Tea at Trianon: At the Frick Madison

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

Thursday, April 15, 2021

At the Frick Madison

From Vogue:

At the Frick Madison, as it’s been styled, the collection comes directly to the fore; both revealing its richesse and its oversights. (Focused on the tastes of one very rich steel-and-coke man, the collection is, all things considered, pretty narrow in scope.) Moving through the galleries, with their staid gray backdrops and minimal identifying details—like on 70th Street, there are no wall texts here, so you’d do well to use the Frick’s audio guide on the Bloomberg Connects app—one can’t help but see the works differently. Ignore, if you can, the “dings” from the elevator, and you just may find yourself absorbed by a piece that once rather faded into the damask. There’s no jostling for space in this building, or competing for attention with a molding or a Renaissance-era couch. The breathing room abounds, serving up an altogether different kind of splendor.

While working on the building, Breuer told the Whitney’s leadership that a Manhattan museum “should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art,” and indeed, he managed to create a sense of lightness and brightness to revitalizing effect. There are, in the old Frick as here, certain obvious highlights: Fragonard’s The Progress of Love panels in full, glorious flower; Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, bathed in the light of one of Marcel Breuer’s famous trapezoidal windows; Rembrandt’s magisterial self-portrait. But quite suddenly, I could hardly tear myself away from Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap; I was dazzled by the red-ringed eyes of the mourners in Gerard David’s The Deposition, and by Hans Holbein’s crazy velvet sleeves in Sir Thomas More; I loved the funny, little faces (and the ducks!) in Turner’s The Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile, and the curl of Julia, Lady Peel’s hair in a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. And goodness, where had Chardin’s Still Life with Plums, so tidy and splendid, been hiding? And the 17th-century Indian carpets? I’d seen—even studied!—so many of these artworks before, but never quite like this. (Read more.)