Library Shines in Frick Renovation

Courtesy the Frick Collection, photo by Michael Bodycomb

The reading room of the Frick Art Research Library before the renovation project.

When the Frick Collection reopens this April, New York City and the world will once again have access to a beloved institution of fine and decorative arts. But that’s not all—the doors will also reopen on one of the nation’s foremost art research centers, with a new name, enhanced accessibility, and updated features.

Now known as the Frick Art Research Library, the small but handsome room with its red leather doors, Formosa marble details, and walnut paneling is a major resource for auction houses, galleries, provenance investigators, students, teachers, and anyone who wants to research art, particularly Western fine and decorative arts from the fourth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Unlike some scholarly collections, it’s entirely free to use and accessible to the public.

Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Edmund Charles Tarbell’s painting of Frick Library founder Helen Frick with her father, Henry Clay Frick.

Helen Clay Frick, daughter of industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick, founded what was previously known as the Frick Art Reference Library in the basement bowling alley of her family mansion in 1920. (This Fifth Avenue home now houses the Frick Collection.) Her inspirations were twofold: On the one hand, she had begun collecting materials as she researched art that her father had purchased. On the other, she was inspired by the Courtauld’s Witt Library—a massive collection of photographs and other reproductions of Western art—while on a trip to London. When she came home, she began establishing her own collection of photographs of works of art.

“She was so impressed that she wanted to, what she called, ‘copycat’ it in New York,” explained Stephen J. Bury, the Andrew W. Mellon chief librarian at the Frick.

The library was founded as a memorial to her father, who died in 1919 and bequeathed his residence and art collection to the public. Today, the library’s collection encompasses half a million books (including about 150,000 auction catalogues), 1.5 million photographs, 6,000 linear feet of archives, and about nine terabytes of web archives and other digitized material.

When patrons return to the library, it may not immediately appear very different, at least in the reading room. “We’re trying to pretend that nothing has changed,” Bury said. “We couldn’t change the reading room because it’s a historic place. … It would really upset people if we’d done that.”

Yet things have changed, and not just a refresh on the wall color that removes decades of grime. New additions to the library include an expanded digital lab, a new conservation studio, and a new research consultancy room. The conservation studio will house more versatile workspaces and state-of-the-art equipment; the consultancy room can house a small group of people who want to talk over an item in a separate space while preserving the hush of the reading room. The library also now features ADA-accessible entrance ramps and restrooms, and the new reference desk has space for a wheelchair user to pull alongside it.

Courtesy the Frick Collection

The fresco in the main reading room of the Frick Art Research Library.

The library will also be better connected to the Frick Collection itself, as visitors once had to leave the building and walk around the block to go from one facility to the other. Now, there are direct connections on multiple levels, so the public can access the museum from the library and vice versa. “It will save curators [and others] quite a long journey,” said Bury.

The expanded digital lab will also help make the library more accessible. Its improved facilities, which now include space for photographing oversized materials, will aid in ongoing digitization efforts. While the past few years have involved a major push at the library to digitize its photographs—a project that’s now “been completed in so far as you can ever complete anything,” Bury said—it still receives a steady stream of new items to digitize. These include new materials in its archives, some of which are important for those researching Nazi-looted art.

The Rosenberg and Stiebel Archive, which came to the Frick during the pandemic after a flood imperiled its storage location, is a particularly important resource in this area. Its material covers four generations of a family business of art dealers, originally in Germany, from the 1890s through the early twenty-first century, with clients who included the Rothschilds. Although only the finding aid for the archive has so far been digitized, Bury said the library gets about thirty related inquiries a week. That’s just one example of the valuable items at the library—a survey by the nonprofit global library organization OCLC found that twenty-five percent of the Frick’s material was located nowhere else. It’s all the more reason to expand the digitization efforts.

Meanwhile, the museum itself is debuting a variety of new and restored spaces. The $330 million restoration by Selldorf Architects was in part designed to address century-old infrastructure. But in addition to an updated electrical system, new skylights, and a new heating and cooling system, the project opened up the second floor of the mansion, once the private living areas of the Frick family. These rooms are especially suited to smaller-scale decorative objects like sculpture and ceramics, said Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen director.

“With the opening of the mansion’s historic second floor, we will be able to showcase significantly more of our unparalleled collections,” Wardropper said. “We cannot wait to welcome the public back to our revitalized home.”

The museum renovation also includes three new spaces on the first floor, a new education center, and a new 220-seat, circular auditorium. (A weeklong festival kicks off April 26 to celebrate the new auditorium.) The library is also mulling monthly public tours of the new digitalization and conservation studio, Bury said, and will continue with its program of show-and-tells.

All in all, it’s a long way from the basement bowling alley. Helen Frick would surely be proud.