Tag Archives: Edgar Degas

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS: THE FRICK IS BACK — AND BETTER THAN EVER

El Greco’s St. Jerome is once again flanked by Hans Holbein the Younger’s Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE FRICK COLLECTION
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday, $17-$30 (pay-what-you-wish Wednesdays 2:00–6:00)
www.frick.org

The Frick is my happy place.

Judging by the smiles on the faces of the hundreds of other Fricksters I encountered at a recent members preview of the reopened Fifth Ave. institution, I am far from the only one.

In 1913, American industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick commissioned the architecture firm of Carrère and Hastings to design the building as both a private home and a public resource. Frick died in 1919 at the age of sixty-nine; his daughter, Helen Clay Frick, served as a founding trustee of the collection and, in 1920, established the Frick Art Reference Library. In 1931, the building was adapted into a museum by architect John Russell Pope. The Frick Collection opened on December 11, 1935, for distinguished guests; three days later, ARTnews editor Alfred M. Frankfurter wrote that it is “one of the most important events in the history of American collecting and appreciation of art.”

The Frick closed in March 2020 for a major renovation, temporarily moving its remarkable holdings to the nearby Breuer Building on Seventy-Fifth and Madison, the former home of the Whitney. On April 17, the Frick will reopen to the public, with ten percent more square footage, going from 178,000 square feet to 196,000, including 60,000 square feet of repurposed space and 27,000 square feet of new construction, increasing the gallery space by thirty percent, highlighted by the unveiling of the second floor, which has been converted from administrative offices to fifteen rooms of masterpieces. The renovation and revitalization also features a new Reception Hall, Education Room, and 218-seat auditorium.

The 1732 Great Bustard resides on a pedestal near the Garden Court fountain (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The main floor will be familiar to anyone who has ever visited the Frick; amid some minor changes, the twenty rooms have remained mostly intact. The Gainsboroughs are in the Dining Room, Boucher’s The Four Seasons are in the West Vestibule, four Whistler portraits stand tall in the Oval Room, Fragonard’s The Progress of Love series populates the Fragonard Room, and Goya’s Portrait of a Lady (María Martínez de Puga?) brings mystery to the East Gallery.

El Greco’s Purification of the Temple can be found in the Anteroom, Tiepolo’s Perseus and Andromeda in the East Vestibule, and Vecchietta’s The Resurrection in the Octagon Room. John C. Johansen’s portrait of Henry Clay Frick enjoys primo placement in the Library, where he is joined by Gilbert Stuart’s 1795 portrait of George Washington and numerous canvases by such British artists as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Turner, and Constable, whose Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds has delighted me over and over again.

The Garden Court, with its peaceful fountain surrounded by columns, plantings, and Barbet’s Angel, is one of the loveliest indoor respites in the city.

Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain and Goya’s The Forge hang catty corner in the West Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The glorious West Gallery houses many of the greatest hits, from Rembrandt’s stunning 1658 Self-Portrait and Velázquez’s regal King Philip IV of Spain to Goya’s gritty The Forge and Veronese’s enigmatic parable The Choice Between Virtue and Vice, along with a pair of gorgeous Turner port scenes, Corot’s captivating landscape The Lake, Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, portraits by El Greco, Hals, Goya, and Van Dyke, and more than a dozen small mythological sculptures.

Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert no longer has its own room but is coping (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The centerpiece of the Frick has always been the Living Hall, with magisterial furniture, chandeliers, large vases, and a five-hundred-year-old Persian carpet. On one wall, Titian’s Pietro Aretino and Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat flank Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, which in the Frick Madison had its own room. Opposite that trio is the pièce de résistance: El Greco’s elongated St. Jerome stares out above the fireplace; to his left and right, respectively, are Hans Holbein the Younger’s stunning portraits of archenemies Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More, the latter, in my opinion, the most spectacular portrait in the history of Western art. Its name, the Living Hall, could not be more appropriate, as it feels lived in.

Drouais’s The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards is near the base of the stairs (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The South Hall offers two Vermeers, Girl Interrupted at Her Music and Officer and Laughing Girl, facing a Frick fan favorite, Bronzino’s Lodovico Capponi, with its cleverly placed sword. After years of appearing behind the ropes that bar visitors from going upstairs, Drouais’s The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards, depicting two young boys smiling like the cat who ate the canary, can now be approached before you make your pilgrimage to newly sanctified land.

And then, there it is: the Grand Stairway leading to the previously off-limits second floor. The looks as people make their way to the steps are fascinating, a mix of bated breath, yearning, excited anticipation, and even stealth, as if some museumgoers still can’t believe it is allowed. At the landing is a decorative screen and an Aeolian-Skinner organ that was once played by Archer Gibson for Henry and at dinner parties. At the top is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Promenade, a lush oil of a woman and two young twin sisters that used to reside near the base of the stairs and now serves as a fine introduction to the myriad treasures upstairs.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Promenade greets visitors at the top of the Grand Stairway (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The second floor is a mazelike procession of tighter spaces where the Fricks lived, again adorned with dazzling classics and lesser-known works that were not regularly on view in the past. Corot’s Ville-d’Avray and The Pond are in the Breakfast Room, with sets of jars and wine coolers and Théodore Rousseau’s The Village of Becquigny. Manet’s The Bullfight can now be found in the Impressionist Room, joined by Degas’s The Rehearsal and Monet’s Vétheuil in Winter, which had numerous people gasping. “I don’t remember ever seeing this before,” one woman said, and others nodded. Don’t miss Watteau’s The Portal of Valenciennes in the Small Hallway.

Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man is now upstairs in the Sitting Room at the Frick (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Gold-Grounds Room gathers such religious works as Fra Filippo Lippi’s The Annunciation, Piero della Francesca’s The Crucifixion, and Paolo Veneziano’s The Coronation of the Virgin. Although there is a user-friendly app that tells you where everything is, I preferred searching on my own and was thrilled when I finally located Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man in the Sitting Room, a depiction of an invitingly calm, laid-back man. Ingres’s Louise, Princesse de Broglie, Later the Comtesse d’Haussonville, another Frick fave, now holds court in the Walnut Room, near Houdon’s marble Madame His.

Among the other second-floor galleries are the Clocks and Watches Room, the Du Paquier Passage, the Boucher Room and Anteroom, the Ceramics Room, the Medals Room, and the Lajoue Passage, each with their own charm. And be sure to check out the hallway ceilings, covered in a beautiful mural with fabulous detail in the corners and ends.

The corners of the second-floor ceiling murals hold tiny gems (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As recently retired former Frick director Ian Waldropper notes in the Frick’s Essential Guide, “The reopening of the renovated Frick Collection is cause for celebration.” It’s an inspiring place to visit old friends and make new ones, to see masterpieces in literal and figurative new light. One way the Frick has not changed is that the institution still does not allow any photos or videos, except at the early members and press previews. At first, I wasn’t going to take any pictures, but then I heard a few guards say, “Get out your cameras now, because you won’t be allowed to starting April 17.”

My happy place is back, and just in time.

There are two current special exhibitions; “Highlights of Drawings from the Frick Collection,” continuing in the Cabinet through August 11, consists of a dozen rarely displayed works, from Pisanello’s haunting pen and brown ink Studies of Men Hanging and Whistler’s surprising black chalk and pastel Venetian Canal to Goya’s brush and brown wash The Anglers and the coup de grâce, Ingres’s graphite and black chalk study for Louise, Princesse de Broglie . . .

Vladimir Kanevsky’s porcelain hydrangeas can be found in the Breakfast Room (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Meanwhile, for “Porcelain Garden,” US-based Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kanevsky has installed porcelain flowers in nineteen locations throughout the Frick, on the floor and on tables, in vases and pots, creating a dialogue between the fragile plants and the museum’s many treasures; you’ll find lilacs in the Dining Room, foxgloves in the West Vestibule, cascading roses and white hyacinths in the Fragonard Room, dahlia branches and anemones in the Portico Gallery, and a lemon tree in the Garden Court, among others.

And from June 18 to August 31, “Vermeer’s Love Letters” unites the Frick’s Mistress and Maid with the Rijksmuseum’s Love Letter and the National Gallery of Ireland’s Woman Writing a Letter, with Her Maid.

Below are only some of the scheduled programs, with more to come.

Friday, April 18
Gallery Talk: A Home for Art, Library Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00

Gallery Talk: Closer Look at Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, West Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00

Friday, April 25
Gallery Talk: A Home for Art, Library Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00

Saturday, April 26
Spring Music Festival: Jupiter Ensemble, Lea Desandre, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Thursday, May 1
Spring Music Festival: Takács Quartet and Jeremy Denk, Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Saturday, May 3
Spring Music Festival: Sarah Rothenberg, Solo Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Sunday, May 4
Spring Music Festival: Alexi Kenney, Violin and Amy Yang, Fortepiano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Thursday, May 8
Sketch Night, free with advance RSVP, 5:00
Spring Music Festival: Emi Ferguson, Flute and Ruckus, Baroque Ensemble, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Friday, May 9
Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Fellow Lecture: The Milicz Medals of Johann Friedrich of Saxony and the Subtleties of Political Art in the Age of Reformation, with Maximilian Kummer, Ian Wardropper Education Room, free with advance RSVP, 6:00

Sunday, May 11
Spring Music Festival: Mishka Rushdie Momen, Solo Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 5:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LILLIE P. BLISS AND BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: MAKING MoMA AND THE MORGAN

Lillie P. Bliss, seen here in a photo circa 1924, is subject of new MoMA exhibit (the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York)

LILLIE P. BLISS AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN
MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through March 29, $17-$30
www.moma.org

“Dear Miss Bliss,” Bryson Burroughs, curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, began in a letter to Lillie Plummer Bliss upon her crucial support of the 1921 “Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art,” “I salute you as a benefactress of the human race!”

Born in Boston in 1864, Bliss cofounded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan. She died in New York two years later, leaving her collection of approximately 120 works by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French artists to the institution, including paintings by Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon. She also encouraged the museum to sell pieces of her bequest as necessary to acquire other works, which led the museum to expand its collection with such masterpieces as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

Bliss is celebrated in the lovely MoMA exhibit “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” continuing through March 29. Organized by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, the show features such works as Cezanne’s The Bather, Seurat’s At the Concert Européen (Au Concert Européen), Marie Laurencin’s Girl’s Head, Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska, Picasso’s Woman in White, and Henri Matisse’s Interior with a Violin Case.

The centerpiece is The Starry Night, which, if you’re lucky, you will get to experience on your own, as it’s hanging in a different spot from its usual place, free of the usual mass of people in front of it, taking photos and videos, obstructing one another’s clear views and peaceful contemplation of one of the most famous canvases in the world.

Installation view, “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern” (photo by Emile Askey)

The show is supplemented with such ephemera as old catalogs, acquisition notices, pages from scrapbooks, photos of Bliss as a child, and a few rare letters, as Bliss requested that all her personal papers be destroyed shortly before her death in 1931 at the age of sixty-six. One key letter she sent to a National Academician is quoted in the MoMA book Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art, in which Bliss writes: “We are not so far apart as you seem to think in our ideas on art, for I yield to no one in my love, reverence, and admiration for the beautiful things which have already been created in painting, sculpture, and music. But you are an artist, absorbed in your own production, with scant leisure and inclination to examine patiently and judge fairly the work of the hosts of revolutionists, innovators, and modernists in this widespread movement through the whole domain of art or to discriminate between what is false and bad and what is sometimes crude, perhaps, but full of power and promise for the enrichment of the art which the majority of them serve with a devotion as pure and honest as your own. There are not yet many great men among them, but great men are scarce — even among academicians. The truth is you older men seem intolerant and supercilious, a state of mind incomprehensible to a philosopher who looks on and enjoys watching for and finding the new men in music, painting, and literature who have something to say worth saying and claim for themselves only the freedom to express it in their own way.”

Bliss did it her own way as well.

Clarence H. White, Belle da Costa Greene, platinum print, 1911 (courtesy the Clarence H. White Collection)

BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: A LIBRARIAN’S LEGACY
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 4, $13-$25
www.themorgan.org

“My friends in England suggest that I be called ‘Keeper of Printed Books and Manuscripts,’” Belle da Costa Greene told the New York Times in 1912. “But you know they have such long titles in London. I’m simply a librarian.”

Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879 in Washington, DC, Greene became the first director of the Morgan Library, specializing in the acquisition of rare books and manuscripts, a Black woman passing for white in a field dominated by men. Prior to her death in New York City in 1950 at the age of seventy, she destroyed all her diaries and private papers, but her correspondence with others paints a picture of an extraordinary woman breaking barriers personally and professionally as she came to be known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.”

Curated by Philip S. Palmer and Erica Ciallela, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy” consists of nearly two hundred items, from letters, photographs, yearbooks, and board minutes to illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, furniture, and books by Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Butler Yeats, and Dante Alighieri in addition to canvases by Archibald J. Motley Jr., Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Ḥabīb-Allāh Mashhadī, Albrecht Dürer, Henri Matisse, Jacques Louis David, and Thomas Gainsborough. Greene’s early holy grail was Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; she was prepared to pay up to $100,000 for the work, printed by William Caxton in 1485, but won it for $42,000 at a 1911 auction.

Re-creation of Belle da Costa Greene’s office is centerpiece of Morgan exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Just as MoMA would not be what it is today without Lillie P. Bliss, the Morgan would not be the same without Greene. While at Princeton, she became friends with Morgan’s nephew Junius Spencer Morgan, who collected rare books and who recommended Greene to his uncle; J. P. Morgan hired her as a librarian in 1905, and she was appointed director in 1924. Her starting salary was $75 a month, but she was earning $10,000 a year by 1911.

The show is divided into sixteen sections, from “A Family Identity,” “An Empowering Education,” and “Questioning the Color Line” to “A Life of Her Own: Collector and Socialite,” “A Life of Her Own: Philanthropy and Politics,” and “Black Librarianship.” It details Greene’s childhood, her successful parents, her education, and her friendship with art historians Bernard and Mary Berenson; Greene had a long-term affair with Bernard, who had an open marriage with his wife. Following Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene worked closely with J.P.’s son, Jack, to expand the institution’s holdings. The centerpiece is a re-creation of Greene’s office, with her desk, swivel chair, and card catalog cabinet, all made by Cowtan & Sons, accompanied by a quote from a letter she wrote to Bernard in 1909: “I was busily engaged hunting up particulars of a certain book & half the Library was on my desk.”

One of the most heart-wrenching parts of the exhibit explores her relationship with her nephew and adopted son, Robert MacKenzie Leveridge, who died tragically in WWII.

The Morgan show is supplemented by three online sites that offer further information about Greene’s life and career: “Telling the Story of Belle da Costa Greene,” “Belle da Costa Greene and the Women of the Morgan,” and “Belle da Costa Greene’s Letters to Bernard Berenson.”

At the heart of it all is Greene’s dedication to her work. As she also told the Times in 1912, “I just have to accomplish what I set out to do, regardless of who or what is in my way.”

Like Bliss, Greene accomplished all that and more, in her own way.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MANET / DEGAS

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), oil on canvas, 1875–76 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); Edouard Manet, Plum Brandy, oil on canvas, ca. 1877 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon)

MANET / DEGAS
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through January 7, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

In 2003, MoMA hosted the revelatory exhibition “Matisse Picasso,” a dramatic exploration of the documented, nearly half-century rivalry between the French Henri Matisse and the Spanish Pablo Picasso.

The Met is now taking a similar approach with “Manet/Degas,” a deep dive into the personal and professional relationship between French artists Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), albeit with far less direct evidence. “Each was incredibly ambitious, and their sustained, thoughtful, and at times competitive observation of one another and their contemporaries would become vital to their enterprise,” Met director and CEO Max Hollein says in the below video. However, wall text points out, “Attempts to assess the relationship between Manet and Degas are complicated by the sparse record of their exchanges,” and the narrator on the audioguide explains, “Manet and Degas would continue to push each other to take the risks that would define their careers. But they left little evidence of their relationship in their papers. For example, though Degas speaks of Manet in his many letters to others, none of his letters is addressed to Manet. And for his part, Manet left just a few letters to Degas.”

The show opens with Manet’s Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette) and Degas’s Portrait of the Artist next to each other, setting up the side-by-side nature of the exhibit, which comprises more than 160 paintings and works on paper. The men, born two years apart, met in the Louvre in 1861–62 and both became friends with artist Berthe Morisot, who later married Manet’s younger brother, painter Eugène Manet. They both copied Diego Velázquez’s depiction of Infanta Margarita. Before they met, they had each made a self-portrait in the style of Filippino Lippi. Manet’s The Madonna of the Rabbit, after Titian hangs next to Degas’s The Crucifixion, after Mantegna. At the 1865 Salon, Manet’s Olympia created a furor, as opposed to Degas’s relatively unrecognized Scene of War in the Middle Ages; the paintings hang nearby each other at the Met.

In 1868–69, Degas made a series of drawings of Manet in addition to a painting of Manet relaxing on a couch, looking at Degas as Manet’s wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, played the piano. He gave the canvas to Manet, who quickly slashed off the right side so his wife’s face and the piano were no longer visible. Degas ended up keeping the work and hanging it on his wall, eventually adding a blank strip that perhaps signaled that he was going to restore the missing section, but he never did. Manet never drew or painted Degas, but he did paint Suzanne at the piano, perhaps as a response to Degas’s work. While Degas collected paintings and drawings by Manet, Manet did not seem to return the favor. Degas helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874, while Manet decided not to participate.

Edouard Manet, Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), oil on canvas, ca. 1878–79 (private collection); Edgar Degas, Portrait of the Artist, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 1855 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Other telling pairings at the Met include Manet’s Standing Man, after del Sarto and Degas’s Study of a Draped Figure, Manet’s Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas and Degas’s Music Lesson, Manet’s The Dead Toreador and Degas’s Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, Manet’s The Races in the Bois de Boulogne (in which the figure at the lower right might be Degas) and Degas’s The False Start, Manet’s Plum Brandy and Degas’s In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (which feature the same model, actress Ellen Andrée), Manet’s On the Beach, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Marine and Degas’s Beach Scene and Fishing Boat at the Entrance to the Port of Dives, Manet’s Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet and Degas’s Hilaire Degas, and Manet’s Woman with a Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair and Degas’s Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair.

The show is divided into such sections as “An Enigmatic Relationship,” “Artistic Origins: Study, Copy, Create,” “Family Origins and Tensions,” “Challenging Genres at the Salon,” “The Morisot Circle,” and “At the Racecourse,” tracing the many intersections of Manet’s and Degas’s personal and professional lives, which continued after Manet’s death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one, as Degas, who died in 1917 at eighty-three, purchased more of Manet’s work, highlighted by his unsuccessful attempt to bring together all fragments of Manet’s masterpiece The Execution of Maximilian.

But the Met, in collaboration with the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, has done a marvelous job of bringing together the work of the these two giants, friends and rivals whose lives overlapped in captivating ways.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FRICK MADISON AND THE SLEEVE SHOULD BE ILLEGAL

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Comtesse d’Haussonville, oil on canvas, 1845 (Purchased by the Frick Collection, 1927)

FRICK MADISON AND THE SLEEVE SHOULD BE ILLEGAL
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
Thursday – Sunday, $12-$22 (includes free guide), 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.frick.org/madison

For the first twelve months of the pandemic, the Frick, my favorite place in New York City, was my “virtual home-away-from-home” when it came to art. And I mean that in a different way than Lloyd Schwartz does in his piece on Johannes Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl in the recently published book The Sleeve Should Be Illegal & Other Reflections on Art at the Frick, in which the poet and classical music critic uses that phrase to describe what the museum, opened to the public in 1935 at Fifth Ave. and Seventieth St., meant to him when he was growing up in Brooklyn and Queens. The book features more than sixty artists, curators, writers, musicians, and philanthropists waxing poetic about their most-admired work in the Frick Collection.

A native of Brooklyn myself, I am referring specifically to the institution’s online presence during the coronavirus crisis. It had closed in March 2020 for a major two-year renovation, moving its remarkable holdings to the nearby Breuer Building on Seventy-Fifth and Madison, the former home of the Whitney from 1966 to 2014, then host to the Met Breuer for an abbreviated four years. Starting in April 2020 and continuing through last month, chief curator Xavier F. Salomon (and occasionally curator Aimee Ng) gave spectacular prerecorded illustrated art history lectures on Fridays at 5:00 focusing on one specific work in the museum’s holdings; thousands of people from around the world tuned in live to learn more about these masterpieces. Two questions added a frisson of excitement for devoted fans: What cocktail would the curator select to enjoy with the painting, sculpture, or porcelain/enamel object that week? And which smoking jacket would Xavier be rocking? These sixty-six marvelous “Cocktails with a Curator” episodes can still be seen here.

For more than half my life, the Frick has been the spot I go to when I need a break from troubled times, a respite from the craziness of the city, a few moments of peace amid the maelstrom. Going to the Frick, which was designed by Carrère and Hastings and served as the home of Pennsylvania-born industrialist Henry Clay Frick from 1914 until his death in 1919 at the age of sixty-nine, was like visiting old friends, reflecting on my existence among familiar and welcoming surroundings. There is still nothing like sitting on a marble bench in John Russell Pope’s Garden Court, with its lush plantings, austere columns, and lovely fountain, in between continuing my intimate, personal relationships with cherished canvases. In Sleeve, philanthropist Joan K. Davidson writes about Giambattista Tiepolo’s Perseus and Andromeda, “Entering the Frick, the visitor tends to head to the galleries where the Fragonards, Titians, El Greco, the great Holbeins, and other Frick Top Treasures are to be found. Or, perhaps, you turn left to the splendid English portraits in the Dining Room. But not so fast, please. You could miss my picture!” I am not nearly so generous as Davidson, not at all ready to share my prized works with others, preferring alone time with each.

After being teased by Salomon’s discussion of Rembrandt’s impossibly powerful 1658 self-portrait, which gave a glimpse of where it is on display at Frick Madison, it was with excitement and more than a little trepidation that I finally ventured toward Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist building, worried it would feel like seeing friends in a hotel where they’re staying while their kitchen is being remodeled. As artist Darren Waterston admits in his piece on Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, about his first pilgrimage to the museum, “I remember feeling a nervous anticipation as I approached the Frick, as if I were meeting a lost relative or a new lover for the first time.” He now makes sure to return at least once every year.

In addition, I was poring over Sleeve, a cornucopia of Frick love. Many of the rapturous entries are just as much about the institution itself and how the pieces are arranged as the chosen object. Writing about the circle of Konrad Witz’s Pietà, short story writer and translator Lydia Davis explains, “Because of the reliable permanence of the collection — the paintings usually hanging where I knew to find them — they became engraved in my memory. Over time, of course, I changed, so my experience of the paintings also changed.” Fashion designer Carolina Herrera, praising Goya’s Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna, notes, “I would love to move in. And, as one does, I would like to move the furniture around, hang the paintings in different places, and put some of the objects away, to change them from time to time.”

While I had contemplated moving in, I had never considered rearranging anything, although I was blown away when, after decades of seeing Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Sir Thomas More in the Living Hall, where it looks over at Holbein’s portrait of More’s archnemesis, Sir Thomas Cromwell, well above eye level and separated by a fireplace and El Greco’s exquisite painting of St. Jerome, I was able to belly up to the canvas at my height when it was displayed temporarily in the Oval Room, leaving me, as curator Edgar Munhall pointed out on the audio guide, “weak in the knees.” Entering Frick Madison, my thoughts zeroed in on my impending rendezvous with Holbein and More.

Unknown artist (Mantua?), Nude Female Figure (Shouting Woman), bronze with silver inlays, early 16th century (Henry Clay Frick Bequest)

Five people melt over the More portrait in Sleeve; in fact, the title of the book comes from novelist Jonathan Lethem’s foray into the work. Nina Katchadourian raves, “Every time I visit the Frick, I go to the Living Hall to look at Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More. I love it as a painting, but I also see it as the first spark in a series of chain reactions that happen among objects in the room. . . . It is a staging of masterpieces that is itself a masterpiece of staging.” I quickly found the canvas, in its own nook with Cromwell, as if there were nothing else in the world but the two of them. You can get dangerously close to the breathtaking canvases, glorying in Holbein’s remarkable brushwork, his unique ability to capture the essence of each man in a drape of cloth, a ring, a stray hair, a bit of white fabric sticking out from a fur collar.

Utterly pleased and satisfied with the placement of the Holbeins — while I did miss all the finery usually surrounding them, seeing them both so unencumbered just felt right — I continued my adventure to track down other old friends and make new ones. St. Francis in the Desert, a work that demands multiple viewings, with new details emerging every time, usually hangs across from More, but here it has its own well-deserved room. Referring to St. Francis’s position in the painting, hands spread to his sides, looking up at the heavens, artist Rachel Feinstein writes, “That moment of isolation is fascinating in the context of the situation we are in now because of COVID-19. Our family of five may not be living alone in a cave right now, but due to the current circumstances, we have turned more inward, like St. Francis. Looking at this image and its sharp clarity during this time of fear and uncertainty is very soothing and inspirational.”

Trips to the Frick bring up childhood memories for many Sleeve contributors (Lethem, Moeko Fujii, Bryan Ferry, Stephen Ellcock, Julie Mehretu); describing seeing Rembrandt’s Polish Rider for the first time in high school, novelist Jerome Charyn remembers, “He could have been a hoodlum from the South Bronx with his orange pants and orange crown. . . . I left the Frick in a dream. I had found a mirror of my own wildness on Fifth Avenue, a piece of the Bronx steppe.” Donald Fagen and Abbi Jacobson recall lost love, while Frank, Edmund De Waal, and Adam Gopnik bring up Marcel Proust. Arlene Shechet and Wangechi Mutu find the feminist power in the early sixteenth century sculpture Nude Female Figure (Shouting Woman). “Making a small work is an unforgiving process,” Shechet writes. “There is no room for missteps, and the Shouting Woman is an example of exquisite perfection, her bold demeanor wrought with great feeling and delicacy. The plush palace that is the Frick becomes eminently more compelling when I visit with this giant of a sculpture.”

Artist Tom Bianchi gets political when delving into Goya’s The Forge, a harrowing canvas that depicts blacksmiths hard at work as if in hell. “The presence of The Forge in the collection is an anomaly,” Bianchi explains. “Frick’s fortune was built on the labor of steelworkers, whose union he infamously opposed. His reduction of the salaries of his workers resulted in the Homestead strike in 1892, in which seven striking workers and three guards were killed and scores more injured. Ultimately, Frick replaced the striking workers, mostly southern and eastern European immigrants, with African American workers, whom he paid a 20 percent lower wage. One wonders if Frick appreciated the irony of the inclusion of this painting among his Old Masters.”

Agnolo Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano), Lodovico Capponi, oil on panel, 1550–55 (The Frick Collection; Henry Clay Frick Bequest)

I’ve always had a minor issue with how the Frick’s three Vermeers, Officer and Laughing Girl, Mistress and Maid, and Girl Interrupted at Her Music, are displayed; two of the three can usually be seen in the South Hall, above furniture, in a narrow space that is easy to pass by, especially if you are checking out the opposite Grand Staircase, which will at last be open to the public when the Frick reopens in mid-2023.

There are no such obstacles at Frick Madison, where all three are in the same room on the second floor. Together the Vermeers are feted by Fujii, Frank, Vivian Gornick, Gregory Crewdson, Susan Minot, Judith Thurman, and Schwartz. Meanwhile, various artists are completely shut out of Sleeve accolades, including Hans Memling (Portrait of a Man), Frans Hals (Portrait of an Elderly Man and Portrait of a Woman), François Boucher (The Four Seasons), Edgar Degas (The Rehearsal), John Constable (Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds), Carel Fabritius (The Goldfinch), François-Hubert Drouais (The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards), Paolo Veronese (Wisdom and Strength), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (La Promenade). Rembrandt’s aforementioned self-portrait receives five nods (Roz Chast, Rineke Dijkstra, Diana Rigg, Jenny Saville, Mehretu), while Ingres’s Comtesse d’Hassuonville nets three (Jed Perl, Firelei Báez, Robert Wilson).

But the biggest surprise for me was the popularity of Bronzino’s Lodovico Capponi, chosen by Susanna Kaysen, David Masello, Daniel Mendelsohn, Annabelle Selldorf, and Catherine Opie. When I saw it at Frick Madison, I had no recollection whatsoever of the 1550s vertical oil painting of a page with the Medici court; it felt like I was seeing it for the very first time. It’s an arresting picture, highlighted by loose background drapery, the curious position of the fingers of each hand, the privileged look in his eyes, and, of course, the ridiculously funny codpiece/sword. As I stood in front of it, it did not strike me the way other portraits at the Frick do; in her “Cocktails with a Curator” entry on the piece, Ng says with a big smile, “This one really is one of my most favorite, if not favorite, works at the Frick. . . . I know I’m not the only one. . . . This is a painting that’s at the heart of many people who are close to the Frick.” When I go back to Frick Madison, which will be very soon, I’m going to spend more time with Lodovico, and I am already preparing myself to make a beeline for it when the original Frick reopens. I clearly must be missing something, as Lodovico has taken a brief sojourn to the Met, where it is not only included in the major exhibition “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570,” which runs through October 11, but is the cover image of the catalog.

Selldorf writes in her piece on Lodovico, “Art informs the space, but the space also informs the art.” Whether it’s the Frick Madison or the Frick on Fifth, “The genius, beauty, and mystery behind its doors may change your life,” Herrera promises. It’s changed myriad lives over its nine-decade existence, from other artists’ to just plain folks’ like you and me. You’re bound to fall in “love at first sight” — as New York Philharmonic principal cellist Carter Brey describes his initial encounter with George Romney’s Lady Hamilton as “Nature” — with at least one work at the Frick, something that will stay with you for a long time, an objet d’art you’ll visit again and again and develop a meaningful relationship with over the years. Just be sure to stay out of my way when I’m reconnecting with Sir Thomas More.

UNFINISHED: THOUGHTS LEFT VISIBLE

Vincent van Gogh, “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise,” oil on canvas, 1890 (Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Collection Antell)

The Met Breuer
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, suggested admission $12-$25
212-731-1675
www.metmuseum.org

In Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s 2014 biopic about British artist J. M. W. Turner, the controversial landscape painter (played with a splendid curmudgeonly gruffness by Timothy Spall) examines a canvas of his hanging at the Royal Academy, approaches it with his brush, and dabs on one last bit of color, as if adding a period to complete the painting. But what really determines whether a work of art is finished? That is the question asked by the Met Breuer in its inaugural exhibition, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” The show, which features nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures, explores various aspects of completion while referencing the Met’s takeover of Marcel Breuer’s building, originally built for the Whitney, which recently moved to its new home in the Meatpacking District. (At the very least, the downstairs of the Met Breuer has not been finished.) “A work is complete if in it the master’s intentions have been realized,” Rembrandt said. However, Pablo Picasso asserted, “To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul.” The exhibition, spread across two floors, includes several canvases by Rembrandt and Picasso as well as works by Titian, Pollock, Velázquez, Monet, Homer, Whistler, Friedrich, Hesse, Gericault, Ruscha, Bourgeois, Cézanne, Sargent, Matisse, Szapocznikow, Tuymans, Richter, Johns, Twombly, Dumas, and many others, from the Renaissance to the present, a fascinating journey into the creative process. But the majority of the pieces on view — divided into such sections as “The Infinite: Art Out of Bounds,” “To Be Determined: Painting in Process,” and “Decay, Dwindle, Decline” — are not immediately identifiable as being incomplete, especially given curators Andrea Bayer, Kelly Baum, and Nicholas Cullinan’s wide employment of the concept of “unfinished.”

Janine Antoni, “Lick and Lather,” chocolate and soap, 1993-94 (collection of Jill and Peter Kraus)

Edouard Manet kept repainting the face of “Madame Edouard Manet” and eventually gave up, not satisfied with the results. James Tissot’s “Orphan” etching was made from a painting that is now lost. Elizabeth Peyton’s “Napoleon (After Louis David, Le General Bonaparte vers 1797)” was based on an unfinished portrait by Jacques Louis David. Lucian Freud continually reworked the face in a 2002 self-portrait with oil paint, leaving the rest of the canvas as a charcoal sketch. Gustave Courbet chose not to give definition to his visage in “The Homecoming.” Alberto Giacometti made significant changes to “Annette” after it was first shown publicly. Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait with Wounded Eye” is an unsigned piece that mirrors the vision problem the artist was suffering from. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Dirty Bride or The Wedding of Mopsus and Nisa” was a design for a woodcut. Gustav Klimt’s “Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III” was commissioned half a dozen years after the subject committed suicide, and then Klimt died before it was complete. Janine Antoni licked and washed with the two busts of “Lick and Lather,” but the materials she used (chocolate and soap) will eventually disintegrate on their own. It is not known why Albrecht Dürer did not finish “Salvator Mundi” after he fled Nuremberg for Venice and later returned. Camille Corot’s “Boatman among the Reeds,” a finished work, looks unfinished when seen from up close; one critic noted, “When you come to a Corot, it is better not to get too close. Nothing is finished, nothing is carried through. . . . Keep your distance.” Meanwhile, X-radiographs have revealed an earlier state underneath Corot’s signed “Sibylle.” Vincent van Gogh committed suicide before completing “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise.” Edgar Degas reworked the 1866 “Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey” in 1880-81 and again around 1897; the artist reportedly said to Katherine Cassat, mother of Mary Cassat, “It is one of those works which are sold after a man’s death and artists buy them not caring whether they are finished or not.” Indeed, the nature of death, the ultimate finality, hovers over many of the works. “The painting raises fundamental questions regarding the transitional nature of the moment of death and the inherent ‘unfinishedness’ of human life,” the wall label says about Ferdinand Hodler’s “Valentine Godé — Darel on Her Deathbed,” a poignant oil depicting the Swiss artist’s ailing lover.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Rough Sea,” oil on canvas, ca. 1840-45 (Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856)

The centerpiece of the show is a side room — missed by many museumgoers — that contains five glorious later canvases by Joseph Mallard William Turner, abstract seascapes and landscapes painted between 1835 and 1845. Pre-Impressionist, they seem to stand at a sort of gateway to the modern and a transition between earlier ideas of “unfinished” related to product and later notions associated with process. There are few definable objects in the works — “Margate (?), from the Sea,” “The Thames above Waterloo Bridge,” “Rough Sea,” “Sun Setting over a Lake,” and “Sunset from the Top of the Rigi” — and there is debate over whether they are non finito (intentionally unfinished), never completed for various reasons, or in fact finished paintings. Given the experimental nature of the glowing canvases, it wouldn’t have surprised me if Spall walked into the room, carefully surveyed the canvases, then added a dab of paint here, a splotch of color there. It also makes one question whether it even matters if a work is finished or not; without knowing any of the background behind these five Turner paintings, you’d be hard-pressed to consider them unfinished; Turner’s magnificent use of light and color and exquisite brushwork take your breath away, filling every bit of you with emotion, leaving nothing untouched, even if, to Turner, they were not done. As Barnett Newman said, “The idea of a ‘finished’ picture is a fiction.”

The exhibition finishes September 4; be sure to also check out Tatsuo Miyajima’s first-floor installation, “Arrow of Time (Unfinished Life),” which was specially commissioned as a companion piece for the show; it consists of approximately 250 red, numeric LEDs hanging from the ceiling, counting down from nine to one over and over at different intervals, an endless cycle evoking life, death, and rebirth. Miyajima named the piece after Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s theory concerning thermodynamics and entropy and was inspired by the Buddhist notion of samsara, which fits right in with the theme of the Breuer’s first major exhibit.

EDGAR DEGAS: A STRANGE NEW BEAUTY

Edgar Degas, Frieze of Dancers, oil on fabric, ca. 1895, (the Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of the Hanna Fund)

Edgar Degas, “Frieze of Dancers,” oil on canvas, ca. 1895, (the Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of the Hanna Fund)

Museum of Modern Art
Floor 6, Special Exhibitions Gallery North
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Daily through Sunday, July 24, $25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

The splendidly curated MoMA exhibit “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” reveals the French artist’s dazzling, experimental work with monotypes, manipulating their tools and processes as if he were using a predigital, hands-on version of Photoshop. Born in Paris in 1834, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas discovered the monotype technique in the mid-1870s, allowing him to expand his creativity and do things that no one else had done before. He “is no longer a friend, a man, an artist! He’s a zinc or copper plate blackened with printer’s ink, and plate and man are flattened together by his printing press whose mechanism has swallowed him completely!” etcher Marcellin Desboutin wrote in an 1876 letter, recounted in curator Jodi Hauptman’s introduction in the exhibition catalog. “The man’s crazes are out of this world. He now is in the metallurgic phase of reproducing his drawings with a roller and is running all over Paris, in the heat wave — trying to find the legion of specialists who will realize his obsession. He is a real poem! He talks only of metallurgists, lead casters, lithographers, planishers!” Degas indeed got his hands dirty, smudging ink, scratching plates, and painting over prints in a whirlwind of artistic fervor. Degas covered many of the same topics he had in his oil paintings and drawings, but employing etching, drypoint, and aquatint gave him a virtual freedom that he took full advantage of. In “Actresses in Their Dressing Rooms,” state 1 of 5 is gray and shady, the characters and interior harder to define than in the fifth state. One of two printings of “An Admirer in the Corridor” is like a ghostly version of the other. The monotype-on-paper “Ironing Women” is cleverly paired with the larger oil on canvas “A Woman Ironing,” capturing Degas’s differing takes on a domestic scene. But it’s not only the multiples that highlight Degas’s process. More abstract works such as “The River” and “Factory Smoke” are filled with a lovely mystery. Other subjects that Degas investigates include women in baths and brothels, putting on stockings, and reclining in bed.

Edgar Degas, “Autumn Landscape,” monotype oil on paper, 1890 (private collection)

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the series of landscapes from the 1890s, stunning monotypes of roads, mountains, and the moonrise that range from figurative to abstract. Of course, it is Degas’s love of performance, particularly of singers and dancers, that stands out. The same trio of dancers is the focus of “Ballet Scene” and “Three Ballet Dancers,” but in the latter Degas has drawn in pastel over the monotype, adding sparkling pinks. The black-and-white “Café Singer” is almost like a negative image of the colorful “Singers on the Stage”; in the pair, one can also see Degas’s passion for light as gas lamps became electric bulbs. Be sure to grab one of the available magnifying glasses to marvel in every little detail. Degas’s obsession with multiple images also found its way into his oil paintings and pastels, as seen in “Frieze of Dancers” and two versions of “Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper.” It’s all a tour de force that delights in this lesser-known aspect of Degas’s oeuvre. “He who is such an anarchist! In art, of course, and without knowing it!” Camille Pissarro wrote in an 1891 letter to his son referenced in Richard Kendall’s catalog essay, “An Anarchist in Art: Degas and the Monotype.” Anarchy may never have looked so good. The exhibition, named after a quote about Degas’s work from poet Stéphane Mallarmé, is supplemented with several of Degas’s sketchbooks in addition to etchings by his friend and fellow artist Ludovic Napoléon Lepic; the show continues through July 24, with the participatory program “Endless Repetition” led by Elisabeth Bardt-Pellerin on July 19 and 21 at 11:30.

WIKIPEDIA EDIT-A-THON: SELECTIONS FROM THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION

Attendees of the inaugural Guggathon edit new Wikipedia entries last October (photo by Kris McKay © 2014 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Tuesday, May 19, free with advance registration, 3:00 – 7:00
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

Ever look at a Wikipedia page and want to make changes to an entry but didn’t know if you were allowed to or how to do it? On May 19 from 3:00 to 7:00, the Guggenheim is hosting its second Wikipedia Edit-a thon, as the uptown institution donates one hundred images to the online encyclopedia and invites the general public to help flesh out the entries, either at the museum or remotely. Among the images that will become part of Wikipedia Commons are works by Edgar Degas, Paul Klee, Vincent Van Gogh, and others. The Guggenheim’s inaugural Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was held last October, dedicated to museum architecture. Tuesday’s Guggathon begins with a welcome address from Guggenheim curatorial assistant Natalia Lauricella and remarks from Wikimedia NYC president Richard Knipel, who will then lead a training session for registered attendees. Then the hands-on editing — participants must bring their own laptops and power cords — takes place from 4:15 to 5:45, followed by a review of the results. At 6:00, gallery educator Lewis Kachur will give a private tour of the Thannhauser Collection.