The Frick Collection has recently announced that it will return to its Manhattan Fifth Avenue mansion late next year. The museum, which houses works from the Renaissance through the early 1900s, relocated to a Marcel Breuer-designed brutalist building on Madison Avenue when renovations began on its original location in March 2021. The Frick’s last day at its temporary location will be March 3, 2024.
The collection’s temporary Upper East Side site formerly housed the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Met Breuer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s short-lived institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art. The Whitney used the building from 1966 through 2014, and the Met Breuer exhibited there from 2016 through 2020.
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Created by architect and designer Marcel Breuer, the structure is a textbook example of the Brutalist style that dominated mid-century construction. As Brutalism affronted an unfamiliar audience in the 1960s and then fell out of fashion in subsequent decades, the building has been simultaneously mocked and praised.
Among other improvements and additions, the Frick’s renovated building will house a new gallery for special exhibitions, auditorium and education center, updated conservation facilities, and more energy-efficient infrastructure. It will also be accessible for people with disabilities and its second floor will open to the public for the first time.
Gilded Age robber baron Henry Frick built his New York City mansion between 1912 and 1914. It faces Central Park and inhabits the entire stretch between East 70th and East 71st Streets in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Frick died in 1919 and his collection opened to the public in 1935.
The renovations maintain the original artistic character of the Fifth Avenue mansion — classical motifs, ornate details, and early-20th-century glamor. In its last year at Madison Avenue, the Frick will continue to display its classical collection, but will also showcase a contemporary take on portraiture through an exhibition of works by the late painter Barkley L. Hendricks, known for his personalized depictions of Black Americans.
Source: Hyperallergic.com