The corner of New York has not been visible in itself since the flick collection was closed during Covid due to the architecture equivalent of a full-body spa treatment.
For a while, the museum, which has become lavishing at Henry Clayflick's Viewer Art Mansion on Fifth Avenue, has broken away with old masters and other arts into Marcel Brewer's former Whitney Museum a few blocks away. Francis of Bellini's “Holy Holy Brutal Building” felt like he was coming across a high school chemistry teacher during his spring break in Cocoa Beach.
Next month, Flick will resume after a $220 million expansion and renovation. Fretful preservationists have been plaguing my inbox for years.
I have good news. The expansion is as sensitive and clever as you can expect. In the moment, it's closer to poetry, like a sensual new marble staircase or a airy auditorium. It probably won't keep all the critics quiet. Grunbler will complain. But it does what it intended. Move the flick straight into the 21st century and seamlessly solve multi-faceted problems. And if that is important, it remains alone enough.
The architect is New York-based German-born Annabelle Seldorf. She and her architect Seldorf paired her with another New York company, Beyer Blinder Belle, and garden designer Lynden B. Miller. Recently, Selldorf is the go-to architect for such a troubling project. London is updating the fierce battle for the National Gallery, designed by Robert Venturi and Dennis Scott Brown in the 1990s.
Finished in 1914, Frick's mansion was designed by Carrie and Hastings's company, who gave New York the 42nd Street Library. In 2001, Seldorf further transformed the former Vanderbilt Mansion, another Karale and Hastings landmark since 1914, and further fractured Fifth Avenue. With care and creativity, she transformed it into Ronald Lauder's cutting-edge Neue Gallery.
Extending the flick was a more tricky task. It required sacrifices. First of all, Seldorf oversaw the transformation of Flick's mansion to Mutham in the 1930s when John Russell Pope, the August architect of the Jefferson Memorial, destroyed Flick's beloved music room. The Pope doubled the footprints of the building.
Like everyone else, I'm sad to lose the music room. Over the years, it became a New York version of a 19th century salon, as opponents of that loss have come to point out. The truth is that 149 seats were too small for many events, and the sound was mediocre. It also occupied an ideal place to place the new gallery in temporary exhibits that require flicks and are essential to Selldorf's planning.
That's what happened. Selldorf has installed three new galleries.
To replace the music room, she was excavated under the gardens of 70th Avenue in Flick, designed a technically latest 218-seat auditorium, shaped like the inside of a clamshell. Past the new lobby, through the low front yard, suddenly enters a surprisingly light and spacious hall, around a curved wooden wall made of grooved walnuts.
She then turned to the reception hall of Flick from the 1970s, but this didn't work at all. On busy days, gaining admission to the museum allowed us to keep in mind Lagardia Airport on Thanksgiving on Eve. The complex ticket and court check arrangement created logjams, bringing visitors to a dead end.
Like a cardiologist, Seldorf blocked the passageways, invented a cunning circulation line, and improved reception halls.
The highlight is the shortpper. New, cantilevered stairs, covered in sensual and covered in marble, Breccia aurora, decadent in a dolce vita-like way. You nod to the grand staircases of the mansion. Then, Seldorf is surgically inserted above the hall, leading to a new connection to a mansion, a shop, a 60-seat cafe (Flick is home to the last museum on Earth), a new second floor overlooking the gardens of 70th Avenue.
In 2014, the museum raised earlier expansion proposals by another building company that imagined a block-like extension to replace the garden designed by British landscape architect Russell Page when the reception hall was built in the 1970s. The flicks assumed the garden was temporary and were replaced when the museum needed to grow again.
But its reflective pool, shaded pea gravel gravel roads, windows wister are Zen-like pauses along the streets, and have now become praised by New Yorkers as one of the city's pocket-sized coincidences. The conservators were shaking about the proposal to destroy it.
The flick has retreated. Two years later, it committed to hiring Selldorf and maintaining the garden.
That turned out to be easier than that. Building an underground auditorium required tearing and repotting the garden. It's still growing. Selldorf treated the garden with respect and organized her biggest bulky addition. This organizes two new floors above the music room adjacent to the extension of Pope's nine-story library on 71st Street and carefully skirts the northern edge of the garden.
This addition repurposed a narrow garden that was previously hidden behind the garden walls, with Flick hiding a lawnmower and air conditioning unit. A new educational centre (another first of the museum) occupies that space today, with the cafe above.
Seldorf then covers the puzzle-like addition to Indiana State Limestone, and eventually integrates the Anodine façade to match the mansion's exterior. The addition is a finesse room for a row of horn beams, with the cafe rising up stairs a few feet ahead of the garden.
I was among those who urged flicks in 2014 to abandon plans to destroy the garden. And I wrote a column that went round among New York architects along with some alternative ideas. These include replacing Pope's music room for temporary exhibition space, excavating under the garden to build another auditorium, adding another floor and redoing the reception hall.
Ultimately, sharing ambiguous ideas from the Peanut Gallery means there is no challenge in redesigning the 87,000 square feet of complex space. Ideas can be different and grossly realized. The architecture takes place in trench. To properly expand the flick, millions of complex decisions are required as commonplace, but meaningful, as selecting a marble variety out of the 138 types already in a building. And it is felt with that shelf-like gesture of horn beams. Its subtle depth gives the garden an important whisper of the breathing chamber.
It requires forensics, the trade stocks of flicks. Buying art is one thing. Building a collection like a flick is another thing.
The credits will also be directed to Flick Director Ian Wardlopper, who oversees the entire expansion and retires last month. He was a stable hand in the heart of the museum. I mentioned earlier that I know when to fully leave the renovations on my own. The joy of visiting the flick remains the same. Frison remains the same as wandering around the suffocating house of a robber baron.
Nothing has changed to the wonderful rooms of Tizians and Fragonard. It is covered in French silk damask and velvet walls in hand. The garden court is the same, but with cleaned skylights and fountains, it now serves as the pope for the first time in living memory.
What's new is that for the first time visitors can wander the grand staircase of the mansion upstairs and noses around the former bedrooms of the Flick family, which have been reused as a gallery for Chinese porcelain, Renaissance medals, vouchers and constables. What used to be a bathroom is hung in a photo of a Rococo in France. The number of objects seen in permanent collections has now doubled.
I'm looking forward to the garden blooming.
The good news has been shortage lately. The flick will resume in mid-April. The city already feels light.
