Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Frick Collection is once again a zone of fantasy where the price of admission confers the right to play gazillionaire in your loot-stuffed den. Pass beneath the sober limestone doorway and you penetrate a dazzling interior in which to lose yourself in robber-baron dreams. That experience, cut off when the New York mansion closed in 2020, has finally been restored, now more glittering and immersive than ever.The 1914 building, which opened to the public in 1935, never looked particularly grimy or tired to me, perhaps because the illumination was forgivingly dim. But a $220mn refurbishment brings an extra dose of dazzlement, plus a whole second floor of gallery space.During construction, the museum decamped to the old Whitney building on Madison Avenue, and there was something revelatory about seeing all those Constables and Fragonards glow against Marcel Breuer’s concrete. Brutalist austerity set off their innate verve. Now, ensconced in their old home again, the artworks seem to have acquired a novel freshness from their travels. Or maybe it’s all the reconstituted silk and velvet wall coverings that magnify the paintings’ luminosity.Visiting the Frick means checking in on old friends. Holbein’s portraits of the two Sir Thomases, Cromwell and More, are back in the library, silently gossiping about Henry VIII. The pair of schemers look secure in their velvet-clad splendour, but it’s El Greco’s gaunt St Jerome that caught my eye this time. A long beard dangles from the saint’s hollow jowls, as if he were gripping a dead raccoon in his teeth. Despite the whiskers’ feathery lightness, they exert a downward pull on his face and droop on to his massive magenta robes.Reassuringly, the Turners still hum excitably in the West Gallery, surrounded, as before, by ravishing Halses, Rembrandts and Vermeers. The whole company looks especially cheery under new LEDs. And what a boon to see the natural gloss on the surface of these canvases, since so many other museums force viewers to peer through glass as if shopping for razor blades in a drugstore.Strolling into the Oval Room we come upon four pale Whistlers — and one rare curatorial glitch. What is François Gérard’s garish 1810 tribute to Camillo Borghese, an oversized Napoleonic courtier in gauche finery, doing in such refined and muted company? Whistler’s full-length society portraits, which he termed “harmonies”, “arrangements” and “symphonies”, belong to a different era and exist on a higher plane. The Gérard looks galumphing by comparison.Let’s pull ourselves away from familiar stamping grounds and venture into unknown territory. The braided cord that once confined visitors to the ground floor has been removed. Before, we could only gaze yearningly up the grand staircase; now we’re invited to climb it, though not without a frisson of taboo. Up there, gorgeous discoveries and undersung favourites have moved into new digs.First comes the breakfast room where Henry Clay and Adelaide Howard Childs Frick sipped their morning coffee encircled by exquisite French landscapes. After a decades-long stint as an office, the chamber has been returned to its original arrangement as a luscious abode for the Barbizon school. A couple of feathery Corots, Théodore Rousseau’s rustic glimpse of a forlorn road, and Daubigny’s polyphonic riff on the colours of water and sky all line the walls like a frieze superimposed on aqua damask. The pastoral mood will surprise those who associate Frick exclusively with Old Masters, but early on he was entranced by the 19th-century French naturalists. Now this portion of the collection has been reunited for the first time and rehung as it was in 1927.Towards the end of his collecting career, Frick acquired Manet’s “Bullfight” and kept it in his private study. It’s a tricky work to find a place for, since it’s a horizontal fragment of a much larger painting. (The original was pilloried at the 1864 Salon, and the artist responded by slashing it to pieces.) After making the rounds on the ground floor, “Bullfight” has now migrated to the breakfast room’s adjoining pantry, in which staff once plated their employers’ eggs and buttered their toast. Surprisingly, it’s found the perfect home there, just above eye level, dominating the space with its high drama and compositional weirdness.Part of the fun of exploring these private quarters is coming across things that were once stashed in nooks and vaults and now command prime real estate. The extra square footage also allows curators to point out the various family members’ distinct tastes. Adelaide had a soft spot for the French rococo, and her cluster of Bouchers has been returned to the panels lining her floral sitting room.The Fricks’ daughter, Helen, waited until after her father’s death to amass the early Renaissance treasures that now adorn her lapis-hued bedroom. Piero della Francesca’s towering St John the Evangelist hangs alongside a gossamer annunciation by Fra Filippo Lippi and golden paintings by Gentile da Fabriano and Paolo Veneziano. Cimabue and Duccio are touring abroad now, but their spots stand ready for their return.All this brightening and rearranging, all the warm lighting and spiffed-up carpentry, are part of an intricate architectural dance choreographed by Annabelle Selldorf, who more than 20 years ago performed a similar miracle with the Neue Galerie. You can locate the border between old and new if you’re looking for it, but it’s also easy to drift from the 1914 mansion into the 2025 café, or up the original grand staircase and down the new one made of luscious tawny marble. If Selldorf has got these interventions right — and it certainly looks as though she has — then even the eager early crowds will find a smooth path from entrance hall to coat-check to bathrooms to Rembrandt, all without a crack in the sense of enfolding luxury.The Frick’s charm has always depended on its domestic intimacy and sumptuous detailing. A less sensitive renovation might easily have shellacked all that in a coating of generic institutional design. Instead, the museum has protected its crucial quality: the ability to make us plebs feel at home in a plutocrat’s redoubt.The Frick reopens April 17, frick.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
