Cokeman's Collection

A special guard in red uniforms and 50 private detectives standing by every entrance were not enough last week for the opening of the Henry Clay Frick art collection on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Dynamic Miss Helen Clay Frick sent for the bomb squad from police headquarters and a special detail of a precinct captain, a sergeant, and twelve patrolmen. Only then were the doors opened and New York's bluest bloods admitted to a museum to which, in the will of its donor, "the entire public shall forever have access subject only to reasonable regulations."

Grandson of Distiller Abraham Overholt, Henry Clay Frick laid the foundation of his great fortune in Pittsburgh coke ovens. Shrewd little Andrew Carnegie bought an interest in Frick Coke Co., made Frick a Carnegie partner in 1889. The partners never liked each other. It was not until 1900 that they broke in what was to be one of the classic feuds of U. S. industry. When Partner Carnegie tried to force Partner Frick to sell out on his own terms, Partner Frick chased him down the office building corridor. Thereafter both men were more or less free to indulge their hobbies: Carnegie, the Great Philanthropist ; Frick, the Art Collector.

Andrew Carnegie built a block-long palace on Fifth Avenue, which cost a little over $1,000,000.

"I'll make that house look like a miner's shack!" cried Henry Clay Frick who thereupon spent $5,000,000 on the house to which the public was admitted last week. Even strolling in Fifth Avenue's Easter Parade with timorous, kindly Mrs. Frick, Frick's mind was constantly working up ways of outshining Carnegie. Frick could not make after-dinner speeches, pat newsboys on the head, or write essays on the virtue of goodness, but he knew how to buy & sell and he had instinctive taste. He set out to form the greatest private art collection in the U. S.

Henry Clay Frick died in 1919. His house was untouched until Mrs. Frick followed him in 1931. Since then their capable, ginger-haired daughter Helen has made the Frick art collection her career, almost her religion. With her own funds she assembled and housed a topnotch art library next door to her father's house (TIME, Jan. 21). As the most active member of the trustees of the $15,000,000 fund that was left to administer the collection, she has weeded out and improved her father's public legacy in the past four years until the 136 pictures finally put on view last week added up to one of the best private collections in the U. S. They are valued at about $50,000,000.

Those four years were spent on more than swapping pictures. The $5,000,000 that Frick gave Architects Carrere & Hastings went to build no museum but a palace for a conceited man. Trustees decided early that the house should, as much as possible, be kept as it was built "as a historic example of a rich man's home of the early 20th Century." But in order that people could circulate through it at all great changes had to be made.

Working on the problem from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. daily, without even taking off her hat, Miss Frick first decided that warehouses were not safe enough for Frick pictures. Before any remodeling was done at all, a fireproof, burglarproof vault was dug in the basement of the house in which every treasure was moved. Then the vault was bricked up. Doors and corridors had to be rearranged. In order to install a modern air-conditioning system the panelling in several rooms had to be taken apart piecemeal and replaced. Eighteen ten-ton blocks of marble were quarried before Miss Frick found one with just the color she wanted for a fountain in the central court. Mrs. Frick was wont to take her ease in a boudoir on the second floor whose panels had once been painted by Boucher for Mme de Pompadour. This had to be dismantled and set up again in what was once the Frick pantry. Engineers were called in to design special glareless lights for each picture. Then finally the ''reasonable regulations" were drawn up.

Before a citizen can see the Frick pictures, he must call, write or telephone to a special ticket office, tell not only the day but the hour that he wishes to tour the collection. Once admitted, he must follow a special strip of green carpet from room to room, never loitering, never turning back, never sitting down. At the end of an hour he will have had brief glimpses of $50,000,000 worth of pictures and will be ejected through the same oak door through which he entered.

Possibly the best known picture in the entire collection is the self-portrait of the aging Rembrandt in a velvet cap. Other famed numbers include Titian's Man in a Red Cap, Titian's portrait of the bearded, obscene Pietro Aretino; Raeburn's portraits of James Cruickshank & wife; the immensely valuable St. Francis in Ecstacy by Giovanni Bellini; eleven Fragonard panels for which Frick reputedly paid J. P. Morgan more than $1,250,000.

Collector Frick paid more attention to the advice of experts than to his own taste but he did have a weakness for portraits. Two interested critics particularly. In the Oval room, flanked by Whistlers, hangs one of the greatest works of the world's greatest society portraitist--Velasquez's portrait of Philip IV" of Spain in a rose coat. This picture cost Frick $475,000. Round the corner hangs another portrait by another great countryman who for a time tried to paint in a way Velasquez did later, not realizing that he had spiritual gifts far greater than technical slickness: a portrait of the Italian commander Vincentio Anastagi by El Greco.

Shuffling past all these at a special preview last week went Andrew W. Mellon, his daughter Mrs. David Kilpatrick Bruce. John D. Rockefeller Jr., Junius Morgan, Miss Helen Frick and five members of her family, besides some 700 other socialites, to the great delight of society reporters. Almost unnoticed in the pack was a little old lady in a black hat: Mrs. Andrew Carnegie setting foot in the Frick house for the first time in her life.

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