TALES OF LOHR: "VERMEER MONET REMBRANDT" AT THE FRICK PITTSBURGH
Thoughts on a capitalist's cache of beauty; plus, "This Week in Warhol" says goodbye, and it says hello
It has only been within the last two decades or so that the great museums and art institutions of the world have begun to reckon with a prickly truth: Fine art, like far too many other things, has often sustained itself at the pleasure of moneyed persons and groups whose rarefied tastes have regularly served as a smokescreen for the scope and breadth of their sins. Painters and sculptors throughout the whole of arts history have survived via the support of dictators and oligarchs, and only in recent years have the problematic realities of these patrons been given a place of privilege within the overarching conversation of the forward direction of arts exhibition and preservation. The British Museum and other prominent international spaces are increasingly under fire for the colonialism-abetted provenance of their collections, many of their masterpieces harvested from countries then stifled under the boot of the oppressor. The Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed chronicles organized efforts to force major museums to sever their financial ties to the opioid-crisis-enabling Sackler family. The record-smashing 2017 sale of the controversial possible Da Vinci Salvator Mundi was doubly notorious due to its having been potentially purchased by proxy for the fundamentalist authoritarian Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman. And in recent months, a host of art galleries and museums have come under pressure due to their ties to the Netanyahu government spearheading the violent, America-implicated actions in the Gaza Strip. (Less than two weeks ago, activists defaced the home of the director of the Brooklyn Museum in protest of these connections.) The message is clear: For a person of thoughtfulness and sympathy, it can no longer be as simple as smiling as you stroll past a pretty painting.
It is to the immense credit of the Frick Pittsburgh Museums and Gardens, a classical-art-centered space named for the Gilded Age industrialist who amassed one of the premier privately owned collections of his day, that they directly address these conundrums in the mounting of their current exhibition, Vermeer Monet Rembrandt: Forging the Frick Collections in Pittsburgh & New York. Frick’s eye for the finer things, and appreciation of pre-Renaissance to post-Impressionist art, led him to bring together a stunning panoply of paintings, drawings, works on paper, and sculpture, that reside at both the Frick Collection space in New York City and on the grounds of the Frick family home, Clayton, in Pittsburgh’s East End. But Frick was also a standard-bearing robber baron who, as a major player in Pittsburgh’s Industrial Revolution-era steel-forging heyday, precipitated the anti-unionist actions in 1892 at the Carnegie Steel Company’s Homestead works. Frick supervised the barbed-wire-fencing in of striking steel workers at the plant, and ordered in an army of 300 armed Pinkerton detectives to break the strike. The resultant action led to ten deaths (nine of them plant workers), Frick threatening to evict the strike leaders from their homes, and, in July of ‘92, to the attempted assassination of the industrialist in his downtown Pittsburgh office. This failed murder ultimately turned the public against the strike, but it nevertheless cemented Frick’s reputation as an exemplar of the worst of Industrial Age capitalist rapacity.
These issues, and the more generalized injustice of a man like Frick being able to accrue the individual wealth that enabled him to accumulate such a collection of artworks, are discussed on explanatory placards that fill the compact galleries in which the Frick has mounted Vermeer Monet Rembrandt. One entire room of the exhibition, for example, presents a detailed accounting of the wealth imbalance of Frick’s era, and of the museum namesake’s real-world disdain for the working class, alongside ten works on paper and a sole painting by Jean-François Millet, whose art romanticized the day-to-day lives of peasant farmers in his native France. Looking at the tender, muted colors and play of light in Millet’s canvas Woman Sewing by Lamplight (1870-72), and being aware of Frick’s stated preference in his collection for paintings that featured characters whose company would be pleasing and entertaining over time, is truly a challenging circle to square in conjunction with Frick’s murder-by-decree of people right in his own backyard whose lives had much more in common with Millet’s rural workers than with his own.
But the exhibition, which brings together many of the highlights of both the New York and Pittsburgh collections, harbors plenty of works that can indeed be enjoyed in less ideologically thorny terms. There are a number of remarkable landscapes to appreciate, including a sunny 1833 seascape by J.M.W. Turner, presaging the Impressionism-anticipating deviations of his later work; the 1866 Whistler canvas Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean, a testament to the American painter’s gift for subtlety and understatement; and Banks of the Seine at Lavacourt (1879), the cool-pastel riverside Monet that gives the exhibition a third of its namesake lineup of masters. Frick’s collection also evinces a keen eye for quality portraiture, with the most striking such example arguably being Thomas Lawrence’s majestic Julia, Lady Peel (1827), pictured above. The figure’s sumptuous finery and eye-catching plumed chapeau, combined with the demure curiosity of her alluring expression, are illustrative of the finest capabilities of the portrait form in capturing the individual essence. Further powerful examples come via a sturdy 1660 Frans Hals study of a casually imperial gentleman; Anthony Van Dyck’s Genoese Noblewoman (1622-27), a beautiful testament to the Flemish painter’s facility with capturing the filigrees of high-end fashion of the era; Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap (c. 1510), a somewhat somber image lightened by the delicacy of the artist’s brush and clear empathy for his downcast-seeming subject; and another of the exhibition’s eponymous works, a mighty 1658 self-portrait in oils by Rembrandt van Rijn. The exhibition notes mark this painting as coming from a particularly difficult period of Rembrandt’s life, during which the artist teetered on the brink of financial collapse. His ability to portray himself with such grandeur and grace amidst these challenges is testament to the primacy of his art above all. Cannily, the Frick mounts this piece across the gallery space from an 1896 Théobald Chartran portrait of Frick himself, the business magnate self-consciously affecting the sort of Great Man posture Rembrandt exudes effortlessly in his own piece.
Unsurprisingly top-billed in the exhibition’s titular triumvirate, and given a pride of place near the Lawrence canvas, is Girl Interrupted at Her Music (1658-59), a modest yet tremendously appealing painting by Johannes Vermeer, purchased by the Frick family in 1901. This oil painting displays all the virtues for which the Dutch master’s work is so prized: Nuanced, realistic interplay of light and shadow, figures with an impressive weight and authenticity, and a soft-edged, almost languid texture that makes his canvases, as much as those of any artist from his period, feel like genuine recollections from an earlier, quieter epoch in human endeavor. Only 36 verifiable Vermeers are known to exist today, and this is now the second I have personally seen, having viewed Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (1663-64) in 2013, during its exhibition at Los Angeles’ Getty Center (on loan from Amsterdam’s celebrated Rijksmuseum). Girl Interrupted at Her Music lacks Woman in Blue’s emotional heft, but is more immediately amusing and optimistic in impact. The Frick Collection owns three Vermeer canvases (this in itself is a testament to the Frick’s lofty position in society); according to the exhibition notes, an opportunity to purchase a fourth arose in 1936, but Frick’s daughter Helen vetoed the buy, “feeling that three sufficed.”
This factoid draws attention to another element of Vermeer Monet Rembrandt that is critical to its overall force: The reality of this monumental art collection as a truly family affair. Henry Clay Frick did not simply purchase these masterpieces and chuck them into a warehouse or other storage space. Nor did he seem to regard them, as many contemporary collectors do, as primarily a financial investment. Frick’s family were intimately involved in the selection and acquisition of the collection; Helen, in particular, was singular in bringing to the trove pieces more reflective of her own somewhat brighter, more contemporary taste. Walter Gay’s paintings depicting interiors of the Fricks’ New York estate remind us that this family actually lived with these images, these towering nuggets of creativity, as part of the day-to-day visual fabric of their lives. Gay’s The Living Hall (1928) depicts a Frick Mansion room adorned with Hans Holbein’s famous portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, hung here as casually as one would mount favorite family photos. The centrality of the Frick art collection to the lived experiences of the Fricks themselves is brought home, in heartening and poignant fashion, by the presentation within the exhibition of House and Piers, painted in the 1890s by the Fricks’ son Childs, born in 1883. This small, primitive, utterly charming painting, created long before Childs’ own impressive career as a paleontologist, hung in the sitting room at Clayton, the family home on the Frick Pittsburgh grounds, not far from the Monet canvas with which it shares an exhibition space here.
Facts like these, in truth, help to make it easier to contemplate Vermeer Monet Rembrandt, if one wishes to do so, separately from the harsher details of Frick’s capitalist-titan career. The guests with whom I walked the exhibition galleries (this was the most crowded I have ever seen the Frick, and on a weekday afternoon two months after the exhibition’s opening) seemed to harbor no pressing anxieties about pondering the fruits of a plutocratic empire, waxing enthusiastic about the play of light on the waters of landscapes, the energy in the faces of portraits and sculptures. “Yes…but ten dead in Homestead” or “Yes, ten dead in Homestead, but…”? Questions like this will plague us for as long as the finest art exists outside the pocketbook reach of all but the filthiest of the filthy rich. We should be grateful to the Frick family and estate for making such masterworks readily available for the public to enjoy. Just as we should never forget the lives, sweat, and literal blood that mingle with every drop of ink and paint that pull these amazing images together.
Vermeer Monet Rembrandt: Forging the Frick Collections in Pittsburgh & New York is on view at the Frick Pittsburgh Museums and Gardens now through July 14. To learn more about the exhibition, and to purchase tickets, visit the Frick’s website.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
JUNE 24, 1970
Max’s Kansas City, the late-night Park Avenue South eatery that has become a regular hangout for Andy Warhol and his entourage, launches what will become a storied run as a New York live music venue with a two-month slate of performances by the Velvet Underground.
These shows are in support of the release of Loaded, the forthcoming fourth and arguably in-all-but-name final album by the Velvets, and the second featuring multi-instrumentalist / vocalist Doug Yule, who joins the band two years prior following the departure of iconoclastic founding member John Cale. Yule’s entry into the Velvet Underground lineup coincides with a softer, somewhat folk-adjacent turn in the band’s sound, with the group’s eponymous third album, the first featuring Yule’s contributions, a marked mellowing from the coruscating brutality of the previous LP, White Light / White Heat. Loaded is the band’s most listener-friendly effort yet, with the streetwise-yet-sunny “Sweet Jane” and fast-paced crowd pleaser “Rock and Roll” reflective of the Atlantic Records label’s request that the band produce an album “loaded” with hits (hence the title).
The music is upbeat, but the band that takes the stage at Max’s for the album-touting run is in the midst of a downward spiral. Founding member and principal songwriter Lou Reed is finding himself frustrated by both the band’s never-stellar commercial fortunes and the increasing prominence of Yule in the band’s sonic concept and the label’s promotional push for him on the soon-to-drop record. Reed is vocal in his discontent with Atlantic’s interference with the mixing and editing of the tracks for the album. Matters are not helped when drummer Moe Tucker, the “glue” of the Velvet Underground and the one band member who seems capable of soothing Reed’s savage breast, is forced to bow out of both the Max’s gig and the Loaded recording sessions due to her pregnancy. Yule’s brother Billy subs for Tucker at the live shows, while a quartet of drummers, including both Yule brothers, fill in at the kit for the album recording.
On August 23, prior to taking the stage at Max’s, Reed informs his bandmates that this will be his final gig with the Velvet Underground. Struggling with depressive symptoms and uncertain about his fate in the music industry, he is leaving the band to stare down an unknown future. The gig that night is recorded with a portable stageside tape machine by bohemian ex-socialite and longtime Warhol-entourage mainstay Brigid Berlin. This tape, crudely recorded but redolent of the band’s full-throttle, finality-flecked live power, is released by Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion in 1972 as the album Live at Max’s Kansas City.
Reed moves back in with his parents in Long Island, taking a $40-a-week job as a typist with his father’s company while he ponders his next moves. Loaded is officially released in November, with Reed publicly claiming the album has been re-sequenced and remixed without his input or approval. The album fails to chart, though it has become a critically beloved cult favorite over the subsequent decades. Tucker quits the band in early 1971, while guitarist Sterling Morrison makes it almost a year after Reed’s departure, officially leaving the group after a Houston gig on August 21 of ‘71, just a year shy of the one-year anniversary of Reed’s swan song. Doug Yule toughs it out on his own for a time, releasing Squeeze, an essentially solo album under the Velvet Underground name, on Polydor Records in 1973. Yule and a backing band, none of whom play on Squeeze, tour briefly as the Velvet Underground in support of the album, but Yule calls it quits with the run of scheduled shows incomplete, bringing a forlorn curtain down on the original lifespan of the band.
Following the Velvet Underground’s christening of the Max’s stage, the restaurant spends the early ‘70s hosting a plethora of sterling musicians and groups, including Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Waits, Gram Parsons, and Emmylou Harris. Max’s closes in 1974 due to declining revenue, but reopens under new management the following year, and swiftly becomes Ground Zero for the rise of punk and alternative sounds on the New York musical scene. Bands that make their mark from the stage during this second golden era of Max’s include The New York Dolls, The B-52’s, Talking Heads, The Patti Smith Group, The Ramones, Television, The Cramps, Misfits, Klaus Nomi, and a powerhouse outfit called Blondie, fronted by a former Max’s waitress named Deborah Harry.