When the Frick Collection announced its intention to shutter and renovate the venerable mansion housing its art and display some of its invaluable collection at the nearby Breuer building—longtime home of the Whitney Museum of American Art and most recently a satellite home of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s special exhibits—it seemed the opposite of what the Frick stands for: stunning art in a beautiful location to house it all.

 

Would that balance between what’s inside and the building itself be lost with the move to Frick Madison? Or would the new surroundings provide a chance to look at familiar artworks in a new way? The answer, unsurprisingly, is both. 

 

To start with the cavils: those gloriously pleasurable rooms in which the masterly series of paintings by Fragonard and Boucher reside are gone; although the dazzling Boucher quartet, The Four Seasons, remains together in the new digs, the same cannot be said for the 14 wondrous Fragonard paintings making up The Progress of Love. In the original Frick mansion, the four lovely large works and the ten smaller ones create a harmonious whole. Here, they are on the walls of two unrelated rooms, which lessens their impact.

 

Still, for every missed opportunity, other changes work nicely. The life-size Renoir portrait, La Promenade, always seemed out of reach in its original place, in an alcove under a set of stairs behind a rope barring visitors from getting near it. 

 

Here, it’s right in front of us, in all its radiant glory. That’s what’s best about the collection on view at the Breuer: several works are no longer in their usual places above or away from visitors and are now at eye level, easier to study and admire. 

 

 

Similarly, reorganizing the artworks was necessary, so now there’s a room containing only the Frick’s peerless trio of Vermeers, and another has four Goyas—three brilliant portraits and the astonishing The Forge—lined up together; the many Van Dycks and Rembrandts get rooms of their own. 

 

It’s useful to see one artist’s works in a single space, even if the sense of an art collector arranging his valuable works and furnishings where he wanted to place them is, regrettably, lost.

 

Lastly, it’s illuminating to see Holbein’s great portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell right in front of us, making it easier to discover subtleties in the brushstrokes; and—most memorably—the only room with a single painting: Bellini’s gorgeous St. Francis in the Desert, which was restored several years ago and now, taken down off the wall in Frick’s original living room, can be studied intensely as one marvels at such an imposing work of art that remains eminently graspable. 

 

This is where one must mention the lighting at the Breuer, which allows for better viewing of certain paintings than the original Frick mansion does.  

 

I don’t want the Frick Collection ensconced at the Breuer forever—it’s slated for a couple years—but this welcome diversion is a satisfying way to visit old, familiar friends.