Is the New Frick Collection Just the Same Old Thing?

In Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Lord Henry, upon meeting the novel’s namesake character, exclaims, “You are too charming to go in for philanthropy, Mr. Gray — far too charming.” That statement, with which Lord Henry flatters Mr. Gray, denotes a toxic relationship between charity and charm. If one fails in the latter, the former helps remedy the situation.

Visiting the newly renovated mansion of Henry Clay Frick on Fifth Avenue is like walking through the robber baron’s own picture of Dorian Gray. While Wilde’s portrait absorbed the sins of its sitter, the museum is Frick’s concerted attempt to artwash his away. 

Frick was mostly successful in his mission, since his name today, like that of his business partner, Andrew Carnegie, still denotes wealth and its associated philanthropy. Between 1883 and 1929, Carnegie, for instance, funded the construction of over 2,500 libraries worldwide (1,795 in the United States). Those buildings, including 67 in New York City alone, are still often called Carnegie libraries and help gloss over the cruelty of the richest man in the world at the time, who exploited his workers while ensuring they didn’t unionize. But what is often overlooked about his largesse is that roughly 225 cities and towns rejected Carnegie’s charity because of his business practices. Speaking about the libraries, Carnegie is quoted as saying, “Free libraries maintained by the people are cradles of democracy, and their spread can never fail to extend and strengthen the democratic idea, the equality of the citizen, the royalty of man.” The wealthy, particularly those with oligarchic tendencies, like Carnegie and Frick, often find ways to rewrite history.

The Frick Collection, for its part, is a true treasure trove by most any calculation. Its three Vermeers account for roughly 10% of all the paintings by the Dutch Old Master, while its Boucher room, Fragonard’s The Progress of Love series (1771–73), and other French Royal paintings rival collections anywhere outside Europe and even upstage the more encyclopedic Metropolitan Museum of Art further up Fifth Avenue. Its Rembrandt self-portrait (among other works by the beloved artist), its Bellinis, its van Dycks, its Gainsboroughs, Goyas, Hals, Turners, and El Grecos would all be superstars in less wealthy institutions, but here they huddle together in the opulent earthly court fashioned by Frick himself.

This week, the museum opens its doors after a years-long renovation and expansion, which was led by Selldorf Architects under executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle. Much of the $220 million was spent on conservation and refurbishment, making the space look refreshed rather than transformed. Selldorf Architects are known for their large art world projects, including the Neue Galerie, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Rubell Museum. Here, the firm has provided a conservative but contemporary take on traditional forms, offering up little but the corporate aesthetic they’re known for. Sure, it’s not offensive — but neither is it inspired. Its greatest show of skill is that it stays out of the way of the real stars: the artworks themselves.

The most noticeable additions are the new reception area, an enlarged bookshop and cafe, newly constructed temporary galleries, a new theater, and the opening of the Frick family quarters on the second floor, which for the last few decades served as staff offices. The reception area is underwhelming, resembling a staid wedding venue, while the bookshop and cafe are certainly welcome but equally unadventurous. While the temporary exhibition space is yet to open, I imagine anything would be better than that strangely cramped and tucked-away basement space that preceded it. The theater is nice and roomy, though its style is incongruous with the rest of the museum and would’ve been more suited to the organic modernism of the Guggenheim further uptown. Nevertheless, it is a comfortable space, and an appreciated addition.

It was nice to be able to see the paintings again. Many of these works are taught to art students the world over; it’s hard not to feel something when encountering the same artworks that grace high school textbooks or beloved art books. More than half the works in the museum and 30% of the paintings were acquired after Frick shuffled off the mortal coil — numbering 700 at the time of the bequest and reaching 1,800 today.

Some of the newest painterly additions, including a 16th-century portrait by Giovanni Battista Moroni — the first portrait of a woman from the era to enter the museum’s collection — and a small landscape by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot are currently on display. The museum points out that the small Moroni work is the most important Italian Renaissance painting to enter its collection in half a century.

The curators have paid great attention to recreating some rooms to evoke Frick’s own time. A cluster of Barbizon School works in the upstairs “Breakfast Room” are presented exactly as they were when Frick lived in the house. They play a special role in the collection since that school of art was Frick’s gateway to collecting. Also on the second floor, a 15th-century profile portrait by Bellini that has long been confined to restricted staff areas is now prominently on display in the new medals rooms, alongside dozens of medallions the museum has acquired in the last few years.

The Frick has always been notoriously conservative. Even back in 2014, it briefly allowed and then quickly re-banned photography in the galleries, a policy they still insist on, and children under the age of 10 are barred from entering. The institution as a whole feels like a time capsule, but also an aesthetic orgy of wealth and excess. American philanthropy often has a distinctly individualistic feel, echoing larger tendencies in the culture, and this museum makes clear that it is Frick himself, more than the art, that is being celebrated. When collectors acquire such prominent works with famous pedigrees, aren’t they acquiring their auras as well? We simply don’t talk enough about why the wealthy build institutions like this, ones clearly designed to distort the realities of their lives. 

If museums are ideally places for education (in fact, their nonprofit status hinges on this) then what do we do if the fictions spun by the benefactors and their legacy projects impede that mission? Shouldn’t the Frick Collection at the very least mount a permanent display that contextualizes the pot of gold he had accumulated by the time of his death in 1919 ($145 million, roughly equivalent to $2.9 billion today) and how he amassed such extraordinary wealth? Frick’s philanthropy often dismisses the same people his charity was purportedly designed to help, and today, with a $30 price tag for entry (pay-what-you-wish hours are at the very inconvenient Wednesday afternoon slot), it’s unlikely that anyone but wealthy and upper-middle-class visitors will be able to regularly enjoy the collection.

A museum like the Frick Collection can teach us a lot about our own historical moment, as today’s oligarchs hope to return to the world that the robber barons only dreamed of. But that’s not to say we shouldn’t continue to try to reinvent museums. More recently, the research of scholars like Eunsong Kim is challenging us to rethink the relationship between museums, art, and patronage. In her book The Politics of Collecting (2024), Kim writes about arts institutions,

Rather than a progressive narrative of new world culture, it is the wealth dispossessed in the new colonial world that upholds the traditions and artifacts of the old world order; the United States is entrusted with the role of global leader because of its commitment to the continuum of colonial rule. It is by design that this continuum is duly extended through the composition of contemporary museum boards and prize committees.

That buttressing of the old world order is nowhere more apparent than at the Frick, where the newness of its accomplishment is cloaked in old world garb.

The dying Andrew Carnegie proposed a final meeting with Frick after two decades apart, perhaps to ease his conscience after the fallout of the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, which resulted in the death of seven strikers and the injury of 11 more. Frick, clearly still angry, replied: “Tell him that I’ll meet him in hell.” 

While it may be enticing to think of the two satans of America’s Gilded Age capital bathing together in the fires of the netherworld, many of us can be thankful that one of them left this little patch of Eden behind. But like the fabled garden, planted inside is a precious apple, and visitors will have to decide whether or not to taste it. 

Walking through the museum, I dream that perhaps one day it will reject the overarching nostalgia that so much of the institution represents, and it will embrace something really new. Perhaps one day we will arrive at its front gates to see that it has renamed itself after George W. Rutter, the Civil War veteran who died as the result of injuries he sustained during the 1892 Battle of Homestead. The Rutter Collection may not have the same ring at present, but it would be a more accurate way to heal the wound that Frick helped to make, which an art museum never could. Maybe that day, what Frick left behind will represent the new culture of which we can all finally be proud.

The Frick Collection (1 East 70th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) will reopen to the public on April 17, and admission is $30 for adults, $22 for senior and visitors with disabilities, $17 for students, while those 10–17 are admitted free when accompanied by an adult. Youth under 10 are not admitted, while the museum is pay-what-you-wish admission on Wednesdays from 2–6 pm.