[NewYork Peasant by Wilfrid: July 20, 2009]
To the Frick for the first time in about a year, I should think, to see the four splendid full-length Whistler portraits re-hung in the Oval Room.
The first thing I discovered is how a couple of well-chosen memberships protect me from gallery price-shock. I have cards for MOMA and the Met, and I go to the Whitney no more than a couple of times per year, the Guggenheim not even that. Otherwise, most exhibits I see are free. A healthy eighteen bucks for admission to the Frick (the Whitney is $15) - which would be a fair enough price to spend a few hours basking in its permanent collection, just not much of a bargain to see that the Whistlers have moved.
Whining aside... if only. The visit also reminded me of problems I've had before with the Oval Room. It is well-enough suited to showing smaller to mid-sized works of art. The four Whistler portraits are tall, however, and the overhead light shroud the upper halves of the canvases with glare unless you stand well back. Never mind. I did notice, for the first time, that these seamlessly consistent paintings, which seem designed to hang together, were created over a period of some twenty years, from 1871 through to the final portrait of the sinister dandy Robert de Montesquiou in 1891-2. As the four portraits leave a central space to be filled, there's also an earlier seascape, "Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean," which struck me as a much less interesting work.
The Frick does add some value by showing a small selection of Whistler's etchings and paintings from Venice in the tiny cubby-hole of a gallery near the entrance. This is a sub-set of a very extensive series of works in which Whistler captured aspects of the architecture and everyday life of the city. I saw a huge collection of these works on paper once, and I am kicking myself to remember where: perhaps in London, perhaps at the Sackler-Freer in D.C., or perhaps after all just at the Met. These are certainly worth a peep; whether an eighteen dollar peep, I leave to you.