Tea at Trianon: The Frick Collection's New Home

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 8, 2021

The Frick Collection's New Home

From Town and Country:

When I was a girl, I loved visiting the Frick Collection. Let Eloise roam around the Plaza Hotel—in my Sunday best, I preferred looking at the beautiful paintings in the limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue where an actual family had once lived. Much later I learned more about Vermeer, Rembrandt, Ingres, Bellini, El Greco, and the other Old Masters who were displayed on the damask walls and in wood-paneled rooms that the industrialist Henry Clay Frick had inhabited. To this day I’m a regular visitor who relishes time-traveling back to the Gilded Age.
But for the next two years the Frick won’t be where we’ve always known it. While the museum is being upgraded by architect Annabelle Selldorf, in a $160 million renovation and expansion, its treasures will be a few blocks away, in the Frick Madison, the building Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer designed for the Whitney Museum of American Art in the mid-1960s (and which most recently housed a satellite location for the Met). For Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director, the move has been an opportunity, he says, “to rethink and reframe the collection.” (Read more.)