The Frick Glows With a Poetic, $220 Million Renovation
The New York Times
The museum, based in Henry Clay Frick’s 1914 Fifth Avenue mansion, reopens with a deft expansion worthy of a New York treasure.
A corner of New York hasn’t seemed quite itself since the Frick Collection shuttered during Covid for the architectural equivalent of a full-body spa treatment.
For a while the museum that luxuriates in Henry Clay Frick’s Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue decamped with its old masters and other art to Marcel Breuer’s former Whitney Museum a few blocks away. Seeing Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” in a Brutalist building felt like coming across your high school chemistry teacher on spring break in Cocoa Beach.
Next month the Frick reopens after its $220 million expansion and refurbishment. Fretful preservationists have been pinging my inbox for years, venting their anxieties about tampering with one of the city’s architectural treasures.
I bear good tidings. The expansion is about as sensitive and deft as one could hope for. At moments, as in a voluptuous new marble staircase and airy auditorium, it approximates poetry. It probably won’t quiet all the critics. Grumblers will be grumblers. But it does what was intended. It moves the Frick squarely into the 21st century and seamlessly solves multifarious problems. And where it counts, it leaves well enough alone.
