Johannes Vermeer's Love Letters at the Frick

NEW YORK - With an exhibition of Vermeer's love letters, the Frick Collection in New York inaugurates its new wing dedicated to temporary exhibitions, marking a decisive moment in the institution's restart in its historic headquarters, which reopened on April 17 after years of closure for renovations. The exhibition is the first in New York on Vermeer since the one at the Met in 2001: at the center is the Frick masterpiece "Mistress and Maid" which was the last painting purchased by the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in 1919 before his death, flanked by two paintings by the same author with the same subject on loan until August 31 from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. "A new era for the Frick begins," said the director, Axel Rüger, who until a few months ago headed the Royal Academy in London and with a past as a Dutch art historian. The initiative is a collaboration between in-house curator Aimee Ng and guest curator Robert Fucci of the University of Amsterdam. “The works on display represent half of Vermeer’s known paintings on a highly emotional theme in which the moments of writing and receiving a message are transformed into a theater of the soul, between waiting, suspicions and sighs,” Fucci said. With five Vermeer paintings now under one roof (the Frick owns two more) and another five at the Metropolitan, there are now 10 Vermeers in New York within 11 blocks, Ng noted: nearly a third of the great 17th-century painter’s remaining work. The Frick’s Vermeer is probably the oldest of the three and the largest in terms of size. The viewer enters the painting, while in the Amsterdam painting he or she observes the scene unseen from a shadowed corridor almost like a voyeur. In all three compositions, the maid’s role is central, not only as a messenger but also as a confidant, an invisible ally of the lovers. As Fucci explains, the figure of the maid introduces complex narrative and psychological dynamics: mediation, complicity, distance. The story of the work lent from Dublin is particularly suggestive: at the time of Vermeer's death, his widow Catharina Bolmes gave it along with another canvas to the baker of Delft, a rich art collector, to pay off a large debt, "the equivalent of three years' worth of bread for a family of eleven children", Fucci said. The woman included in the contract a clause stating that she could buy back the works "because they were dear to her". The detail is recorded in a document of the time from which we understand how much those paintings were an integral part of the artist's private life.