Room To Grow
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
There is a subaqueous grayness to the art collection of Henry Clay Frick. Reticent and autumnal, these rows of pedigreed masterpieces rarely condescend to compositional drama or chromatic brilliance — quite an achievement in a collection weighted toward the Italian masters. Though it is one of the great paintings of the world, Bellini’s “Saint Francis in Ecstasy” is entirely without ecstasy, its diminutive figure standing motionless in a bare briar patch. Gerard David’s roughly contemporary “Deposition,” as overcast and drizzly as the skies of Flanders, is likewise uncorrupted by any hint of passion. And so it goes with Rembrandt’s nearly monochrome self-portrait, perhaps the finest self-portrait in history; Hobbema’s two chilly rustic landscapes, and even the pale, neoclassical half of Fragonard’s otherwise buoyant Louveciennes Cycle.
But now, like an army of occupation, a very different set of paintings has taken up temporary residence in these demure galleries. Fourteen works, every bit as eminent as anything in the Frick, come to us from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is being renovated. A number of the new arrivals are by painters already in the collection: Velázquez, Hals, Turner, El Greco, and Filippo Lippi. But the mood of these images is strikingly different. Whereas Frick himself was a somewhat secularized Episcopalian, many if not most of the Cleveland works blaze with the pietistic fires of the Counter-Reformation.
One of the finest, El Greco’s “Holy Family With Mary Magdalene,”has all the phosphorescent religiosity of an altered state. Fields of golden fire, filled with the heads of airborne putti, flood the darkness of Zurbarán’s domestic scene of Jesus and Mary. A very different kind of passion, brutal and dark, distinguishes Caravaggio’s “Crucifixion of Saint Andrew,” its foreground marked by the dirty, plebeian legs of one of the guards. Frick, surely, would not have approved.
Perhaps the most dazzling image in the show is Andrea del Sarto’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac,”and this despite the fact that the Cleveland oil-onpoplar panel is a pale, even ghostly rehearsal for the artist’s more full-bodied version of the subject, now in Dresden. Painted around 1530,this is an example of Florentine cinquecento painting in the grand manner. The nude, serpentine figure of the young man, his face half-veiled in the patterned shadows of the Mannerist movement, embodies all the mincing grace associated with that style. But the magnificent figure of Abraham, his knife raised behind him at the moment of angelic intervention, is a far more robust creation. The gold and saturated vermilion of his clothing rivets our attention even more than the poised sword, bursting through del Sarto’s wonted artifice to the sustained force of Titian.
Among French artists, Georges de La Tour distinguishes himself with a typical nocturne of Saint Peter Repentant, seated in old age beside a fire. Surely the Frick’s curators chose this image because of its visual rhyme with their own “Education of the Virgin,” variously attributed to La Tour, his son Etienne, and, most recently, La Tour’s studio. The defining weakness of the Frick painting, the lackluster face of Mary’s mother, is nowhere evident in the Cleveland image, which has been executed with considerable brilliance throughout.
Let us not neglect the moving depiction of Samson by Valentin de Boulogne. Of the 14 artists from the Cleveland collection, he is perhaps the least known. But if Valentin is not a household name, he is one of those less familiar artists — Jacopo Bassano and Michel Sweerts are two others — who surprise unsuspecting viewers by upstaging every other painter in the room. In the present company, Valentin does not quite achieve supremacy, but he easily holds his own in a brooding work inspired by Caravaggio. Yet the two men have very divergent temperaments. Whereas the Roman artist is an angry and impulsive realist, Valentin, half a generation younger, is profoundly introspective. Like the late plays of Shakespeare and the early plays of Calderón, his fabulistic scenes from the Bible are “rounded with a sleep,” a mood quite rare in painting.
The latest work from Cleveland is Turner’s “Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons,” from 1835. As it happens, the Frick already owns five Turners, though very different from this. Most are calm studies such as a harbor scene of Dieppe, Cologne at evening, and Mortlake Terrace on an early summer morning. And while “Fishing Boats Entering Calais Harbor” depicts a violent storm at sea, chromatically it sticks to those grayish-green tonalities that Frick so admired. By contrast, the Cleveland view of the houses of Parliament from across the Thames is ignited by a painterly bravura that has no parallel in the Frick Turners, with their relatively thin paint textures. In the Cleveland image, the screeching yellows and oranges in the sky over London look past Monet to Munch.
With the arrival of this striking Cleveland show, and for the first time in its history, the Frick now has three exhibitions running concurrently. In addition to the Cleveland show in the courtyard and oval gallery, Domenico Tiepolo’s New Testament drawings are in the basement, and Cimabue occupies a side gallery near the entrance. As always, these exhibitions are among the finest and most serious currently on view anywhere in the city.
Still, one cannot escape the impression that the Frick’s admirable and escalating ambitions are fast outgrowing their available space. Last summer’s Liotard show, for example, though very fine, would have been even better if the curators had had more room: You felt they had artificially reduced the exhibition to fit the available space.
It is time for the Frick to expand. I emphatically do not mean that they should add some ultracontemporary parabuilding by Renzo Piano. The museum already has abundant and excellent and elegant space available on the second floor, on the other side of the pipe organ, beyond which most visitors cannot even imagine. When the Frick residence first opened to the public as a museum back in 1935, some of these upper rooms, now staff offices, were fitted to accommodate exhibitions. This is the moment for them to resume that function.
Until January 28 (1 E. 70th St. at Fifth Avenue, 212-288-0700).