NEW YORK, N.Y.- Visitors to The Frick Collection will be able to enjoy a new gallery—the first major addition to the museum’s display spaces in nearly thirty-five years. The inspiration for this initiative, which involves the enclosure of the portico in the Fifth Avenue Garden, comes from the intention of museum founder Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) to build an addition to his 1914 mansion for his growing collection of sculpture. The project was postponed in 1917 following the United States entry into World War I and Mr. Frick died before it could be resumed. In recent years, the institution has placed greater focus on sculpture through critically acclaimed exhibitions and several key acquisitions, while also evaluating the effectiveness of the display and lighting of such objects. Another area of increased focus has been the decorative arts. When talks began with renowned porcelain collector Henry H. Arnhold about a promised gift, the idea to create a gallery both for sculpture and the decorative arts was revisited. The architecture firm Davis Brody Bond developed a plan to integrate the outdoor garden portico into the fabric of the museum, and groundbreaking occurred last year.

Davis Brody Bond is one of the leading practices in the United States engaged in a range of museum and landmark structure commissions. The firm’s cultural portfolio includes the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and over twenty years of restoration and expansion work at the New York Public Library. The Portico Gallery opens in mid-December with an inaugural exhibition of works drawn from Henry Arnhold’s promised gift of 131 examples of Meissen porcelain from the early years of this Royal Manufactory’s production. On view through April 29, 2012, White Gold: Highlights from the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain will feature approximately sixty-five of these objects, presented along with a pair of eighteenth-century sculptures by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1740–1828) that includes the full-length terracotta Diana the Huntress, a signature work at the Frick that returns to view having been recently cleaned and treated. It finds a permanent home in the new portico gallery, while the ongoing display of other sculptures and ceramics will rotate periodically.

Comments Director Ian Wardropper, “With the opening of the new Portico Gallery, we fulfill a wish expressed by Henry Clay Frick nearly ninety-five years ago concerning the display of sculpture. It will become the permanent home of Houdon’s Diana the Huntress while offering additional space for the presentation of decorative arts objects. Appropriately, our inaugural exhibition previews the generous promised gift of Henry Arnhold, whose family collection of Meissen will complement beautifully our holdings in French and Asian porcelains and whose foundation underwrote the costs of construction. The light-filled, enclosed portico also offers an enchanting new vista of Henry Clay Frick’s private garden, and we very much look forward to sharing all of these attributes with the public.”

A NEW GALLERY TRUE TO THE VISION OF HENRY CLAY FRICK
The New York-based firm Davis Brody Bond developed an approach for this new gallery that is sympathetic to the Beaux Arts building constructed in 1913–14 by Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings. They have incorporated the structure’s existing features, with the colonnade, bluestone floor, and exterior limestone wall remaining the gallery’s primary features. Architectural details relate to the vocabulary of the original mansion and John Russell Pope’s enclosed Garden Court of 1935. A sense of the portico’s outdoor location, with its view of the private garden, is preserved through the use of glazing on the south side of the gallery. The lighting system has been designed by Richard Renfro of Renfro Design Group, selected for their experience in civic, cultural, and historic renovation projects, such as the Grand Central Terminal restoration and the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2006, Renfro Design Group undertook the award-winning relighting of the Frick’s Fragonard Room, and in the fall of 2010 completed work on the nearby Boucher Room. The firm’s scheme incorporates a series of lanterns based on those in Pope’s Garden Court, with further illumination provided by ambient and supplemental accents on the display cases and sculpture. Independent exhibition designer Stephen Saitas, also known for his work at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Morgan Library and Museum; The Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Yale University Art Museum, and the New York Public Library, among others, is creating the inaugural installation with Director Emerita Anne L. Poulet, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts Charlotte Vignon, and Curator Denise Allen. Construction management was overseen by Westerman Construction Co. Inc.

Although initially designed with a great paintings collection in mind, the house of Henry Clay Frick would soon be filled with sculpture and decorative arts objects of comparable quality and importance. In 1915 Frick purchased property adjoining his mansion at 1 East 70th Street, a fifty-foot plot at 6-8 East 71st Street, and requested that his architect, Thomas Hastings, draw up plans for an addition. The resulting drawings show an extension of the façade on that street and include a three-bay wing with imposing columns and an ornamented entablature. Within a few months (at around the time the United States became engaged in World War I) Frick decided to postpone the project. He died in 1919, never having returned to it.

The museum founded in Frick’s name opened in 1935, after the death of his wife, Adelaide. Initially, many of the institution’s artworks were crowded in the long West Gallery, where paintings were double-hung and where portrait busts filled the corners of the room. Within a couple of years several sculptures were moved into the Garden Court for better viewing. Over the years, the Frick’s sculptures were further dispersed throughout the galleries, some in deference to new installations and more favorable viewing conditions, while others moved in response to the need for special exhibition space. Some works ended up in internal hallways where they cannot always be seen to best advantage. Indeed, as the Oval Room took on the more frequent function of serving as a special exhibitions space, Houdon’s Diana the Huntress was moved from this space to the East Gallery and later placed off view. With the creation of the new Portico Gallery, the Frick’s curators have for the first time the opportunity to display porcelain and sculpture in bronze, marble, and terracotta in a truly appropriate and well-illuminated space.

When the new gallery opens, it will become a permanent home to Houdon’s Diana, which has undergone technical studies and its first cleaning since its acquisition more than seventy years ago. Returning to view after a five-year absence, Houdon’s masterpiece will be situated in the western-most bay of the new portico. It will be illuminated at night and pleasingly visible from the outside of the institution, in the tradition of European sculptures in the galleries visible along the Rue de Rivoli side of the Louvre Museum. It will be shown with The Dead Thrush, a marble relief on long-term loan from The Horvitz Collection, Boston.

With a gift of porcelain pledged by Henry Arnhold, the institution furthers its engagement with the decorative arts, adding substantially to its ceramic holdings. The group of 131 objects—sixty-five of which are part of the exhibition—has been selected from one of the greatest private collections of early Meissen assembled during the twentieth century. Beautiful objects long-admired for their masterfully modeled shapes, compositions, and gemlike glazes, they offer a window into the early years of manufacturing porcelain in the West and celebrate a fascinating chapter in the history of the ceramic medium. Indeed, although the formula for manufacturing true porcelain was developed in China by the sixth century, it remained a consuming mystery in the West until its discovery in 1708 under the patronage of Augustus II (1670–1733), elector of Saxony and king of Poland. In 1710, the king established a royal manufactory outside of Dresden in the town of Meissen, and the porcelain created there has been known by that name ever since. Early Meissen porcelain was at the forefront of the European ceramic industry until the ascendency of the French Royal Sèvres Manufactory in the 1750s.

Examples of Meissen porcelain from this period are particularly rare and have always been highly sought after. Such works captured the attention of Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold, who established their collection in Dresden between 1926 and 1935 with a focus on tablewares and vases and objects of royal or noteworthy provenance. Lisa Arnhold immigrated to the United States, and the collection was brought over in 1940, making it a unique grouping to have survived together. Lisa and Heinrich’s son, Henry Arnhold, has continued to build the collection according to his parents’ tastes, while also expanding it in scope over the decades to reflect a broader range of objects produced by this important Royal manufactory in its early years. These works are well known to specialists, but they drew appreciation from a much wider public in 2008 through their presentation at the Frick in the critically acclaimed exhibition The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain, 1710–50.

Among the objects selected for the exhibition are several large-scale objects on pedestals along the south wall, among them a pair of trumpet-shaped vases with elephant-head handles and a base surrounded by a wire cage that once contained porcelain birds on the modeled rock outcroppings and branches. Twenty-one of these Meissen vases were ready for firing in 1731, although it is not known how many were made altogether. The pair acquired by Henry Arnhold in 2000 are extremely rare survivors of this extraordinary series and come from the collection of the kings of Italy. In specially designed wall cases on the north side of the new gallery there will be four groups of objects from the Arnhold Collection, each representing a collecting focus and strength.

STONEWARE
In the first wall case on the right, visitors will find sixteen examples of the earliest wares in production at the Meissen manufactory, stoneware, also known as “red porcelain.” The formula was developed sometime in 1707 or 1708 and marks an important step towards discovering the secret of making true white porcelain. Fired at a very high temperature, these objects—mostly tablewares—were hard enough to be engraved, cut, and polished. The handsome coffee pot and cover at right has a European form but is decorated in relief with Asian prunus blossoms. Nearby, a standing cup with cover features intricate gold ornamentation, a highly polished surface, and a silver-gilt knob.

MEISSEN CHINOISERIE
In the adjacent wall vitrine will be fourteen examples of hard-paste white porcelain, the formula for which was perfected by the 1720s. In producing wares that imitated such Chinese forms as low, wide bowls and pairs of long-necked vases, the Meissen manufactory strove to satisfy the European taste for Eastern porcelain. Chinoiserie wares by Meissen, however, tend to exhibit a marked European approach, exemplified by a mounted figural group located in the center of this case (at left). Although the model for the group is not known, it is thought to have been inspired by a Chinese sculpture in the collection of Augustus II that features a bearded man accompanied by a disproportionately large exotic bird, lemons, berries, and a flower. The fact that the porcelain group is mounted on a French gilt-bronze base—not typical of wares made in and for the Asian market—suggests that it was executed for export to the French market.

JAPANESE AND JAPANESE-INSPIRED WARES
By 1719, Augustus II had amassed more than twenty thousand pieces of authentic Chinese and Japanese porcelain to be used as prototype models at the manufactory and for display in the aforementioned Japanese Palace. Purchase of such pieces has been a collecting interest for Henry Arnhold, and three examples of these wares will be on view in the third case along with Meissen production in the Japanese style. A rare fluted Japanese dish, illustrated at right, will be juxtaposed with a Meissen copy, the pairing underscoring the refinement achieved by the royal manufactory only twenty years after its establishment. In addition, a French Vase Japon newly acquired by the Frick in honor of Director Emerita Anne L. Poulet (and not part of the Henry Arnhold’s promised gift) will be on view in an adjacent case.

Despite its name, this is an interpretation of a Chinese Yu (or Hu) vase from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C–A.D. 220). This baluster-shaped vessel was made in at the Royal Manufactory of Sèvres in 1774 along with two others of the same size, shape, and decoration by gilder-painter Jean-Armand Fallot. Only the Frick vase is adorned with an elaborate silver-gilt handle and chain by Charles Ouizille, Marie-Antoinette’s favorite jeweler.

HAUSMALER
Additionally, promised to the Frick, and to be shown in the fourth wall case are thirteen wares decorated by noted independent artists known today as Hausmaler (or house painters) who worked outside the factory. The Arnhold Collection is particularly rich in examples of their work. The teapot at left, with its accomplished decoration of a continuous seascape with large ships and a foreground bordered with trees, is painted in a distinct palette of iron red and black that is the hallmark of the independent painter Ignaz Preissler (1676–1741). Master of a technique known as schwartzlot, Preissler was commissioned by wealthy clients in Bohemia and Silesia to paint wares in this style. Also in the case will be examples attributed to the Augsberg workshop of Bartolomaus Seuter and others.

Eventually, when Henry Arnhold’s gift of Meissen porcelain becomes a permanent part of the Frick’s holdings, it will be on constant view in the portico gallery. Until that time, the Frick plans to continue using the gallery space for other exhibitions of sculpture and ceramics.