The staff at the Frick are still reeling. Call it elation, exhaustion, or simply the aftershock of three months of blockbuster lines at the gates of that famously tranquil Fifth Avenue mansion, home to a connoisseur’s collection of Old Master paintings, a series of Sunday chamber-music concerts, and a venerable research archive on provenance and collecting. One tourist from London, stomping her boots on a cold, rainy Saturday (nearly four thousand visitors in line that day), said that she hadn’t seen anything like it since she took her children to the opening of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
But the reason for all those soaked, shivering people wasn’t a glimpse of Daniel Radcliffe. It was fifteen seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, on loan from the Mauritshuis, in the Hague—or, more accurately, two paintings, Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and Carel Fabritius’s “The Goldfinch.” Neither painting had left Holland for many years until the Mauritshuis emptied its galleries for a renovation, in 2012, but they had inspired wildly popular novels. Tracy Chevalier’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” with the girl on its cover, quickly became a movie. (Scarlett Johansson wore the earring.) As for Fabritius’s “Goldfinch,” he (or she) arrived in bookstore windows this past fall, thanks to a novel of the same name by Donna Tartt. By the time the girl and the bird began their journey home this month, more than two hundred and thirty-five thousand people—many of whom had never been to the Frick before, or even knew a Dutch from a Flemish painting—had climbed the mansion’s baronial staircase to see them, and thirteen thousand of those people had actually joined the museum, quadrupling its membership roll, in order to stand in a special line that promised to get them out of the cold and into the show faster.
“In no time, even the members’ line was a line,” is how Susan Galassi, the museum’s senior curator and acting chief of curators, describes the Frick frenzy. “We expected it, but we couldn’t believe it—the lines outside, and then, inside, the attentiveness, the appreciation.” By then, a larger version of the show had already stopped in Tokyo, San Francisco, and Atlanta, but Colin Bailey—the museum’s longtime chief of curators, who left for the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, last spring—had wanted to keep the exhibit “small—intimate and reflective, in the spirit of the Frick,” Galassi says. “He flew to the Tokyo show, which a million people visited, and saw that the ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’ needed its own room, so we decided to use our Oval Room”—a beautiful space between the Frick’s two second-floor galleries—“just for the Vermeer, and to borrow five more paintings to hang with the others in the East Gallery.” The result was that “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” a big painting as Vermeers go, was the first thing you saw, alone under two sheets of glass, with nothing but a dim reflection to distract you. The last thing you saw was the West Gallery, hung with a treasure trove from the Frick’s own collection of seventeenth-century Dutch masterworks.
Margaret Iacono, the Frick’s Northern European painting specialist and assistant curator, who worked with Bailey on the exhibit and took over the planning and hanging when he left, describes the experience this way: “Imagine, three of our Rembrandts together on one wall. Our three Vermeers together on another. For three short months, four of the world’s thirty-five Vermeers were in this house!” (She won’t be able to reciprocate; Henry Clay Frick’s will forbids the loan of any paintings that he collected himself.) “You could walk through and you saw—you felt—the continuity.”
“Tokyo prepared us,” Iacono says. “I’ve been here for thirteen years, and I’ve never seen so much preparation. We turned our small drawing gallery on the first floor into a pop-up store. We stocked the novels, we printed posters, we ordered mugs with the goldfinch and the girl on them. We made rules: you could spend as long as you wanted the first time around, but you couldn’t go back in. We did crowd control, to regulate the flow. We had hoped to get canopies for the sidewalk, to protect the people waiting in all that bad weather.” The city said no, but everyone at the Frick—from Ian Wardropper, the museum’s director, to the curatorial and educational staff—took turns outside with the crowds, amateur pollsters armed with clipboards and asking questions: Have you been to the Frick before? How did you learn about this exhibit? What have you come to see? The art patron Agnes Gund kicked in money for free Friday-evening viewings, and on Mondays, when the museum is officially closed, there were schoolchildren’s tours and special visitors to accommodate. The staff kept track. Woody Allen came. Anthony Kennedy arrived from Washington for the show. Wardropper did the honors for the Justice, and pronounced him incredibly knowledgeable.
Wardropper, a specialist in sculpture and decorative arts, says that the show was an education in running a museum. “I only knew about the Tartt book when my bookstore manager came in and said, ‘Shouldn’t we stock this?’ She was right. It was those two pictures—the girl and the goldfinch—and all the media they got that did it. That, plus the dynamics of a hit in this town. I knew that we had a hit on opening day, when there were so many people here that the temperature rose because of body heat!”
The Frick is starting to recover. Wardropper, whose one break this winter was a weekend away with his wife at a museum directors’ conference, says, “Am I exhausted? Yes! But invigorated, too, because the interesting challenge now is how to keep those people coming. But, at the same time, we’re saying, Slow down! The Met, where I spent ten years, has a blockbuster mentality, and there’s not much room for editing. But this house, with its high percentage of masterpieces—not all, but some—was somebody’s home, and, for us, the kind of editing you saw this winter is always good.” The Frick has a show on Renaissance bronzes that just opened, and Galassi—whose Goya exhibit, in 2006, held the museum’s attendance record until the girl and the bird visited—is thinking about her next show. Iacono, for her part, is thinking about a vacation. She had been the voice of the show—she wrote and spoke the earphone guide—and, after a television interview in December, the face of the show. She even looks Dutch, with straight blond hair, apple cheeks, and a smooth, high brow. (“I’m one-sixth Dutch; it’s not a lot.”) She says that she loved every minute, and added, “I have to admit that I am longing to be on a beach—anywhere, as long as it’s warm—with my copy of ‘The Goldfinch.’ I have yet to have time to crack it open.”
Photograph: Landon Nordeman