The Frick Madison Archives

Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at Frick Madison on View September, 2023

Lady Mama flanked at the exhibition’s entrance with Frick collection works by Jean Antoine Houdon; photo: George Koelle. Artwork by Barkley L. Hendricks © Barkley L. Hendricks; courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Since opening in 1935, The Frick Collection has inspired generations of artists who have engaged with the complex legacies and enduring importance of Old Master paintings. Barkley L. Hendricks was one such artist, and the Frick ~ with its iconic portraits by Rembrandt, Bronzino, Van Deck, and others ~ was one of Hendrick’s favorite museums. On view this fall at Frick Madison, Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick presents fourteen early works by this pioneering American artist who, beginning in the late 1960s, revolutionized contemporary portraiture by uniting portraits of Black figures with traditions of European painting. His work has inspired some of the most prominent artists of today, including Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley. Frick Madison is a particularly appropriate venue for this show, as it was in the Breuer building (then the home of the Whitney Museum of American Art) that Hendricks first showed his art in a New York City museum exhibition, in 1981.

Continue reading “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at Frick Madison on View September, 2023” →

Frick Vermeers Return From Amsterdam, Now on view through March 3, 2024

The Frick Madison, Upper East Side

Image: Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), Mistress and Maid, ca. 1666−67, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 31 in. (90.2 x 78.7 cm), The Frick Collection, New York, photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.

The Frick Collection’s trio of paintings by famed seventeenth-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer has returned from Amsterdam to New York. From June 15 through the remainder of the institution’s temporary residency at Frick Madison, visitors can once again encounter in one room the Frick’s Officer and Laughing Girl, Girl Interrupted at Her Music, and Mistress and Maid. Recently reinstalled after their presentation in the Rijksmuseum’s landmark Vermeer exhibition, these three canvases by the “Sphinx of Delft” have revealed a few more hints about their layered histories.

Continue reading “Frick Vermeers Return From Amsterdam, Now on view through March 3, 2024” →

Inspired by Rosalba Carriera’s ‘Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume,’ Nicolas Party Creates Site-Specific Mural + Portraits at Frick Madison

Murals, The Frick Madison, Upper East Side

Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera mural and paintings on view at Frick Madison

The Frick Collection has unveiled a large pastel mural commissioned from the Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party (b. 1980) at the museum’s temporary home, Frick Madison. This site-specific work was created in response to Rosalba Carriera’s Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume ~ one of two eighteenth-century pastels by Rosalba bequeathed to the Frick by Alexis Gregory in 2020. The installation features Rosalba’s superb portrait at the center of a three-wall mural designed by Party, as well as two new related works specially created by Party for this presentation.

On view from June 1, 2023, through the remainder of the Frick’s residency at the Breuer building (which ends March 3, 2024), this installation will inspire the Frick’s summer and early fall programming as well as a new publication.

What’s to become of the historic Breuer Building? Just announced ~ purchased by Sotheby’s, who will take ownership in September, 2023 and open its new flagship doors in 2024.

Continue reading “Inspired by Rosalba Carriera’s ‘Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume,’ Nicolas Party Creates Site-Specific Mural + Portraits at Frick Madison” →

Frick Madison Announces its Exhibition Schedule for Final Year before Closing March 3, 2024

The Frick, The Frick Madison

The Frick Madison, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, NYC

The Frick Collection announces details of its final year at Frick Madison, the acclaimed temporary home of the Upper East Side museum and library, as it looks ahead to the reopening of its renovated historic buildings on East 70th Street, planned for late 2024. Following the June 2023 debut of a site-specific mural created by Nicolas Party, Frick Madison will then feature a special exhibition of portraits by Barkley L. Hendricks, opening in September. The final special presentation at Frick Madison will provide a rare opportunity for the public to view St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80) by Giovanni Bellini—one of the most iconic works from the Frick’s permanent collection and considered by many to be the finest Renaissance painting in the United States—in dialogue with Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (ca. 1508/9). Both works were owned by Venetian collector Taddeo Contarini, and this installation will mark the first time in more than four hundred years that the two masterworks, which were both displayed for decades in Contarini’s palazzo, will be presented together. Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini will be on view at Frick Madison from November 9, 2023, through February 4, 2024. Frick Madison will remain open through March 3, 2024.

Wondering what’s next for the historic Breuer Building? It was announced on June 1st that Whitney Museum sold the building to Sotheby’s for about $100 million. Sotherby’s will move into the building in 2025.

Continue reading “Frick Madison Announces its Exhibition Schedule for Final Year before Closing March 3, 2024” →

Frick Madison to Present Major Fall Exhibition ‘The Eveillard Gift’ in October, 2022

The Frick Madison

Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun Head of a Woman, 1784 Pastel on faded blue paper
12 x 9 7/8 inches. Promised Gift from the Collection of Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.. Image courtesy Frick Madison.

The major fall exhibition at Frick Madison (the temporary home of The Frick Collection during renovation of its historic buildings) presents the largest and most significant promised gift of drawings and pastels in the institution’s history. Assembled by Elizabeth “Betty” and Jean-Marie Eveillard, avid collectors of drawings and pastels, the exhibition includes European works ranging in date from the end of the fifteenth century to the twentieth century and representing artists working in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. The twenty-six works include some of the couple’s finest acquisitions: eighteen drawings, five pastels, two prints, and one oil sketch. Along with preparatory figurative sketches and independent studies and portraits are two vivid landscape scenes. Artists represented come from the same schools that attracted Henry Clay Frick as a collector, many of whom are represented in the permanent collection: François Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Thomas Lawrence, and Jean-François Millet. The gift also introduces to the museum’s holdings works by artists not previously represented, including Gustave Caillebotte, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jan Lievens, John Singer Sargent, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

Continue reading “Frick Madison to Present Major Fall Exhibition ‘The Eveillard Gift’ in October, 2022” →

Frick Madison Announces Fall 2022 Installation, Olafur Eliasson and Monet

The Frick Madison, Upper East Side

Claude-Oscar Monet (1840 – 1926) Vétheuil in Winter, 1878-1879oil on canvas27 in. x 35 3/8 in. (68.58 cm x 89.85 cm)Purchased by The Frick Collection, 1942.Accession number: 1942.1.146

In the fall of 2022, the Frick presents a special installation that takes inspiration from the institution’s acclaimed Diptych publication series. In conjunction with a volume focused on Claude Monet’s Vétheuil in Winter, the Frick is installing a new work created for the occasion by Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967 Denmark) alongside the Monet painting, one of the museum’s few Impressionist works. The publication, which will be released simultaneously, features a text by Eliasson and an essay by Frick Curator Emerita Susan Grace Galassi. Each book in the Diptych series, which was launched in 2018, focuses on a single work in the collection, pairing an illuminating essay by a curator with a contribution from a contemporary cultural figure.

Continue reading “Frick Madison Announces Fall 2022 Installation, Olafur Eliasson and Monet” →

Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at Frick Madison

The Frick Madison, Upper East Side

Salman Toor (b. Lahore, Pakistan, 1983) Museum Boys, 2021; Oil on panel; 30 x 40 inches; © Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo by Farzad Owrang

The installation at Frick Madison has prompted new ways of looking at the Frick’s paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts—works predominantly made in Europe from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries. Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters is the latest addition in a broader program in the past decade that has celebrated a range of voices and perspectives through digital productions, installations, publications, and collaborations.

At various times during the next year, four New York–based artists will engage with Old Master paintings in the permanent collection, each presenting a single new work on the second floor, where paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Holbein are displayed. These “pop-up” presentations, each running for a limited number of months, will initiate fresh conversations with the institution’s traditional figurative holdings, with particular emphasis on issues of gender and queer identity typically excluded from narratives of early modern European art.

Continue reading “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at Frick Madison” →

The Breuer Building Opens it’s Doors to Frick Madison on March 18th!

The Frick Madison, Upper East Side

‘detail’ Marcel Breuer building. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now the temporary home of Frick Madison

The Frick Collection announced today that it will open the doors to Frick Madison, its temporary new home, on Thursday, March 18, 2021. Located at the Breuer-designed building at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, former site of the Met Breuer and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Frick Madison will welcome visitors Thursday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Timed entry tickets will need to be purchased in advance, with online sales beginning February 19. The Frick Collection will operate Frick Madison for approximately two years while its historic buildings on East 70th Street undergo renovation. This temporary relocation enables the Frick to provide public access to its celebrated collections during a time when the museum and library would otherwise be closed.

Purchase Advance Tickets Now

Continue reading “The Breuer Building Opens it’s Doors to Frick Madison on March 18th!” →