Initiated over a decade ago by its former Director Samuel Sachs, and continued by his successor, Anne Poulet, the Frick Collection has sponsored a series of small, βfocusedβ exhibitions that have added considerably to New Yorkβs cultural landscape. The pace of these undertakings has progressively increased as has their scope and ambitionβlimited only by the space available in the magnificent CarrΓ¨re and Hastings-designed hΓ΄tel particulier.
New Yorkers should be grateful that they are being offered such a steady stream of thoughtfully arranged and intelligently curated βmemorandaβ in the visual arts. As appropriate adjuncts to the Frickβs permanent collections, these exhibits pertain principally to European painting, sculpture, and drawing, from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries.
Currently arranged in the spacious central rotunda are five large canvasses by the great Venetian High Renaissance master Paolo Veronese (1528β1588). Two, The Choice Between Virtue and Vice and Wisdom and Strength, have been admired in the adjoining gallery since Henry Clay Frick purchased them in 1912. A third, Mars and Venus United by Love, has had a home steps away, at the Metropolitan Museum, for an equally long time. The remaining two, titled (somewhat ambiguously) Allegories of Navigation, are on loan from the Los Angeles County Museum. They have survived together as a pendant pair since they were painted, but emerged from relative obscurity only about thirty years ago.
The five Allegoriesare large and, grouped in such close proximity, create a vision of overpowering opulence. Anyone