MANHATTAN — The Old Masters hanging in the marbled halls of the Frick museum will soon have some Cubist neighbors.
Henry Clay Frick, who made his fortune at the turn of the last century in the coal, steel and railroad industries, built his art collection with paintings of the Old Masters and fine French furniture and porcelains now on display at the museum that bears his name inside his grand Neoclassical mansion at 1 E. 70th St.
The Frick Collection is now making what seems like a departure, venturing into the world of modern art with an upcoming exhibition of 60 drawings spanning 30 years of Pablo Picasso’s groundbreaking career.
But museum officials said that "Picasso’s Drawings, 1890 – 1921: Reinventing Tradition," which will run from Oct. 3 to Jan. 8, 2012, is not much of a stretch.
At the turn of the 20th century, while Picasso was creating his works in pencil, ink, watercolor, gouache and chalk, he was drawing inspiration from the Renaissance and other great works of European art that Frick was collecting.
Picasso may not be represented in the Frick's collection but is its "irrepressible offspring," as the museum called the painter. The threads of El Greco, Goya and Ingres that run through Picasso’s works — even when he riffs on them in Cubist interpretations — tie him to the Frick’s walls.
"The past decade has witnessed a spurt of activity focusing on Picasso's relationship with the Old Masters and his nineteenth-century predecessors, as well as with non-Western arts,” said Susan Grace Galassi, senior curator at the Frick and one of the show’s organizers. “However, this topic has not been examined specifically in terms of his drawing, where many of these references and relationships first appear."
It was time to look more closely at his drawings — the medium he experimented in while tinkering with ideas for his paintings, sculptures and collages, she said.
"We have not tried to make direct comparisons between Picasso's drawings and those of other artists,” she said, "but to show the breadth and range of references on both a technical and stylistic level that give an historical grounding to his remarkable innovations and inventions-as well as his awareness of coming at the end of a great chain of artists."
The show will then travel to Washington, DC, where it will be shown at the National Gallery of Art from Feb. 5 through May 6, 2012.
