On the corner of Seventieth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan there stands an elegant mansion built by Pennsylvania native Henry Clay Frick. An industrialist involved in the manufacture of steel, Frick was the quintessential robberbaron of the 19th and early 20th centuries; reviled by many, he survived a bloody attempt on his life while seated at his Pittsburgh office desk.
Somehow this all benefits lovers of great art. Frick was certainly not the first rich guy to decorate his halls with sumptuous pictures, but few did a better job of it.
This collection offers a remarkable range of first-rate works. It’s also a perfect “date museum,” providing a small enough floor plan to engage a romantically inclined couple, with the option to swerve into the atrium and sit amidst bronze frogs squirting from their princely lips a fountain not unlike the pastoral ejaculations in the nearby Fragonard room, where phallic imagery and pneumatic clouds inspire likeminded lovers in pursuit.
Yes, there is more than a little Rococo fluff here, but very high quality fluff it is, and mingling with much more serious works by a list of geniuses difficult to match: Piero della Francesca, Bellini, Corot, El Greco, Goya, Holbein, Rembrandt, Titian, Turner, Velázquez, Whistler and Van Eyck, to name a few.
One work in particular, Ingres’ portrait of the Vicomtesse Othenin d’Haussonville, has been of special importance to me since undergraduate school. It was with this lovely painting that a most important professor demonstrated the difficult notion that truth and beauty need not reside together in a work of art. Miss d’Haussonville appears to have a severely dislocated shoulder. In fact it seems to emerge from her mid ribcage. But Ingres was a master of proportion. How could he have made such a blunder, as subtle as it is?
This anatomical anomaly is deliberate. As the many drawings and studies for the work demonstrate, Ingres moved the shoulder down to accommodate the lyrical movement of the picture and provide it with a tension between shapes that a truthful depiction would have failed to produce.
In the largest of the museum’s galleries, at the far end, there hang two pendent pictures by Veronese. These are actually two of five, or so I have been made to understand, and a third of these hangs in the Met some 16 blocks away. I am reminded, when I look at these two beauties, that I have never seen a dull Veronese. Not one of his pictures seems without some striking pictorial device, some sweet, overarching trajectory of shape that unifies the whole business.
The teacher of Veronese, Titian, is represented by two noble portraits, his teacher Bellini by an early example of landscape painting that depicts St. Francis. Piero della Francesca, who had no small influence on Bellini, is present in the form of an altar panel. This sort of chain of influence can be seen elsewhere in the world but seldom with such fine examples.
Overall, the quality of the collection is astounding. And who I am to say so? Am I simply repeating what I’ve heard others say? And isn’t it all subjective, this idea of quality?
This last is the argument, I find, of people with less experience, not more. Aesthetics and art criticism are not the same things, and one need not read aesthetics to appreciate a painting or make one. But if one wants to query the nature of quality in art, it helps to have some experience of looking and reading.
Last week, two late Picassos came up for auction, one at Christie’s and the other the following night at Sotheby’s. The first was predicted to sell in the range of $9 million, and in every press report I read, the second was described as “…a much better picture…” and expected to bring a couple million more. It did so.
How did the reporters know the second was “much better”? Were they all art experts? I suppose a Sotheby’s representative made the assertion. How did he know? Could he see something about the second that he couldn’t see in the first?
The very notion of “intangible” merits discussion; because we can’t account for its quantitative measurement doesn’t mean there is no such thing as quality in art or beauty. Those who will dismiss ideas of greatness in art are frequently capable of declaring this beer or that city better than all others. Not just more appealing to themselves, but better, by all standards.
If quality in art can’t be described as intangible, then where is this adjective applicable? The question may be best considered near those squirting frogs on 70th Street.
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