A short lived transfer could be too profitable for a cultural establishment’s personal good. Whereas the Frick Assortment’s Fifth Avenue premises had been being renovated and expanded from 2020 till this spring, work and ornamental objects from this beloved New York Metropolis landmark had been displayed within the former house of the Whitney Museum of American Artwork on Madison Avenue, renamed Frick Madison for the length. Free of the generally suffocating opulence of the 1914 Beaux-Arts mansion—which was commissioned by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick from the agency of Carrère and Hastings, adorned by the pioneering inside designer Elsie de Wolfe, and retrofitted as a museum twenty years later by the architect John Russell Pope—the works regarded higher than ever. As Colin B. Bailey wrote in these pages, their transposition into the austere setting of Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist structure was “extraordinarily satisfying, elegant, thoughtful, and respectful at every turn.”1 Although the Frick’s interim venue was only one block east and 4 blocks north, spiritually it felt light-years away.
I can’t have been alone in wishing that this provisional association might in some way turn into everlasting. For years the Frick had tried to enlarge its amenities—opposite to a extensively held misapprehension that issues by no means change there, its holdings have greater than doubled for the reason that museum first opened in 1935—however met with repeated opposition from architectural preservation teams and residents of the Higher East Facet Historic District. These constituencies objected to what they noticed because the extreme bulk of the proposed additions in addition to the elimination of the small backyard on the museum’s south aspect, deemed a vital neighborhood amenity, and the Frick was pressured to desert successive enlargement plans, together with a 2014 scheme by Davis Brody Bond. The newly accomplished model is by Selldorf Architects, the New York–primarily based agency headed by the German-born Annabelle Selldorf, who collaborated with Beyer Blinder Belle, New York preservation specialists justly admired for his or her meticulous remodeling of landmark constructions.
In 2011 it was introduced that after the Whitney decamped to its new Renzo Piano–designed construction in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, the Breuer constructing can be rented to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork for eight years as a satellite tv for pc exhibition venue. However the Met Breuer, which opened in 2016, did not catch on with the general public and have become a monetary drain on its guardian establishment. The Frick—keen to maintain its public presence alive whereas its galleries had been closed—took over the rest of the lease in 2020. Three years later the Whitney offered the Breuer constructing to Sotheby’s, which has engaged the Swiss agency of Herzog & de Meuron to transform it to be used because the public sale home’s worldwide headquarters.
Shopping for the Breuer constructing might need made higher monetary sense for the Frick, contemplating that its newly accomplished renovation alone value $220 million (or $330 million for the whole venture, together with the Frick Madison interlude), greater than double (or triple) the $100 million Sotheby’s reportedly paid for the outdated Whitney, although it could have spent further tens of millions for substantial alterations. And a more cost effective off-site enlargement might have left the Frick with a large fund for additional acquisitions, letting it make the most of the decline in costs for outdated grasp photos, which now typically fetch lower than trendy and up to date works, reflecting a seismic generational shift in style.
Growing the Frick’s holdings has lengthy been constrained by the mansion’s restricted exhibition house. The addition of two singularly disagreeable, low-ceilinged underground galleries in 1977 didn’t remedy the issue. That limitation was highlighted in 2023 when the Frick introduced that Assadour O. Tavitian, a trustee and a significant collector of outdated grasp artwork, had bequeathed a single, albeit magnificent, portray—the Italian Mannerist Giovanni Battista Moroni’s haunting Portrait of a Lady—to the establishment. A 12 months later it was revealed that he had left 331 works to the Clark Artwork Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, together with $45 million for a brand new wing to accommodate them. With ironic symmetry, it’s being designed by Selldorf Architects. May that trove have gone to the Frick if the Breuer constructing had been annexed? Idle hypothesis although this can be, components akin to having one’s donations on everlasting show are sometimes decisive within the ultimate disposition of necessary collections. This has been confirmed by the acute lengths to which museums have gone to safe prime works from potential donors, such because the Met agreeing to construct a devoted wing with reproductions of interiors from Robert Lehman’s Manhattan city home so as to land his outdated masters.
Although the Frick’s artworks are esteemed for his or her beautiful high quality and distinctive rarity, for many individuals the actual thrill comes from viewing them amid the home trappings of a Gilded Age magnate. That voyeuristic impulse is significantly enhanced by the current refurbishment, which amongst different adjustments has opened the constructing’s second story, as soon as the personal household quarters of the Fricks, to the general public for the primary time, with these former sitting rooms, bedrooms, and dressing rooms pressed into service as exhibition areas. (That they had been used for workplaces and artwork conservation, operations now moved to the expanded library wing.)
The reconfiguration of the mansion’s second flooring could be very properly carried out, and it strengthens this singular establishment’s identification as a haven for the shut contemplation of artwork in humanely scaled, uncrowded environment (a bonus assured by timed admissions). Though the ceilings within the outdated household quarters on common are a bit lower than eleven toes excessive (these on the bottom flooring are about double that) they don’t really feel oppressively low and positively ought to to not dwellers of common New York Metropolis flats.
As guests ascend through the Grand Stair Corridor—up the veritable scala regia that was once tantalizingly barred to the general public by a velvet rope—they encounter on the high Renoir’s full-length La Promenade, a confectionary deal with that for many years was hung in a ground-floor alcove simply past that genteel barrier. First in a clockwise circuit of the second story is the previous Breakfast Room, its partitions now lined with photos by the Barbizon College painters, the mid-nineteenth-century French group that included Corot, Millet, Rousseau, and Daubigny, whose silvery-brownish landscapes grew to become the style that hooked nouveau riche People on accumulating artwork within the many years after the Civil Conflict. The dramatic distinction between these conservative canvases and the revolutionary redirection that electrified French artwork within the 1870s turns into sharper within the close by Impressionist Room, the place Manet’s The Bullfight, Degas’s The Rehearsal, and Monet’s Vétheuil in Winter present a crash course on a motion not typically related to the Frick.
One huge change has been the return of the Boucher Room—initially the personal sitting room of Adelaide Childs Frick, the founder’s spouse—to its authentic place within the southwest nook of the second story, from which it was moved within the Nineteen Thirties so the general public might see it downstairs. Embellished with eight canvas panels by François Boucher, the eighteenth-century French Rococo painter who by no means reached the poetic heights of his youthful up to date Jean-Honoré Fragonard (whose far superior Progress of Love sequence is put in on the primary flooring and had shone as by no means earlier than at Frick Madison), this fussily detailed chamber is of extra anthropological than aesthetic curiosity. It exemplifies the long-held notion amongst worldwide excessive society {that a} French ancien régime pedigree in some way ennobled insipid artwork and ostentatious objects, an concept that gained forex among the many moneyed courses thanks partially to Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr.’s house furnishing information The Ornament of Homes (1897), which elevated their Francophile preferences to the authority of holy writ.
Extra enriching is the Gold-Grounds Room, painted a deep cobalt colour that gives the proper counterpoint to early Italian Renaissance work with a matte-metallic backdrop (and figures typically clothed in the same shade of blue), a conference that prevailed in European devotional artwork from the Byzantine age by the fifteenth century. Among the many profoundly transferring treasures on this oasis of piety are two panels by the chic Piero della Francesca: his eventful Crucifixion, barely greater than a foot sq., and his contemplative St. John the Evangelist, 4 instances that top. Together with two further Piero panels close to them, they account for greater than half of the grasp’s seven work within the US, a proportion even better than the Frick’s possession of three of the world’s thirty-four verified Vermeers.
A number of acquainted photos profit from their new placement, together with Ingres’s arresting portrait of Louise de Broglie, now within the dark-paneled Walnut Room. There one can unhurriedly ponder this anatomically incorrect conundrum, with one arm protruding from the topic’s waist to make a extra pleasing composition. One other memorable encounter happens in a brocade-hung downstairs anteroom, the place Moroni’s Portrait of a Lady turns her quizzical gaze on passersby and stops them of their tracks.
Sadly the architectural additions and modifications are notably much less profitable than the reinstallation of the artworks. That is first evident as one examines the expanded advanced from East seventieth Road, the place the view north is now dominated by Selldorf’s enlargement of the Frick Artwork Analysis Library wing on East 71st Road. This limestone-clad configuration—4 tales excessive on the western portion of the property dealing with Central Park and 9 tales tall towards the east—was given a stepped, setback profile to attenuate its mass, however that tactic attracts extra consideration by seeming so effortful.
The library wing overlooks the seventieth Road Backyard, created by the eminent British panorama architect Russell Web page in 1977. Its threatened elimination spurred opposition to the 2014 proposal, which might have stuffed that sixty-by-eighty-five-foot plot with a six-story addition. To keep away from additional controversy, Selldorf retained the much-loved mini-landscape, though it needed to be dug up so as to assemble the brand new subterranean auditorium beneath it. The grassy plot, peripheral shrubs and timber, and rectangular reflecting pool have been restored to Web page’s authentic specs by Lynden B. Miller, a specialist in public backyard design.
Selldorf’s tendency towards a cold minimalism is clearest on this a part of the scheme. She was apparently making an attempt to harmonize with the Frick’s Classical aesthetic whereas on the similar time asserting her Modernist credentials, however she succeeds at neither, and in locations her design feels uncomfortably paying homage to Nineteen Thirties Fascist structure. Selldorf herself acknowledged the affect of that type in a 2008 interview with Ricky Clifton in Pin-Up that’s posted on the Selldorf agency’s web site:
Clifton: All that early Nineteen Thirties early fascist stuff. To me that’s simply nice. And I can see parts of that in your [New York gallery] venture for Hauser & Wirth—the doorway, for instance.
Selldorf: Sure, completely. In fact, that’s the place numerous influences got here from, too.
On the expanded Frick, one can see a robust likeness between the enlargement’s new north- and south-facing elevations and the German architect Eduard Jobst Siedler’s workplace annex of 1928–1930 for the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which Hitler used till Albert Speer’s huge extension was accomplished 9 years later. Though Siedler’s scheme was executed in the course of the Weimar Republic, its pared-down, neotraditional aesthetic—with usually spaced rectangular home windows set flush into an unornamented stone exterior—presaged the strict Stripped Classicism of Nazi structure. This isn’t to say that Selldorf used Siedler’s Reich Chancellery as a mannequin. There are bas-relief lintels above the ground-floor home windows of her extension, vestiges of an earlier Frick enlargement. However the parallels to conservative German precedents are putting sufficient to counsel a design course of that arrived at comparable outcomes by differing motivations.
STENGEL & Co.
The Reich Chancellery workplace annex, designed by Eduard Jobst Siedler, Berlin, 1928–1930
Certainly, that south-facing elevation is interrupted by a slender Worldwide Fashion steel-and-glass-paneled section very like the façade of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Constructing of 1954–1958 in New York. There, in 1997, Selldorf put in one in all her earliest schemes: workplaces for the German vehicle producer Daimler-Benz, an Worldwide Fashion association that mixed traditional Mies and Le Corbusier furnishings designs with a rigor that echoed the costly perfectionism of the shopper’s product.
Coming into the Frick through the outdated vestibule, one turns to the best and strikes into the brand new twenty-seven-by-fifty-one-foot Reception Corridor, which likewise is convincing neither as a contemporary interpretation of Classicism nor as an expression of traditional Modernism. Though this bland rectangular house advantages from three arched French home windows that overlook the seventieth Road Backyard, its partitions and flooring are encased in a lot featureless beige stone that it resembles a complicated mortuary. The 2 rows of metal-and-glass lanterns suspended from the ceiling do nothing to dispel the lifeless environment, and the room pretty begs for some humanizing touches—wall-hugging benches, busts on pedestals, timber in Versailles planters, outdated Flemish tapestries—something to provide it a welcoming aura. (A pair of enormous, freestanding round settees upholstered in a dusty blue cloth—a mid-Victorian kind that Selldorf modernizes right here—are proven in Frick publicity images of the Reception Corridor, however they’re eliminated for press occasions, openings, and different giant gatherings.)
Comedian aid is supplied by the astounding cantilevered stairway on the northern finish of the Reception Corridor, which leads as much as the brand new second-floor café and reward store, and right down to the brand new auditorium. Slathered on each floor with a busily veined two-tone marble and encircled by a shiny glass, brass, and bronze balustrade, this vulgar concoction brings to thoughts the go-for-broke aesthetic of the architect-decorator Peter Marino, right this moment’s undisputed king of top-tier industrial glitz.
One other unlucky change on the Frick has been the lack of the outdated elliptical Music Room, which adjoined the mansion’s skylit Backyard Court docket and was used for lectures in addition to recitals. (Some critics have claimed—maybe to justify the Music Room’s destruction—that its acoustics had been terrible, but when so, why was the house so wanted by first-rate classical musicians for many years?) The house has been transformed into a versatile sequence of galleries for momentary exhibition, which had been nonetheless incomplete for the press preview. The Music Room has been changed by a below-ground auditorium that seats 218 (an almost 50 % enhance in capability). The massive subterranean foyer that adjoins it’s one more architectural dud. Virtually featureless save for recessed ceiling lights in a concentric, mandala-like sample (vaguely just like the skylight within the mansion’s Oval Room), this beige-on-beige nonentity lacks the slightest design curiosity and could possibly be a part of a “function” suite in any American chain lodge.
The brand new Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, a biomorphically contoured off-white quantity, is executed in a free-form method that falls someplace between a refined Artwork Nouveau sinuousness and the cavelike recesses of Studio Gang’s current Richard Gilder Heart for Science, Schooling, and Innovation at New York’s American Museum of Pure Historical past.2 Nevertheless, the ethereal high quality that Selldorf appears to have sought right here is subverted by the obtrusive electrical gear hanging from the ceiling, a frightening array of heavy black metallic lighting suspended from three giant brackets—two semicircular, one linear—that hover menacingly overhead like an alien spacecraft. Such uncovered equipment can be acceptable in a Seventies black field theater, however right here it must have been performed down or partially hid. And what’s the goal of the feebly zigzag-patterned, quasi–Artwork Deco metallic railings put in in opposition to the partitions on each curving sides of the auditorium and main down towards the stage? They merely add to the combined stylistic metaphors—amongst a number of pointless distractions in a spot the place the viewers’s consideration ought to as a substitute be targeted on the presentation at hand.
Selldorf occupies the identical approximate place in right this moment’s architectural hierarchy loved by Renzo Piano early within the millennium, when he was the architect most frequently chosen by museums in quest of dependable outcomes that would stand the check of time. Whether or not or not that’s attainable to find out upfront is open to query, however in recent times artwork world purchasers have flocked to Selldorf as to no different member of her era. Though there’s a pure propensity for architects to focus on particular classes—and a herd intuition amongst patrons who comply with their friends and really feel safer with a agency that has already executed no matter form of constructing they’re searching for—Selldorf has nearly cornered the present-day marketplace for institutional, industrial, and personal artwork galleries. (She has one other, fairly much less glamorous specialty in municipal waste therapy crops, a number of of which she has designed for New York Metropolis with commendable distinction.)
Annabelle Selldorf was born in Cologne in 1960 to Herbert Selldorf, an architect and furnishings designer whose household title was initially Seligmann, and Dorothea Selldorf, an inside designer. They labored for Vica, an inside design and retail firm based in 1950 by his mom, Ludovica Selldorf, which created furnishings and decor that Annabelle Selldorf has described as “very sort of haute bourgeois with a modernist slant.” These tidy, unassertive designs had been markedly extra modest than the overscale furnishings typical of Third Reich interiors and mirrored the cultural tentativeness of West Germany within the speedy postwar interval. (In 2004 Selldorf revived the Vica model, which now produces her mother and father’ chairs in addition to her personal authentic designs.) She has credited her father’s capability to vary all the tone of an present construction by small however incisive alterations—as he did within the Cologne home the household purchased in 1972—as a big affect on her personal observe, which favors low-key interventions over daring sculptural gestures of the kind that introduced fame to Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, and Zaha Hadid.
Though Selldorf didn’t plan on changing into an architect till her teenagers, her lackluster secondary college grades precluded acceptance at a German structure college, and at nineteen she moved to New York Metropolis. Whereas she attended Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, she labored within the New York workplace of Richard Gluckman, admired by artwork professionals for his adept conversions of disused industrial constructions into sympathetic exhibition areas. For a quick interval he was the go-to architect for the high-end up to date artwork world, a clientele that sooner or later Selldorf attracted.
She graduated in 1985 and arrange her personal workplace three years later, however her huge break didn’t come till 2001 with the opening of the Neue Galerie, her much-admired reworking of a Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile for the cosmetics inheritor Ronald Lauder’s assortment of early-twentieth-century Austrian and German artwork. Her nearly imperceptible renovation toned down the constructing’s second-rate ritziness, performed up the variegated marble veneers of its high-ceilinged salons, and turned it right into a believable simulacrum of a Viennese Stadtpalais hospitable to the patron’s Klimts, Schieles, and Beckmanns. Simply as occurred with Piano’s Menil Assortment of 1982–1986 in Houston, the Neue Galerie immediately captured the artwork world’s creativeness and led to a bunch of recent jobs for its architect.
Selldorf’s works have included studios for the artists Jeff Koons, Eric Fischl, and April Gornik, a number of gallery and set up commissions for 3 of right this moment’s 4 so-called artwork megadealers—Gagosian, David Zwirner, and Hauser & Wirth—in addition to a city home on New York’s Higher East Facet for Larry Gagosian and one other for Zwirner within the East Village. She has additionally designed extensions or renovations for the Clark Artwork Institute, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Artwork Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Museum of Modern Artwork San Diego in La Jolla, and London’s Nationwide Gallery.
The final two of these commissions have been embroiled in controversy, not least as a result of they each concerned additions designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The as soon as sacrosanct moral prohibition in opposition to an architect destroying the work of a residing coprofessional now not pertains, as was demonstrated in 2014 when Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s MoMA enlargement did away with Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s American People Artwork Museum to permit for a seamless new 53rd Road façade.3 However Williams and Tsien misplaced any declare to the ethical excessive floor when two years later Charles Moore’s Hood Museum of Artwork at Dartmouth was largely demolished—and its façade utterly obliterated—for his or her new gallery constructing.
There have been these—myself included—who seen the American People Artwork Museum as a extra grievous loss. That sliding scale of concern arguably additionally applies to gauging the seriousness of Selldorf’s double assault on Venturi and Scott Brown’s constructed legacy. Their 1996 reworking of Irving Gill’s Scripps home of 1915–1916 in La Jolla, which had turn into a museum many years earlier, might not have been the couple’s best work, however it was preferable to Selldorf’s flat-footed evocation of midcentury Modernism that now prevails there.
Rather more damaging is what Selldorf has carried out to Venturi and Scott Brown’s Sainsbury Wing of 1986–1991 on the Nationwide Gallery, which is able to reopen to the general public in Could. In 2022 eight former presidents of the Royal Institute of British Architects signed an open letter that condemned her agency’s plan, which they claimed
inappropriately adjustments a finely conceived house into an airport lounge…. It feels as if the architect is making an attempt to jam a contemporary constructing into the heart of the Sainsbury Wing and wholly change its character.
Officers of the Nationwide Gallery are in charge for initiating the venture, which started in 2018 once they shifted the principle public entrance to the museum from the piano nobile of the unique William Wilkins constructing of 1832–1838 to the Sainsbury Wing, which opens at floor degree. Current-day considerations about accessibility prompted the change, for the reason that former entrance required ascending a flight of stairs beneath the multistory portico dealing with Trafalgar Sq.. Nevertheless, another answer that might have created a brand new entrance immediately from the sidewalk into the Wilkins constructing was not carried out, possible as a result of essential opinion on Venturi and Scott Brown’s design has all the time been sharply divided, and its quirky character was deemed expendable.
Though the Sainsbury Wing is sufficiently esteemed to have been designated a Grade I listed constructing—Britain’s highest landmark ranking—its interiors aren’t protected, and Venturi and Scott Brown’s fastidiously thought-about entry sequence has been butchered. Making the construction a extra environment friendly machine for processing big numbers of holiday makers was the rationale for this damaging choice, however one in all Britain’s best public buildings of the late twentieth century has been severely compromised.
Fortunately nothing that egregious has occurred on the reinvigorated Frick, and one of the best one can say about it’s that the important character of this cultural treasure stays intact. A number of the much less felicitous points of the scheme could be improved with makeshift options, like some softening parts within the Reception Corridor, whereas others, such because the auditorium and its foyer, will fade into insignificance amongst one’s extra optimistic impressions of a go to there. The transformation of the mansion’s second-story rooms into galleries is praiseworthy by any measure and might justify all the endeavor. Our capability to commune with the Frick’s extraordinary artistic endeavors in an environment of luxurious, calm, and voluptuousness—more and more uncommon qualities in these instances of museum gigantism, overtourism, and “immersive” pseudo-art occasions—stays blissfully unchanged, a democratic miracle that permits every of us to benefit from the fruits of being a tycoon with out having to go to the difficulty of changing into one.
