The Fabulous Frick

For high-quality art in a beautiful setting, the Frick Museum in New York (between 70th and 71st Streets, and Madison and Fifth Ave.) cannot be beat (that's Henry Clay Frick at the left, with granddaughter Adelaide, in 1918). Right now, you can enjoy a tiny (size of a modest walk-in closet) but wonderful Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting mini-exhibit (closes Dec. 31), a Tiepolo exhibit (downstairs) and Masterpieces of European Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has closed its permanent exhibit while it undergoes an extensive renovation (it has loaned the Frick 14 works; exhibit closes Jan. 28).

CIMABUE. The exhibit has to be tiny, since there is very little work remaining by Cenni di Pepo, better known as Cimabue (roughly translates to “Ox’s Head”--umm, possibly not a highly complimentary moniker?) There’s something like only four portable works attributed to Cimabue. The Frick exhibit unites one panel from its collection with one discovered in a private collection in 2000 (it is now owned by the National Gallery in London). The image below is not one from the Frick--it's an earlier Cimabue and far more stylized, and you can't get the full sense of it from this image--but it's a striking painting nonetheless.

Wikipedia says the Frick's Cimabue panel, “The Flagellation of Jesus," was purchased in 1950 and long considered to be of uncertain authorship. But in 2000, the National Gallery in London acquired a Virgin and Child with many similarities (size, materials, red borders, incised margins, etc.) The two pictures are now thought to be parts of a single work, a diptych or triptych altarpiece, and their attribution to Cimabue is fairly secure.

While the Flagllation is owned by the Frick (and is the only Cimabue in the United States), the Virgin and Child is in the U.S. temporarily. For a short time, the two works can be viewed side-by-side. The pair are believed to date from 1280.”

The Cimabue exhibit is a jewel. It's an example of the Frick's incredible attention to detail that on the two Cimabue panels, the small clasps that jut a few centimeters onto the painting are painted to track with what is beneath them, so don't interrupt your visual experience at all. (Although since I noticed them, maybe they do.) But it's a very thoughtful touch. The museum also provides clipboards with a catalogue covering Cimabue works (and others), which lets you indulge your curiosity right while you're looking at the paintings. Another thing I love about the Frick is that your $15 admission fee gets you a free audio guide to their permanent collection--and, if you ask, you can get a list of local eateries from the gift shop if you're not familiar with the neighborhood. My sister and I opted to walk up to the Whitney Museum on Madison and 74th and eat at the restaurant there, Sarabeth's, which is good--and located right next to one of the Whitney's gift shops (a convenient stocking-stuffer shopping stop).

CLEVELAND MUSEM OF ART EXHIBIT. One of my favorite games is trying to decode the symbolism in paintings and the Frick's tags for its paintings are always interesting and informative. So there's The Cleveland Museum of Art's Nicolas Poussin's "The Holy Family on the Steps" (1648), with Joseph off to the side, studying a compass--an allusion, the Frick tells us, to the carpenter's trade and a traditional symbol of God the universal architect. (The writeup on the Cleveland Museum's web site says that "The representation of Saint Joseph is unusual, for he is depicted more as an architect than a carpenter.")

Another Cleveland pic on loan to the Frick is Jacques Louis-David's "Cupid and Psyche." Cupid has an incredibly mischievous smile, and the model was James Gallatin, the 19-year-old son of the American envoy in Paris.

And then there's Valentin de Boulogne's "Samson" (c. 1630; another of the loans from the Cleveland Museum of Art). In that painting, a detail like the bee on the clasp of Samson's garment alludes to the "fabled swarm of bees that gathered on the slaughtered lion's carcass and produced honey." The painting's tag notes that the bee is also the heraldic device of Cardinal Francisco Barberini, who commissioned the painting.

That reminded me of a visit to the Barberini Palace in Rome, where you can find the bee-laden heraldic devices carved in stone on the walls. I love the Barberini because it provided one of those unexpected moments of discovery when I wandered back behind the museum and came upon a gated field. Inside the field were dozens of grazing rabbits, and cats wandering around them. It was sort of surreal. I noticed a kindly-looking white-bearded old man in a hut next to the iron gate, who indicated that it was fine for me to look around. So sweet, I thought. What a cute old man. Then I noticed what lined the walls of the little wooden hut--hard-core porn torn from magazines. The little old man didn't seem quite as cute after that...

Anyway, even if you miss these exhibits--and I'm skipping Tiepolo, because we'd been at the Frick for about four hours and had reached museum burnout--a visit to the Frick is always time well spent. Top Ten items there: Its Vermeers. The Hans Holbein painting of Sir Thomas More. The Sargents. The Rembrandt self-portrait. The incredibly rich, gilded icons. Jean-Antoine Houdon's La Grive Morte (The Dead Thrush), dated 1782. (A press release a while back noted that it was on loan from a gallery in Boston until August 2006, but it's still there, so I guess the loan has been extended?) If you love the whimsy of trompe l'oil, you'll love this marble relief. It is a small slab of white marble with the upside-down body of a thrush carved out of it, and it rests in a deep gold frame. The frame can't contain the volume of the bird; Houdon has one of its wings juts over the frame, leaving a shadow. It's a very arresting image and makes the work so much more intesting than it it were simply mounted in an alcove as a marble sculpture.

At the Frick, it's hard to pick your favorite, because there are so many wonderful things there. They also have a really great website, with MP3 audio guides you can download. There are also very good virtual tours of rooms.