The House Museum of All House Museums Reopens, and It’s Better Than Ever

For lovers of house museums, there is little better than the Frick. The former home of the titular Henry Clay Frick on East 70th Street in New York’s Upper East Side is ostensibly an art museum, as it houses the American industrialist’s formidable collection, but as fans know, it’s more than that: the house itself is the art.

So it was with real excitement that I stepped through its doors for the first time after its five-year closure on one of New York’s first real spring days, a little bit nervous and a lot just happy to be back. I wasn’t alone; it felt like every attendee at the press preview was a true fan of the original 1914 building, and ready to be a fan of its rework and additions. Even the architect on the project, Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects, admitted in her opening remarks that she was "quite emotional" seeing everyone there.

The draw of a good house museum—whether the Frick considers itself one or not—and particularly a historical one is the idea that it is as close to what it looked like when it was first built as possible. But we all know that’s a fiction; after all, it is not 1914 anymore, and the Beaux-Arts mansion’s original designers, Carrère and Hastings, famed architects of the Gilded Age, are long gone. As are those that made many of the tweaks to the building over the years, particularly when it was first converted into a museum in 1935, per its late owner’s request, by John Russell Pope, who added the nine-story art research library; or in 1977, when the 70th Street garden was notably added, along with a reception hall and the (cramped) basement special gallery rooms. "People tend to think the Frick has never changed; in fact, the Frick has withstood a number of changes," Xavier F. Salomon, deputy director and Peter Jay Sharp chief curator of the Frick Collection said before we were released to explore the museum, which opens to the public Thursday April 17.

But sometimes, the fear of adding subtracts. That’s the case given that historic house museums are not houses anymore—for the dozens who work there, they’re offices, and in the Frick’s case, the necessity of offices meant that until now, the family’s private rooms were off limits to all but staff. In the new reworking, you are able to, to the delight of myself and those around me at the press visit, finally walk up the main staircase to that next floor. "I’ve been wanting to get past the velvet rope my whole life," I heard someone tell one of the guards. (I’d been waiting to get my eyes on Bronzino’s portrait of Lodovico Capponi again; he seemed even more insolent and haughty in his spot next to the stairs than ever before.)

There’s something particularly intimate about entering into these more personal rooms that really sells that people lived here once, in an aesthetic so far from and yet very close (as far as ostentatiousness is concerned) to our modern counterparts, whose new homes were visible out a southwestern facing window. Indeed, there is still so much fascination with how the rich and famous live that visiting the Frick scratches the same satisfaction as a celebrity home tour, albeit one likely featuring better taste. It almost added to the impressiveness to think that, even if they are probably deeply grateful for their new, state-of-the-art workspaces as part of this expansion, some lucky employee got to spend years walking down a sky-blue hallway with a mural by Alden Twachtman on the ceiling of the mansion’s second floor.

It’s when you step away from the pristine and still serene garden court that the new structures subtly make their entrance, the Italian marble much shinier and cleaner but delightfully complimentary to the old stuff. I found myself marveling over design elements as functional and basic as the staircase, its careful lines and rounded curves delighting.

Over a decade ago, in 2014, at the start of the debate over what would be of this renovation, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, "The city’s truest anti-MoMA, the Frick becomes the latest front in a larger battle to prevent nonprofit outposts of civilization from falling prey to the bigger-is-better paradigm." Now that the dust has settled on the debate over what would have to be given up to make the necessary—or just desired—updates to the building possible, from better accessibility to a womb-like auditorium for the museum’s musical program, it’s clear that real care was taken in restoring and expanding this somehow once single-family home into much more than just a house, all for a cool $330 million. And it continues: when I found myself in an (original) elevator headed down from the library, a construction worker was taking a close-up picture of one corner of it. As every homeowner knows, maintenance is never finished.

Top photo of the Boucher Room, now restored to its original location on the second floor, by Joseph Coscia Jr, courtesy of The Frick Collection.

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