Frickrolled

THE RENOVATION OF THE FRICK COLLECTION precipitated the greatest concurrence of art and architecture in the history of New York City. This phenomenon of the early 2020s had nothing to do with the Frick’s campus at Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Nothing to do with the 1914 Beaux Arts pastiche of a mansion, arguably the last such of the first Gilded Age, commissioned from Carrère & Hastings by Pennsylvania coke magnate and sometime chairman of Carnegie Steel Henry Clay Frick, as a venue for his showy horde of European art history’s greatest hits. Nothing to do with the workmanlike 1935 annex, with its palmy skylit Garden Court and celebrated Oval Room gallery, plus a neighboring tower for the Frick Art Research Library, designed by John Russell Pope in fulfillment of Frick’s intention for his home to be in perpetuity a monumental gallery. Nor with later additions such as the small grassy quadrangle, tidy reflecting pool and all, added in 1977 east of Pope’s 70th Street entrance or a 1975 Reception Hall and now named for its l…