Frick Collection reopens in April with a Vermeer exhibition in the making

Last year, the New York Frick Collection loaned three paintings by Johannes Vermeer to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for a special exhibition. The resulting blockbuster, which became the Dutch museum’s most successful exhibition ever, attracted some 650,000 visitors from 113 countries. Now the Rijksmuseum is returning the favor and lending one of its own Vermeers to the Frick for an exhibition celebrating the New York museum’s reopening after a years-long construction project.

The landmark Vermeer The exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, home to the Dutch Golden Age artist’s unprecedented collection of 28 paintings, originated in New York in 2018, when the Frick announced plans to close its Manhattan building for a major renovation. The multi-year closure allowed the Frick to lend out his three Vermeers for the first time since the museum’s namesake, industrialist Henry Clay Frick, more than 100 years ago. This in turn inspired the Rijksmuseum, owner of four Vermeers, including The love letter (around 1669-1670) And The milkmaid (c. 1660) – to set about examining the world’s thirty or so surviving specimens.

Now that the Frick is preparing for the reopening of the renovated complex, the Rijksmuseum sends greetings in the form of The love letterwho will use the Frick as the centerpiece in his own bijou Vermeer show, Vermeer’s love letters (June 18 – September 8), a three-part installation inaugurating Frick’s new special exhibition galleries. In addition to the Dutch museum’s Vermeer – a seductive, mysterious interior scene featuring a lute-playing woman, her maid and a letter – the exhibition will also feature Frick’s own work. Mistress and maid (around 1666-1667) and, on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland, Lady writing a letter, with her maid (around 1670).

Compiled by Robert Fucci of the University of Amsterdam, Vermeer’s love letters will give each work its own wall, says Frick’s director Ian Wardropper. And while the show will be held in a new space—a first-floor room previously used for concerts and lectures—the little checklist is very much in keeping with Frick’s long-standing minimalist approach.

“I believe in small shows,” says Wardropper The Art Newspaperadding that a very tight focus is “what the Frick does really well”.

The new galleries, consisting of three rooms of different sizes spread over more than 2,000 square meters, are a signature feature of the Frick’s renovation, designed by New York-based Selldorf Architects. Previously, the museum organized short-term exhibitions in two small underground seminar rooms (whose ceiling height was not suitable for paintings) or on the first floor in spaces created by moving works from the permanent collection. The redesign of a once round room, which dated from the first conversion of the Beaux Art mansion into a museum in the 1930s, “is referential and respectful to the old house,” says architect Annabelle Selldorf, known for her renovation of another Fifth Avenue mansion in the Neue Galerie, a museum of German and Austrian art.

All three works can be seen in Vermeer’s love letters were in the 2023 Rijksmuseum exhibition, but not in the same room. This allows for new comparisons in the Frick’s exhibit, says Wardropper. And although the new rooms have been “consciously kept small,” he says, they will still have space during this minuscule summer show.

The Vermeers will be displayed in the largest of the three rooms, and the smallest will be used for introductory panels. That leaves the third, medium-sized room. “We are going to store the crates in which the Vermeers came in,” says Wardropper.

The Frick’s reopening next spring coincides with the end of Wardropper’s 14-year tenure as director. He will be succeeded by German art historian Axel Rüger – former director of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and, coincidentally, a Vermeer scholar himself.