Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s all the reconstituted silk and velvet wall coverings that magnify the paintings\u2019 luminosity.Visiting the Frick means checking in on old friends. Holbein\u2019s 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\u2019s El Greco\u2019s gaunt St Jerome that caught my eye this time. A long beard dangles from the saint\u2019s hollow jowls, as if he were gripping a dead raccoon in his teeth. Despite the whiskers\u2019 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 \u2014 and one rare curatorial glitch. What is Fran\u00e7ois G\u00e9rard\u2019s garish 1810 tribute to Camillo Borghese, an oversized Napoleonic courtier in gauche finery, doing in such refined and muted company? Whistler\u2019s full-length society portraits, which he termed \u201charmonies\u201d, \u201carrangements\u201d and \u201csymphonies\u201d, belong to a different era and exist on a higher plane. The G\u00e9rard looks galumphing by comparison.Let\u2019s 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\u2019re 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, Th\u00e9odore Rousseau\u2019s rustic glimpse of a forlorn road, and Daubigny\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cBullfight\u201d and kept it in his private study. It\u2019s a tricky work to find a place for, since it\u2019s 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, \u201cBullfight\u201d has now migrated to the breakfast room\u2019s adjoining pantry, in which staff once plated their employers\u2019 eggs and buttered their toast. Surprisingly, it\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019 daughter, Helen, waited until after her father\u2019s death to amass the early Renaissance treasures that now adorn her lapis-hued bedroom. Piero della Francesca\u2019s 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\u2019re looking for it, but it\u2019s also easy to drift from the 1914 mansion into the 2025 caf\u00e9, or up the original grand staircase and down the new one made of luscious tawny marble. If Selldorf has got these interventions right \u2014 and it certainly looks as though she has \u2014 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\u2019s 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\u2019s redoubt.The Frick reopens April 17, frick.orgFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":273458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-273457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273459,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273457\/revisions\/273459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}