Few visitors to the Frick Collection give much thought to the architectural firm that designed it. Unless they have an unusually acute interest in the architecture of New York City, they may not know that the Frick was the work of Carrere & Hastings, one of the city’s more distinguished early 20th-century firms. But half of what we actually see is really by another, later craftsman. He was one of the greatest of all American architects and his name was John Russell Pope.

With or without realizing who designed it, many of us have spent a good deal of time in an environment that Pope conceived. One of the most successful museum architects before World War II, Pope (1874–1937) was responsible for the grand entrance of the American Museum of Natural History, dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt in 1931, as well as the gallery that houses the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, much of what is now called The Tate Britain, and possibly the noblest museum space ever conceived, the old wing of the National Gallery in Washington.

There is a clear affinity between these buildings and parts of the Frick. The footprint of the building that the industrialist Henry Clay Frick called home was about half the size of the present museum, stretching from the area where now the elevators are to the West Gallery at the northern end. But what is now the entrance was once an outdoor carriage drive, and the lovely courtyard garden did not exist, nor did the oval chamber, the East Gallery or the ornate auditorium. All of these are the work of Pope.

Now that work is being done to restore the courtyard — it should be completed by next week — this is a good occasion to reflect on the career of one of America’s forgotten masters. According to Steven McLeod Bedford, author of “John Russell Pope, Architect of Empire” (1998):

After his death in 1937, interest in Pope virtually ceased. The shifting trends of architectural style condemned his work as retardataire. Major luminaries of modernism, including Joseph Hudnut and William Lescaze, reviled his work, while John Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown, in their AIA-sponsored history of American architecture (1961) found no merit in Pope’s work.

The reason for this contempt, of course, was that Pope was an unapologetic classicist who lived just long enough to see that style fall into contempt, but not long enough to evolve, like his associates Eggers and Higgins, into something more up to date. Now there were many classicists among his architectural contemporaries: McKim Mead and White, York & Sawyer, and Clinton & Russell, to name but a few. But something in Pope sets him apart, placing him in an altogether higher order of creativity.

The spirit of classical architecture — as practiced in Europe from the Renaissance to the French Revolution — lives on in Pope. He has far more in common with Brunelleschi, Palladio, Vanvitelli, and Gabriel, than with his aforementioned contemporaries and compatriots. Educated as they were in the Beaux Arts tradition, you have the feeling that they have reduced all of classicism to a mathematical formula whose point is to follow, as closely and as archaeologically as possible, the letter of their predecessors’ example. For Pope, by contrast, the classical is not to be resurrected, because it has never really died out. His pillars, columns, arches, and domes have that juice, that élan vital, that courses through the finest monuments of Florence and Rome, but that is nowhere to be found amid the artifacts of the 19th century.

In order to appreciate this quality at work, only observe the contours of his paired Ionic columns in the Frick garden court, as well as the columns in the interior of the American Museum of Natural History. Through the ancient play of entasis, that slight convex bulge at the center of the column’s shaft, the architect tricks the eye into seeing uniformity. Every one of Pope’s contemporaries knew this trick, but none of them could make the column live and breathe the way Pope could.

The same quality can be observed in the Jefferson Memorial, which was completed more or less to Pope’s designs in 1943, and above all in the National Gallery of Art. For those architects share with Pope’s New York projects a resonant simplicity that was nearly unparalleled in the architecture of his classicist contemporaries. For them, the richness of the tradition consisted in the accumulation of sundry and elaborate data over the surfaces of their structures. For Pope, by contrast, as for the classical architects of the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, classicism is a matter of evocative volumes, emphasized to such a degree that the exterior surfaces of the National Gallery are left almost bare.

There is beauty and daring in those exteriors, but the real grandeur of the museum is within. I know of no other structure that, through the sheer competence with which it employs and deploys the classical idiom, imparts as giddy and vertiginous sense of wellbeing as does the National Gallery in Washington. If architecture is indeed frozen music, as Goethe said, then the National Gallery, and to a lesser degree the Frick, can be read as the architectonic reflection of the music of Richard Strauss. Surely Strauss, like Pope, was a nonpareil. But these two men were contemporaries who represented the glorious last gasp of a dying tradition, tonal music on the one hand, classical architecture on the other. And both of them succeeded in conjuring up, whether in masonry or in pure tone, the feeling that an inexpressible beauty haunted the very heart of the world.

jgardner@nysun.com