to the suite—looking unfinished but really made in a late, simplified style—finds a young woman droopingly alone, with one limp hand resting suggestively in her lap. A stone Cupid above her on a pillar regards her indignantly and points a finger horizontally, as if saying, “Girl, stop moping and get out there.” Fragonard’s rococo gaga-ness is deceptive. He had a subtle, at times almost subliminal narrative imagination. His tones vary from shouts to whispers. No other major period style ended as abruptly as this one, extinguished by the Revolution.
“The Progress of Love” brings to an extravagant climax the luxuriousness that is implicit, at the Frick, in the ownership of so much extraordinary art. Its showiness departs from the collection’s generally sober temperament. Frick had conservative compunctions. He acquired no nudes, for example. He seems to have dreamed less of glory than of dignity, laundering the machinations of his avarice. There was nothing racy beyond the dandyism of Whistler. Frick collected more works of Whistler’s than of any other artist, likely because the painter squared his originality with soothingly patrician airs. Frick was reluctant to endorse his era’s cascade of Parisian avant-gardes. (An occasionally displayed Monet or Renoir feels positively reckless in context.) He epitomized sensibilities of the time that said “Not so fast!” to modernity in a way that can only be modern in itself, called forth by the pressure of worldly change: reactionary, certainly, with a touch of hysteria in championing prestigious, almost exclusively dead white men. The collection’s bias makes it, as a whole, an illustrative historical artifact that happens to be breathtaking in many of its parts. The works may be old, but our experience of them is strictly up to date. More than one contributor to “The Sleeve Should Be Illegal” invokes a sensation of walking on air after a visit to the Frick, a payoff of renewed faith in the powers of art and a forgivable pride in our own perhaps untrained and underused capacities to comprehend the aesthetic and spiritual stakes of a timeless game. ♦
