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Helen Clay Frick Research Paper

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For nearly 80 years, visitors to a New York art museum called the Frick Collection have stood behind a velvet rope at the bottom of a sweeping marble staircase and longed to see the private rooms upstairs.

By 2020, they will be able to satisfy their curiosity. That’s because Henry Clay Frick’s three-story mansion in New York City, which opened as a museum in 1935, is going to turn private living quarters into exhibition space and expand with a 42,000-square-foot addition.

Two of the Frick family’s second-floor bedrooms plus a sitting room and breakfast room will become galleries. Construction, slated to begin in 2017, also will connect the three-story museum with the nearby Frick Art Reference Library, which also opened in 1935. Helen Clay Frick, daughter of the industrialist, founded the library in 1920. …show more content…

The second floor landing.
MICHAEL BODYCOMB Enlarge
That’s one reason the adjoining bedrooms of Helen Clay Frick and her mother, Adelaide, which are currently used as offices, will become exhibition galleries. About 320,000 people visit the Frick Collection each year. A recent show of Gilded Age Dutch paintings that included Vermeer’s famous portrait “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and “The Goldfinch” by Carel Fabritius drew record crowds and lines that snaked around the block.

Most of the collection is on view, but small sculptures, decorative arts objects, and drawings that are in storage will be well-suited to exhibition in the family’s private rooms.

The Frick Collection, which employs 200 full-time and 40 part-time staff, has an endowment of $325 million. In 1977, the museum tore down three townhouses it bought in the 1940s to build a one-story pavilion and two basement classrooms that soon became exhibition spaces. On some of that land, British landscape architect Russell Page designed a 60-by-80-foot garden that faces 70th

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