Displaying items by tag: Frick Collection

New York should be grateful that the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven is closed for renovations. As a result, eight canvases by the inimitable English painter George Stubbs, one of the great artists of the 18th century, have been lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Works by Stubbs are scarce in this town: The Met has one painting, and there’s a drawing at the Frick Collection. This makes “Paintings by George Stubbs From the Yale Center for British Art” a rare and thrilling treat.

Today, Margot Bogert, chair of the Frick Collection’s board of trustees, announced three new trustee-elects: banker Elizabeth “Betty” Eveillard, philanthropist Monika McLennan, and banker J. Fife Symington IV, who is a great-great-grandson of the Frick’s founder, Henry Clay Frick.

Bogert publicly welcomed the new board members in a statement:

The unique atmosphere of The Frick Collection has as much to do with the decorative arts as with the old master paintings that line the museum's walls. Indeed the enamels, clocks and watches, furniture, gilt bronzes, porcelain, ceramics, silver, and textiles far exceed in number, and are the equal in quality, of the works on canvas and panel.

The institution announces the publication of the first handbook devoted to the decorative arts in the collection.

The Frick Collection has yielded.

Facing a groundswell of opposition to a proposed renovation that would have eliminated a gated garden to make way for a six-story addition, the museum — long admired for its intimate scale — has decided to abandon those plans and start over from scratch.

“It just became clear to us that it wasn’t going to work,” said a museum official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the board had not yet made the decision final with a vote.

A group of 54 artists and other art worlders has signed a letter asking Mayor de Blasio and Meenakshi Srinivasan, chair of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, to deny the Frick Collection’s proposed plan for expansion.

“Those of us in the art world who cherish the unique and tranquil ambiance offered by the Frick are urging the Frick to withdraw its proposed plan and consider alternative methods of expansion that would preserve the character essential to its appeal,” says the missive, which is signed by gallerists Paul Kasmin and Irving Blum, filmmaker Sophia Coppola, and artists Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, John Currin, Brice Marden, Frank Stella, Cindy Sherman, Deborah Kass, Cecily Brown, Lisa Yuskavage, Rudolf Stingel, and Sarah Sze, among others.

When Henry Clay Frick set out to furnish his new residence at 1 East 70th Street, his intention was to replicate the grand houses of the greatest European collectors, who surrounded their Old Master paintings with exquisite furniture and decorative objects. With the assistance of the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen, Frick quickly assembled an impressive collection of decorative arts, including vases, potpourris, jugs, and basins made at Sèvres, the preeminent eighteenth-century French porcelain manufactory. Many of these objects are featured in the upcoming exhibition "From Sèvres to Fifth Avenue," which presents a new perspective on the collection by exploring the role Sèvres porcelain played in eighteenth-century France, as well as during the American Gilded Age. While some of these striking objects are regularly displayed in the grand context of the Fragonard and Boucher Rooms, others have come out of a long period of storage for this presentation. These finely painted examples will be seen together in a new light in the Portico Gallery.

The Morgan Library & Museum, which has been without a leader since late last summer, looked West to bring back a longtime New Yorker as its new director, choosing Colin B. Bailey, who has served since 2013 as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco but was for many years before that the chief curator at the Frick Collection.

Mr. Bailey, a well-regarded Renoir scholar, succeeds William M. Griswold, who left last year to take over the Cleveland Museum of Art. Mr. Bailey comes to the Morgan almost a decade after an expansion, designed by Renzo Piano, enlarged not only the museum’s floor plan but also its ambitions, moving it more actively into contemporary art, collaborations with other institutions and high-end acquisitions.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Renaissance Italian bronze statuettes, maiolica wares, Limoges enamels, and French sixteenth-century ceramics belonged to the category of objects that every serious art collector in Europe hoped to own, their value and association with royal and noble provenance bestowing upon their owners an aura of cultivation and taste. The greatest collections were assembled by Sir Richard Wallace, George Salting, Frederic Spitzer, and several members of the Rothschild family, among others. Henry Clay Frick, who emulated these European collectors, acquired in 1915 most of John Pierpont Morgan’s renowned collection of Italian bronzes and Limoges enamels. Three years later, he completed his Renaissance collection of sculpture and decorative arts with the acquisition of a Saint-Porchaire ewer, shown at right, related to a small group of elaborate French sixteenth-century ceramics. Only about seventy authentic pieces of Saint-Porchaire are known today, making them exceedingly rare. In March, with the generous support of Trustee Sidney R. Knafel, the Frick purchased an unusual Saint-Porchaire ewer decorated with a lizard spout and a handle in the shape of a bearded man.

Giovanni Bellini’s "St. Francis in the Desert" is a masterpiece of Venetian Renaissance painting that has enthralled visitors to The Frick Collection for generations. The work is also profoundly mysterious, its beauty and depth of detail matched only by the enigma of the artist’s intentions. For centuries, viewers have puzzled over the painting’s meaning—seeking explanations in a variety of pictorial and textual sources. Until now, the artist’s practical conception and realization of this extraordinary picture have remained largely unexplored. The Frick is pleased to announce the publication of "In a New Light: Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert," which presents the collective findings of an unprecedented technical examination of St. Francis in the Desert and offers new understandings of its meaning through an examination of the artist’s process. In 2011, the results of the study were the subject of an acclaimed dossier exhibition of the same name. Published this month by the Frick in association with D Giles Limited, this highly anticipated and beautifully illustrated monograph is edited by Susannah Rutherglen and Charlotte Hale, with contributions by Denise Allen, Michael F. Cusato, O.F.M., Anne-Marie Eze, Raymond Carlson, and Joseph Godla and a foreword by Keith Christiansen.

Over 30 masterpieces from the celebrated Frick Collection will be seen outside New York for the first time as part of a special exhibition at the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 2015.

"The Frick Collection – Art Treasures from New York" will be the first major exhibition to be displayed in the new wing of the Mauritshuis following the opening exhibition of the museum in 2014. The exhibition will give visitors to the Mauritshuis a fascinating insight into the history of The Frick Collection and its founder, wealthy American steel magnate Henry Clay Frick (1849—1919). The works selected for the exhibition are masterpieces from the 13th to 19th centuries, which include not only paintings, but also drawings, sculpture and decorative arts, reflecting the outstanding quality and diversity of The Frick Collection. They perfectly complement the Mauritshuis’s own collection which focuses on Dutch art of the Golden Age.