Welcome to the latest installment of “This Old House,” the Henry Clay Frick mansion edition. The sumptuous 1914 Beaux-Arts residence is reopening to the public on April 17 after a $220 million, four-year renovation, and with a series of member events this week. For the first time in 90 years, visitors will be able to ascend the Grand Staircase to experience the family’s private rooms on the second floor, the velvet ropes whisked away.
The makeover will allow museumgoers to reunite with the Rembrandts, Van Dykes, Vermeers, Turners, 16th to 18th century furnishings and dine at the Frick’s first-ever cafe, opening later this spring.
But less evident is the A-team of craftspeople forging new traditions at the Frick: textile weavers, lighting restorers, tassel makers, woodworkers, glass artisans and painters, from Lyon, France, to Gowanus, Brooklyn, whose skills have brought fresh energy and sparkle to an aging mansion.
The Frick’s interiors, including the Garden Court and the Oval Room, were largely the work of the architect John Russell Pope, who was tasked with transforming the house into a museum in the 1930s. The reimagining this time around was similarly daunting.
“Mr. Frick had the best materials and craftsmanship, so we had to come up to that level of quality,” said Ian Wardropper, the Frick Collection’s longtime director, who recently retired. And it was impossible to restore just one gallery. “It’s like if you redo the living room and suddenly your bedroom looks shabby,” Wardropper said. “My job is to preserve what everyone loved about the Frick, but with new luster and polish.”
Fine craftsmanship informs the expansive new addition by Annabelle Selldorf Architects with Beyer Blinder Belle, who took their cues from the historic house. “The sheer intelligence of craft at the Frick is inspiring,” Selldorf said. “We were committed to using the same materials and details in a slightly different way, to express the character of our time.”
Here are some of the stellar artisans whose talents are on view.
The elaborate restoration of this Gilded Age mansion’s green silk velvet walls behind the old masters in the West Gallery required the weaving magic of Prelle, a family firm founded 1752 in Lyon, France’s “city of silk.” Henry Clay Frick’s name did not appear anywhere in Prelle’s archives but the company’s general director, Sabine Verzier, a crack detective, spied the original order — with fabric samples — placed by White Allom & Company, the English decorators Frick hired for their cachet. (They had worked on Buckingham Palace.) “We knew when the room was installed, and the threads that were used: three shades of silk, a light green, an emerald with tints of blue and one a bit more pale,” Verzier said.
Velvet’s plush luxe occurs when 10,000 very fine silk threads are laid out on a clackety-clacking 19th century wooden loom and then cut as a long pile, an act that requires what Verzier calls “artisanal know-how.” The striated velvet walls appear multidimensional, the alchemy of silken threads making the hues appear to shift with the light.
DARREN WATERSTON, MURALIST
Darren Waterston, 59, whose luminous murals enliven the new cafe, made his first pilgrimage to the Frick as a 19-year-old art student from California. He credits the sight of “St. Francis in the Desert” with his decision to become an artist. “It was ‘Dear God, I have to see this painting!” he said of Giovanni Bellini’s Renaissance masterpiece.
The imagined landscapes and palette of Bellini inform Waterston’s new murals, which are meant to be “in conversation with the collection,” he said. The main frieze, “Arcadia,” is a fever-dream that unfolds across the walls like a Japanese screen. They also nod to another artist Waterston admires, the printmaker Hercules Segers (circa 1590-1638), known for his surreal and mysterious etchings of the natural world.
Xavier Salomon, the Frick’s chief curator, has admired Waterston’s work since “Filthy Lucre,” the artist’s renegade reinterpretation of James McNeil Whistler’s 19th-century Peacock Room as a decadent ruin, commissioned in 2013 by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Waterston made a point of visiting the Frick Collection every year from his home on the West Coast. Fifteen years ago, he moved to New York. “I thought ‘Oh my God — I’m in the same city as the Frick!” he said.
Anne Anquetin decided she had had enough of being a manager in the information technology industry. “I wanted something more meaningful, something I could touch that spoke to my heart, versus the cloud,” she said.
Seven years ago, she snapped up — and now manages — the historic company in Paris making passementerie, the French term for the tassels, fringes, ornamental cords, rosettes and pompons (her word) that serve as haute couture for draperies and wall upholstery. Mostly stitched by hand, with assistance from a yarn-spinning machine, these are mini-artworks of astonishing variety, culminating in exuberant, dance-worthy skirted fringes.
The silk tie-backs in the Boucher Room, the former boudoir of Adelaide Childs Frick on the second floor, are a riot of rosettes, braided cords and other elements. “You have to have patience, precision and a love for the material,” Anquetin said. The tassels in the Breakfast Room embrace a hundred tiny pompons, coils, skirts, and sateen balls, all handwoven. “If we closed the company, all these skills would disappear,” Anquetin said.
Dawn Ladd has spent the past four years restoring 179 lighting fixtures for the Frick — 19 chandeliers, 37 armless hanging fixtures, 115 ceiling lights and eight sconces. Her mission was to clean them, bring them up to code and discreetly outfit most chandeliers with miniature LED spotlights called Pixis that train on paintings and sculptures.
They arrived at Aurora Lampworks’ Brooklyn studio in shrink-wrapped batches, the chandeliers hung on garment racks. (Never ever put an antique chandelier with sinuous arms decorated with lions or bearded Russian faces on the ground.) New candle covers were painted to look aged. The chandeliers were originally made for incandescent bulbs, which burn hotter and use more electricity. “There was a lot of grime on the surfaces from a hundred years on Fifth Avenue with four city bus lines,” said Joe Godla, the Frick’s chief conservator.
Ladd sometimes wishes she sold rugs instead, which don’t have electricity running through and don’t hang over peoples’ heads, possibly crashing on the floor.
It would not be a stretch to say that the cantilevered marble staircase spanning four floors of the Selldorf addition is one of the most stunning contributions to the “new” Frick. “This is the most challenging staircase I’ve ever done in my life,” said William F. Torres, president of Wilkstone, a 100-year-old marble company based in Paterson, N.J.
Eat your heart out, Hollywood.
The cinematic stairway is crafted from approximately 18 tons of Breccia Aurora Blue, a veined marble with blue streaks found in selected quarries near Bresciain northern Italy. It appears to float, transporting visitors from the second-floor museum cafe and shop to the first floor’s double-height reception hall, down to the subterranean auditorium.
The checkerboard pattern in a new hallway leading to the Selldorf addition from the mansion uses marble from the same quarries, easing the transition between old and new. Some quarries had ceased production, but Torres’ Italian partner Antonio Farina scoured more than a dozen stone yards to match them.
One person who found herself bowled over by the staircase was Selldorf herself, especially by its dramatic veined undersides. “I hadn’t seen that aspect of it in my head,” she said. “It’s like a Tiepolo drawing except that it’s nature you’re looking at.”
Selldorf typically took her cues from the beloved interiors designed for the Frick in the 1930s, particularly when she commissioned new Murano glass lanterns as a festive parallel to those Pope used in the Garden Court.
Pierpaolo Seguso is the 23rd generation of a family of Murano artists and glassmakers whose company was founded 627 years ago. His grandfather Archimede (1909-1999) led a revival of ancient approaches to Venetian glassmaking; his works, along with those of his father Giampaolo and other Segusos are found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
The Selldorf lanterns use two different glassmaking techniques. The panes are made first by pouring hot glass onto a warm table to achieve a reaction called “martellato” — a hammered texture. The jewel-like ornaments along the stems and base were handblown and have a mirrored effect created with paint. “You look at the glass ornaments and think they might be metal and then you look at the metal and it could be glass,” Seguso said. The end result is refined and simple — but “simple doesn’t mean easy,.”
Anywhere you see historic woodwork at the Frick, which is pretty much everywhere, chances are Melissa Ford-Hart and her husband, Rob Hart, of West New York, N.J., have restored it.
“We see wear as a beautiful thing,” she explained, referring to a refurbished walnut door in the Garden Court. “This door was part of a tree. What kind of winters did it go through? Which forest did it come from? Our job is to make it whole and honor the history of its use.”
Repairing hallowed woodwork meant locating walnut with the same color and sheen. The pair was able to salvage quality wood from an unlikely source: discarded card catalogs in the Frick’s reference library.
At the front door of the Frick, the pair modified transoms and reversed the hardware so that the doors could swing out to accommodate large artworks that previously had to be carried through the East 70th Street garden. In the entry hall, Ford-Hart and Hart cleaned and waxed the magnificent walnut gilt coffered ceiling framed by laurel leaves and berries. On the second floor they hid wiring behind the cornices of a fanciful Chinoiserie ceiling mural with cavorting monkeys painted by Alden Twachtman (and believed to have been commissioned by the legendary decorator Elsie de Wolfe). A major repair was removing water stains in the Oval Room. “Twenty years from now we want it to look as good as it does today,” Ford-Hart said.
GRAND ILLUSION DECORATIVE PAINT
Visitors admiring the marble busts by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) in Henry Clay Frick’s bedroom (now called the Walnut Room) can be forgiven for assuming the plinths holding the extraordinary works are made of the same Breccia marble as the mantelpiece.
But they were painted by Pierre Finkelstein, a French decorative painter in Brooklyn. “Marble has so much chromatic variety, so it’s hard to paint,” he said. “You’re trying to recreate millions of years of geology on a flat surface.”
Painted surfaces have long fooled the eye, including at Versailles. Finkelstein tries to capture the essence of the stone, starting with the “quiet, darker elements.” (He mischievously peppers his work with Pierres the way the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld did with his Ninas.)
“You want to show your stuff, but you also don’t want to let it go too far, stealing the life from the sculpture,” he said. “It’s like driving with the foot pedal on the brake and the gas at the same time.”
The second-floor Boucher Room is a gloom eraser: a joyous confection of cream-colored gilt boiserie — or paneled walls — setting off paintings of children engaged in adult occupations in the arts and sciences (from astronomer to sculptor). The paintings, circa 1760, were the creations of François Boucher and workshop, purchased by Frick in 1916 and installed in boiserie made in the 18th century style. Visitors today will never see the effort it took to reinstall this 3-D jigsaw of a room, which had been moved to the ground floor for public viewing when the mansion opened as a museum. In the move, an original cabinet wall for Sèvres porcelain was not saved and the layout was significantly altered.
James Boorstein of Traditional Line, in Manhattan, has reinstalled the period room, while specialty conservators worked on the restoration of textiles and paint. “In French rooms, there is no room for error,” Boorstein observed. “You can’t cheat.” Figuring out the correct positioning of the hearth and hearthstone, done largely through mock-ups in the empty room, was the key to installing the 40 panels of exquisite parquet de Versailles floor and aligning all the boiserie with the existing windows.
The woodcarver, Carole Halle, wielded 18th and 19th century chisels to sculpt seashells, scrolls and flowing acanthus leaves into a narrow panel. The supporting team built back the cabinet for porcelains. “The paintings fit into the room within an inch of their life,” Godla, the conservator, said with relief.
