Spare No Expense

Steel Tycoon Henry Clay Frick spared no expense to make his art collection one of the best in the world. When he died in 1919 he left $16 million worth of Rembrandts, El Grecos, and English, Italian and French old masters in his block-long mansion on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue.

After his death, his energetic spinster daughter Helen became an art patron in her own right. Under her father's will, the Frick home was turned into a public gallery. Next door, she established the Frick Art Reference Library, now one of the largest collections of art photographs, pamphlets and books in the world.

Last week, at 59, Helen Frick was close to finishing another enterprise that had occupied her for two decades: the cataloguing, in twelve monumental volumes, of her father's collection. The first three volumes were off the presses and on their way, as gifts, to a selected list of the world's libraries and museums.

Castoff Shirts. Like her father, Helen Frick has spared no expense. In 1928 she appointed Dr. Frederick Mortimer Clapp, head of the fine arts department of the University of Pittsburgh, as general editor, got Porter Garnett and later Bruce Rogers,, topflight book designers, to lay out the format. She brought dozens of art scholars to Manhattan, some from as far as Spain, France and Britain, to examine the Frick masterpieces and write the catalogue's text pieces.

The catalogue paper was handmade in England; fine old castoff linen shirts from Italy provided its basic rag stock. The ink, pure lampblack carbon and linseed oil unadulterated by modern aniline dyes, was specially ground in Germany in 1928. A new type font was designed by Jan van Krimpen, cast in The Netherlands. Two three-ton hand presses were shipped from England to Pittsburgh for the actual printing.

A Few Concessions. By machine-age standards, the catalogue was assembled with painful slowness. Each sheet of paper had to be dampened before it was printed, the putty-like ink endlessly kneaded. On a good day, three workmen could turn out no sheets, sometimes had to destroy several days' work because of the belated discovery of a single typographical error. Whole sections were jettisoned when scholars turned up new historical details about some of the paintings.

Last week, with nine volumes to go, Helen Frick had made a few concessions to modern times. Up-to-date substitutes would replace the castoff Italian shirts and the made-to-order German ink, no longer available. Using a modern mechanical press instead of the slow-moving hand presses, catalogue supervisors hoped to finish their job by 1952.

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