New Portico Gallery Opens with Selections of Meissen Porcelain from Henry H. Arnhold's Promised Gift and Two Sculptures by Houdon
December 13, 2011, through January 6, 2013
The Portico Gallery
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Loggia, Fifth Avenue Garden, The Frick Residence, New York, 1927. |
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Only a year after Henry Clay Frick and his family moved into their new residence on Fifth Avenue and Seventieth Street, Mr. Frick commissioned the house's architect, Thomas Hastings of Carrière and Hastings, to draw up plans for an addition to display his growing collection of European sculptures. The new gallery was to be erected on land that the collector had purchased at 6–8 East Seventy-First Street, adjacent to the mansion's West Gallery. With the advent of the United States' involvement in World War I, however, labor became scarce and construction costs were on the rise, so Frick decided to defer the addition "until times become normal and perhaps reasonable." He died in 1919, never having completed the project.
In recent years the idea of creating a gallery specifically for sculpture and decorative arts was revisited in light of a promised gift of Meissen porcelain from the distinguished collector Henry H. Arnhold. Rather than altering the footprint of the existing building, it was decided to integrate Carrière and Hastings's open loggia overlooking the Fifth Avenue garden into the fabric of the museum by enclosing its south side with large glass panels. The project was entrusted to the New York–based architectural firm of Davis Brody Bond, renowned for its many museum and landmark commissions. The firm's primary challenge was to complete the transformation without disturbing Hastings's original limestone walls, Ionic columns, or ceiling.
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The Frick Collection, View Toward the Open Portico, photograph: Michael Bodycomb |
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In December 2011 the Portico Gallery opened with an inaugural exhibition of Meissen porcelain selected from the promised gift made to the Frick by the distinguished collector Henry H. Arnhold, whose foundation generously underwrote the cost of the gallery's construction. The porcelain is presented with two eighteenth-century sculptures by Jean-Antoine Houdon: The Dead Thrush, a long-term loan from the Horvitz Collection, Boston, and Diana the Huntress. A signature work of the museum, Diana underwent analysis and treatment for eleven months in preparation for its installation in the new gallery.
The Frick Collection, Winter 2009, photograph: Michael Bodycomb
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