Michael Savage
posted 17 January 2006

New York is known for its new art, which has been avidly collected and exhibited over the last century or so. The city's squillionaires have also hoarded remarkable old masters, many finding a permanent home in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the rich often find it hard to part with their fortune, even after their death, and so the Met is in lamentable order, with some collections ring-fenced as public mausoleums to their owners - Altman, Lehman and Annenberg each have their gaudy sepulchres. Henry Clay Frick, maybe the richest of them all, went even further and made arrangements for his collection to be maintained in his Fifth Avenue mansion in perpetuity. It's a jewel of a gallery, affording a glimpse of some great masterpieces in unconventional settings.

Frick was personally both nasty and uninteresting. The buccaneer industrialist's taste was utterly conventional - English portraits, a bit of French rococo, some Italian renaissance, plenty of Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, and a few Spanish paintings by the most familiar names. The building is dull rich person style - the monumental aspirations blunted by concessions to modern comforts. Some of the spaces are too big, others too small; some too grand, others too trivial. But somehow the impact of the whole transcends all of its faults.

My favorite space is the entrance hall. A cold, light stone offsets the fabulous luxury of the furniture, providing a variety of tone and texture. First you walk past some relatively minor paintings - Tiepolo's sketch of 'Perseus and Andromeda', a tiny triumph of the rococo, and Bartolo di Fredi's 'Adoration of the Magi', a minor but charming early renaissance painting. Then, on the left, two Vermeers flank a Hobbemma. To the right, one of the greatest renaissance portraits - Bronzino's 'Ludovico Capponi'. The hallway is perhaps ten feet wide, and the scene is utterly transfixing. Portrait, landscape, genre and history painting. French and Italian, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century, an embarrassment of riches, a cornucopia of genius. Beyond the barred passage of the stairs lie unspeakable horrors - a domestic organ, an ugly Renoir - the more conventional trappings of the more philistine bourgeois. But here, briefly, are the greatest treasures.

That's the secret of the Frick. It's unconventional, varied, and undidactic. The grandest room is the Picture Gallery, one of the most celebrated spaces in New York. But it doesn't work for me. Such a long, undifferentiated wall is hard to fill effectively. It's hard to make a long sequence of paintings look more than trivially decorative, and comparison across a few works is hampered when the rest bears down upon you. At certain times of the day intense sunlight obscures some paintings altogether - I missed Goya's 'The Forge' entirely on my first visit. But for all this, the quality and variety is compelling. Rembrandt's great 'Nicholas Ruts', where he first moves ahead of his youthful rival Jan Lievens, is next to the 'Polish Rider', also claimed as a Rembrandt, a later work, which also holds its own against paintings not directly related - French and English nineteenth century art, for example. It means that we are free to focus on the individual works without a thought for context or story.

The tragic late 'Self Portrait' is the best thing here. Rembrandt turns slightly in his chair to face us almost head on, a wearied face, but dressed in magnificent finery. In the era of mechanical reproduction we are used to looking head on (symptomatic is that today we tend to hang too low - compare paintings of domestic scenes and picture galleries of old). Audio guides tend to reinforce this, by making gallery going more like television. People stand rigidly in front of each painting, their eyes following what they're told to zoom in on. And the crowded galleries on the main tourist trails make viewing at a distance impossible. But late Rembrandts especially reward a more varied viewing. Often, they are clearly and obviously meant to be approached from one angle. For example, the 'Susannah and the Elders' in Berlin should be seen from the left, where the figures are concentrated. From here, Susannah looks right at us, imploringly, and we gaze into the abyss beyond the protagonists. Unusually, and brilliantly, the 'Self Portrait' works from both directions, revealing different dimensions of the artist as his gaze follows the viewer. Time spent with the 'Self Portrait' reveals more and more, as if a relationship is unfolding. The lack of this dimension re-enforces skepticism about the attribution of the 'Polish Rider' to Rembrandt.

The small room at the end of the Picture Gallery shows some of the Frick's earliest paintings, including a celebrated Duccio from the start of the renaissance and a wonderful gold-ground Gentile da Fabriano, together with a highly questionable 'Simone Martini' on loan from a private collection. There are also excellent Renaissance bronzes and enamels, recreating a sense of the studioli that the cultured Princes and Princessas of the Renaissance created for their private use.

On the other hand the final room, added after Frick's death, is a straightforward failure. A mediocre Manet and disappointing Goyas bore us on one wall, an improbably combination of seventeenth century French classicist Claude and nineteenth century avant-garde Whistler assault the senses on another wall. Everything that didn't' quite fit anywhere else is thrown together here. There are some good things, but as a whole it is less than its parts. It illustrates the challenges of display very well, although on the whole, the Frick is a great triumph of welcome contrasts and serendipitous connections that allow us to value the paintings individually, on their own terms, to an extent that is more difficult in the sometimes clinical atmosphere of major public collections.

The very rich rarely have the knowledge or taste that their art collections are meant to display - they're usually too busy making money or spending money. The decisions they make are often bad, and shouldn't be respected too much. But public collections have often made even worse decisions, perhaps because their sins are of commission rather than omission. I'm thinking, for example, of the appalling condition of many paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that have suffered drastic cleaning that has done immense damage to much of the collection. And what is lost in the ability to compare across a wider collection, or to see a broader taste, is sometimes made up for in the ability to view in a quiet and intimate setting. The best private galleries are differently rewarding than most public galleries. Here the art is left to speak for itself, without the same need for didactic contextualising and interpretation. The pace is leisurely, and the enjoyment more truly democratic.