The lovely Frick Museum has re-opened after extensive renovations and Stacey, Jeremy and I visited. The last time I was at the Frick was when Stacey’s NYU Grad Acting class was taken there by Larry Maslon who was their “Now of Then” teacher. The “Now of Then” is a three semester class where the teacher and students try to locate a play and its characters within the context of their times. It is a way of looking at different cultures of the past–“then”–and trying to understand and interpret it through our present sensibilities–the “now.”

The students uncover the behavior of a given play through its cultural filters so that they can perform the author’s intention. It’s the tension between the written word and the imperative to perform those words today. Seeing the Frick home was a way of introducing the students to a specific part of New York society at the turn of the century.

The art work in the museum is beautiful and the furniture, enamels and paper works are stunning but for me the most amazing thing is that people actually lived there. It was someone’s home. Henry Clay Frick commissioned the building and it was constructed between 1912 and 1914 on East 70th street off of Fifth Avenue in the Lenox Hill section of the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

There were sixty-one rooms. They were embellished with ancient symbolism and decorated inside with Rococo and Renaissance furniture and decorative arts and collections of the old masters’ paintings. The Frick museum began with Frick’s own personal collection of European art and he bequeathed them to the public along with his residence. The Frick Art Reference Library was established by his daughter, Helen Clay Frick in 1920.

Fifth Avenue was known as “Millionaires’ Row” because so many wealthy residents lived there including John Jacob Astor, William H. Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and William S. Clark. Many of these Gilded Age mansions (called the “Glded Age” because it suggested a superficial appearance of prosperity and wealth but concealed underlying corruption) were eventually demolished but some, like the Frick, were adapted for new uses.

In addition to the Frick a number of the mansions have become museums including Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Ukrainian Institute of America.

The Frick Museum

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