forces of expression at the Frick
They have stuck in my head, these two paintings, for reasons that I cannot quite figure out. J. M. W. Turner exhibited them 200 years ago and Henry Clay Frick bought them as a pair nearly a hundred years after that. Another century on, and they hang at the edges of my vision in the newly reopened Frick Collection, a museum that, despite all the triumphant reviews and advertisements, made me feel dazed, almost despondent. Not even the five-year, $220-million renovation could dispel the trophy-room aura of the place. There are big names—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, and so on—but that is all, that is the entire point, the names. I kept imagining Frick on holiday in Europe, visiting manor after ruined manor, assembling these ruffled nobles into a perpetual and cadaverous aristocracy just so that he could join their company.
Frick commissioned the Fifth Avenue mansion in 1913, died six years later, and willed his trustees to turn the house into an institution “encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts,” by which he meant showing off his European paintings, winnings from his career as a coke and steel magnate. Wandering its immaculate galleries, I was reminded of an exhibit I saw last year at the Morgan Library, Morgan's Bibles: Splendor in Scripture. A trove of sacred texts were arrayed beneath an enlarged photograph of J. Pierpont Morgan strolling through the desert with his pekingese, no doubt on a visit to one of the Met’s excavations. The exhibit displayed a papyrus from the third century, the Golden Gospels of Henry VIII, and a jewel-encrusted medieval manuscript. And yet, beneath that photograph of Morgan, they did not seem spectacular so much as proto-Hobby-Lobby-ish, hoarding, undevout.
The portraits at the Frick had a similar effect. I avoided their eyes, I looked past them, I couldn’t bear them. Instead of looking at faces I tried to look at drapery. I wanted feeling or force instead of names and schools and provenance. I found it in El Greco’s portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi, where a kidney-colored upsweep of curtain makes an almost threatening gesture, like the brandishing of a matador’s muleta. I found it in Van Dyck’s portrait of Frans Snyders, in which a black curtain twists into a vortex behind the seated subject, like some animal skin trying to gather itself back into life. The audio guide does not mention the drape at all, preferring instead to highlight “the force of Frans’s expression,” an exaggeration indicative of the museum’s curatorial project: that there is nothing to see here but nobles and names.
I thought that’s what I liked about the Turners, or why they stayed with me. Their names—Cologne, Dieppe—were of places rather than men, and thereby more expansive. But I was fooling myself: the name in question was not Cologne or Dieppe but Turner, nailed to each frame. Besides, there were other landscapes in the galleries that gave me the same dismal feeling as the portraits. The Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corots, for instance, with their cattle and rowboats, seemed like portals into some repetitive and purgatorial bog, long since ruined by all the pastoral kitsch of the intervening years. They also felt like frosting in these halls, forgettable and interchangeable filler—another cow here, another boat there—between all the old masters, all the grand names.
Far from here, off the highway in Southwest Pennsylvania, there is a low marble marker with lesser names, a slab that says Paul Dohannis (Donahas-Dohannas), Hungarian of Standard, Single, Shot in the head. That says Jacob Shucaskey, Polish Hungarian of Tarrs, Shot through the head. Left a wife and five children. And so on. They are the names—equivocal names, whose variant spellings reveal a whole history—of the nine men killed during the Morewood Massacre, when law enforcement opened fire on striking workers at one of Frick’s coke works. The next year, Frick would mobilize an army of Pinkertons to do the same, ten men shot dead, in the Homestead Strike of 1892.
Frick himself almost died during the Strike, when an anarchist entered his office wielding a revolver. Alexander Berkman shot Frick twice, then stabbed him three times with a steel file, but still failed to kill him. Berkman had hoped to foment further action; instead, the strike failed, he went to jail for 14 years, got deported, went to Soviet Russia, became disillusioned with Bolshevism, and, when he finally decided to shoot himself in the heart, also missed. He hit his stomach and spine instead, paralyzing himself, and died soon after.
If there is something obviously parabolic in this about labor and capital in the 20th century, there is also something parabolic in the fact that I only know about Berkman from a niche documentary that was screened at a microcinema in Bushwick, during which my friend fell asleep, but I know about Frick from all throughout the City, from Art History textbooks, from family and friends. Berkman called Frick an “insignificant reptile” in his prison memoir, but he was only half right, and few who walk the halls of the Collection would even admit to that.
And so I am stuck on an artificial shore, watching the commerce of ships with the likenesses of half-anonymous noblemen. Ah, authorship and pigment. Ah, shadows and light. I could lie down on the green carpet, I could breathe deep the cool air, I could be escorted by museum security onto the steaming sidewalk, where the line of timed ticket holders wraps around the building.
I thought that I liked the Turners because they opened out onto the world rather than closing me in with the pantheon, but it was the wrong world. Turner’s glowing shores were proxies for what I longed to see: a different heat and haze, a native landscape, some record of the places that made this mansion possible. The Collection, perhaps by no fault of its own, makes apparent our ignorance of all the processes that precede it, coal into coke into steel into canvas. I would have preferred two large paintings that opened out onto that, the furnace of an older history that we have so few windows into, that barely even haunts us, that we allow the barons to replace with idylls and seascapes, a fictional European scrim over the fearsome topography of the country. Thousands and thousands of coke ovens blackening the earth and the sky—I can’t even picture it. I don’t know what it would have looked like, what it would feel like to look at it, what force it would bring against my sense of history. The Turner paintings at either end of my periphery were not portals but blinders. I just wanted to see.
ben tapeworm