MANHATTAN — The Frick Collection is the latest Museum Mile institution to expand.
Unlike the $54 million overhaul of Andrew Carnegie's mansion that the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is undertaking, the change at Henry Clay Frick's former home is more modest. The Frick Collection is opening a new 665-square-foot gallery by enclosing the portico along the building's Fifth Avenue garden.
It is the first major addition to the institution's gallery space in nearly 35-years, museum officials said.
When Frick, the Pittsburgh coke and steel magnate whose strike-breaking actions earned him the distinction of being "the most hated man in America," set his sights on "Millionaire's Row," at 1 East 70th St., he wanted to best Carnegie, whose mansion was a mile up Fifth Avenue on East 91st Street.
He had told friends he wanted his mansion to "make Carnegie's place look like a miner's shack," according to PBS.
After it was completed in 1914, Frick then wanted to build an addition to house his growing collection of sculpture. But the project was put on hold in 1917 because of World War I, and Frick died before the project could be re-started, museum officials said.
The new portico project takes its inspiration from Frick's intentions, the museum said.
“With the opening of the new Portico Gallery, we fulfill a wish expressed by Henry Clay Frick nearly ninety-five years ago concerning the display of sculpture," Frick Collection Director Ian Wardropper said in a statement.
"The light-filled, enclosed portico also offers an enchanting new vista of Henry Clay Frick’s private garden, and we very much look forward to sharing all of these attributes with the public.”
Jean-Antoine Houdon's full-length terracotta sculpture of Diana the Huntress, which has recently been cleaned and treated for the first time in 70 years, will return to the Frick after a five-year absence.
She will make her permanent home in the new Portico Gallery for Decorative Arts and Sculpture, as it's called, and will be joined for the space's inaugural show by highlights from the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain.
The museum, which opened in 1935 after the death of Frick's wife, Adelaide, had never had an appropriate and well-lit space to show off its porcelain and its bronze, marble and terracotta sculptures, museum officials said.
The museum is currently home to a blockbuster Picasso exhibit and recently announced that a long-lost Jean-Antoine Watteau painting now on view will be housed in the museum for the next two years.
