Last year, New York’s Frick Collection loaned three paintings by Johannes Vermeer to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for a special exhibition. The resulting blockbuster, which turned into the Dutch museum’s most successful show ever, attracted around 650,000 visitors from 113 countries. Now the Rijksmuseum is returning the favour and lending one of its own Vermeers to the Frick for an exhibition celebrating the New York museum’s reopening after a yearslong construction project.
The landmark Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, which saw the unprecedented gathering of 28 paintings by the Dutch Golden Age artist, had its origins in New York in 2018, when the Frick announced plans to shut its Manhattan premises for a major renovation. The multiyear closure freed up the Frick to loan its three Vermeers for the first time since the museum’s namesake, the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, acquired them more than 100 years ago. This, in turn, inspired the Rijksmuseum—owner of four Vermeers, including The Love Letter (around 1669-70) and The Milkmaid (around 1660)—to get busy making inquiries about the world’s 30-odd remaining ones.
Now, as the Frick prepares to reopen its revamped complex, the Rijksmuseum is sending over greetings in the form of The Love Letter, which the Frick will use as a centrepiece in its own bijou Vermeer show, Vermeer’s Love Letters (18 June-8 September), a three-work installation inaugurating the Frick’s new special-exhibition galleries. In addition to the Dutch museum’s Vermeer—a beguiling, mysterious interior scene featuring a woman playing a lute, her maid and a letter—the show will include the Frick’s own Mistress and Maid (around 1666-67) and, on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland, Lady Writing a Letter, with her Maid (around 1670).
Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter (around 1669-70) Courtesy the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Curated by the University of Amsterdam’s Robert Fucci, Vermeer’s Love Letters will give each work its own wall, says the Frick’s director Ian Wardropper. And even though the show is to be held in a new space—converted out of a first-floor room previously used for concerts and lectures—its diminutive checklist is very much in keeping with the Frick’s longstanding minimalist approach.
“I believe in small shows,” Wardropper tells The Art Newspaper, adding that a very tight focus is “what the Frick does really well”.
The new galleries, comprised of three differently sized rooms spread out over 2,000 sq. ft, are a signature feature of the Frick’s renovation, designed by New York’s Selldorf Architects. Previously, the museum had mounted short-term shows in two small subterranean seminar rooms (with ceiling heights ill-suited for paintings) or on the first floor in spaces created by displacing works from the permanent collection. The reimagining of a once-circular room, which dated to the Beaux Art mansion’s initial conversion into a museum in the 1930s, “is referential and deferential to the old house”, says the architect Annabelle Selldorf, known for her conversion of another Fifth Avenue mansion into the Neue Galerie, a museum of German and Austrian art.
All three of the works on view in Vermeer’s Love Letters were in the 2023 Rijksmuseum show, but not in the same space. This allows for fresh comparisons in the Frick’s exhibition, says Wardropper. And though the new galleries were “deliberately kept small”, he says, they will have room to spare during this miniscule summer show.
The Vermeers will be displayed in the largest of the three rooms, and the smallest will be used for introductory panels. That leaves the third, medium-size room. “We will use that to store the crates that the Vermeers came in,” Wardropper says.
The reopening of the Frick next spring coincides with the winding-down of Wardropper’s 14-year tenure as director. He will be succeeded by the German art historian Axel Rüger—a former long-time director of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and, as it happens, a Vermeer scholar himself.