In 1890, Henry Clay Frick defrauded the people of Pittsburgh. The coke and steel mogul rigged a bidding process, pilfering a half-million-dollar discount on property that would host the Homestead steel mill’s expansion. Two years later, he drove the steelworkers to strike and executed a prearranged mercenary assault on their pickets. The ensuing battle killed ten and wounded dozens, achieving its purpose of breaking the union and ensuring maximum profit on the manufacture of battleship armor for the increasingly imperial U.S. Navy. Frick told Congress that the company had been losing money and that financial necessity had precluded settlement on negotiated terms, both lies. “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, because it was properly done,” declares the Death Dodger in Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot. Frick’s crimes were not subtle; their relationship to his fortune was no mystery. People keep forgetting anyway.

This is in part because the Frick Collection, which Frick bequeathed to the city of New York, enacts a perpetual mystification upon the public. A peerless assemblage of masterworks housed in a limestone Carrère and Hastings mansion, “the Frick” drapes the man in a shroud of civic generosity. He intended as much, telling an associate, “I want this collection to be my monument” (154). The museum’s April 2025 reopening, after a years-long $220-million renovation, renews this desire in tandem with a luminous account of the collection’s assembly from its recently retired director, Ian Wardropper. The book delights the eye and informs the antiquarian curiosity, but its nods to Frick’s “ruthless business practices” hardly register in a broadly ennobling chronicle of his alleged perspicacity, sophistication, and philanthropy (152). Both the book and refreshed galleries offer indulgent tours of sumptuous elegance, untroubled by serious or sustained reflection upon its true costs.

A foreword from Julian Fellowes sets the book’s tone. The writer-creator of HBO’s The Gilded Age hand-waves questions of tycoon turpitude, beckoning readers to focus on “where they did well with their money and power, however they gained them” (9). Such restrained analysis may satisfy Lord Fellowes of West Stafford, a multimillionaire British Peer whose father managed Shell Oil’s operations in late colonial Nigeria, but it does not reflect best historical practice. Wardropper follows suit with thanks to his patrons and an admiring sketch biography of Frick, downplaying the Pennsylvanian’s birthright bankroll from a wealthy, whiskey-distilling grandfather (and family friends, the Mellons), while emphasizing his “drive and intelligence” (16). A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it account of the Homestead affair drawn primarily from George Harvey’s heroic 1928 narrative manages the neat trick of portraying Frick as a victim rather than as principal orchestrator.

The book’s subtitle promises to chart the evolution of taste in the Gilded Age. For readers willing to conflate the conventional elite tastes of Frick and his family with those of their entire period, the remaining chapters deliver. Doubling back to the 1870s, we follow Frick’s five-decade aesthetic education through key moments or relationships of collecting, house building, and interior decoration. Frick appears as a man of initially standard Pittsburgh-industrialist proclivities. His fattening billfold funds the forging of ties with prominent transatlantic art dealers and rivalries with fellow collectors, upgrading his discernment to levels more consonant with New York Society, and refining his “passion for art and the desire to share it” (151). (Art dealers receiving prominent attention include Charles Carstairs, Roland Knoedler, the Duveens, Charles Allom, Bernard Berenson, and Elsie de Wolfe; rival collectors include Isabella Stewart Gardner, Benjamin Altman, Peter Widener, and J. P. Morgan.) Such decorous admiration from Wardropper largely stands in for argument; luscious reproductions of artwork for evidence.

Frick’s wife, Adelaide, facilitated the collection’s existence by spraining her ankle on a Parisian vacation in 1912—the year Frick took title to the future museum’s Fifth Avenue plot—thereby preventing a homebound transatlantic journey originally booked on the Titanic. She remains otherwise peripheral to the collection’s story. The true pluralizer of the “Fricks” in the book’s title is Henry’s favorite child, Helen, who sharpened her father’s collecting acumen, founded the Frick Art Research Library (FARL), and stewarded the Frick to its opening in 1935. Helen’s brother, Childs, receives late-chapter consideration for his achievements as a paleontologist and fossil collector, but lower billing, reflecting the siblings’ respective influence over the collection’s content and unequal shares of paternal affection.

The book’s framing around family dovetails with the renovation’s spiritual core: the opening of the mansion’s second-floor rooms to the public. The Frick’s signature enticement—beyond the unmatched density of masterpieces by Bellini, Titian, Rembrandt, El Greco, Vermeer, Turner, and company—was always the authorized voyeurism of seeing them in a domestic space of surpassing opulence. The museum’s revamp accentuates this thrill in the family’s private quarters, restoring downstairs mainstays of the old Frick—Renoir’s La Promenade, Barbizon bucolics, the Boucher-workshop boudoir lousy with Bourbon Boss Babies—to their original upstairs locations. It also integrates works that Helen and others collected later (Italian gold-grounds rarities, portrait medals) or that previously lacked dedicated space (ceramics, art-clocks). Audio guides for major works are a welcome addition. As of this writing some minor items still lack explanatory text, producing a luxury shop window effect in which visitors may steal a glimpse of Frick’s true collecting spirit.

Contributions from the renovation’s architectural director, Annabelle Selldorf, are mixed. The airport departure gate sensation of entering the old Frick evaporates in the newly airy reception hall; it returns upstairs in a perpetual queue at the charming but lilliputian gift shop’s single, guarded doorway. Brass handrails evoking Trump-Tower glitz befoul an otherwise slim and elegant cantilevered marble staircase. The dedicated Education Room brimming with natural light will inspire schoolchildren, but the FARL’s new digital media resources for researchers required the reduction of on-site storage space. Black metal spotlight rigs hang like spidery inverted scaffolding from the subterranean auditorium’s ceiling, marring the creamy walls’ evocation, for this reviewer, of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Music—Pink and Blue No. I. Spatial echoes of an artist known for labial abstraction, even if inadvertent, would have displeased Frick—he disdained twentieth-century art, and his Mennonite upbringing made him uncomfortable with nudes—but today’s concertgoers doubtless will cherish a womb-like sonic bunker promising the absolution of barbarity through beauty.

This perennial Frick promise resonates not only in the new auditorium’s design but also in its name, which honors the founder-CEO of private equity giant Blackstone (and longtime Frick board member), Stephen A. Schwarzman. Blackstone subsidiaries have been linked to Amazon deforestation, child labor in slaughterhouse cleaning operations, and warrantless disclosure of private customer data to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Schwarzman underwrote nearly a sixth of the renovation’s cost with a tax-deductible gift of some $35 million, less than a thousandth of his at-last-count $44 billion-plus net worth.Footnote ¹ Frick at least devoted a fifth of his entire estate to the museum. Mystification is cheaper than it used to be.

Just before his peroration on the alleged authenticity of Frick’s discernment and public-spiritedness, Wardropper claims that art furnished the industrialist with a sort of therapeutic “antidote to business” (151). Yet his recurring accounts of how Frick “tracked the prices of paintings” (36), treated art as a vehicle for competitive social climbing (45–47), and relished a “love of the deal” (152) when outbidding rivals suggest something quite different. Art served Frick not as a personal antidote to his compulsive cupidity, but as a distinctive vessel for it, whose alchemical properties transmuted lucre into a more publicly respectable source of power. Its alchemy has proven a renewable resource, continuing to flatter his image in public memory, while doing the same for his contemporary comparators in real time.

The collection’s enchantments are undeniable. The book deepens them, and the renovation’s expansion of them has unleashed an avalanche of press enthusiasm. (The New York Times published eight appreciative review articles between March and May alone.) Yet the Frick’s essence remains unchanged from its opening in 1935, during the Great Depression: it is a temple to inequality, built upon boodle and bones, entrenched on an avenue of oligarchs. Outside a weekly “Pay-What-You-Wish Admission” time slot on Wednesday afternoons (not notably a moment of leisure for most New Yorkers), a standard ticket costs more than four times the hourly federal minimum wage. Terming this a “democratic miracle,” as one recent reviewer did, seems inapt.Footnote ²

One might say instead that shades of democracy, denied and roiling, haunt the walls. A week before Frick’s death, Helen came downstairs to discover him “lying on a couch … facing Goya’s The Forge and Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain” (151). The portrait of the resplendent monarch once sat in for Philip IV while the king was alive, absolute power infusing its oil and canvas at a feast in Madrid celebrating a 1644 suppression of Catalan revolutionaries. The Forge, meanwhile, has its own regal provenance—it belonged to Louis-Philippe and hung in the Louvre—but its dark, devotional allegory of the working-class life cycle, still hanging adjacent to Philip IV’s hauteur, startles. Taut and brimming with collective force, three laborers gather tight around a fiery anvil. The black sledge rises in righteous fury, high in the Frick’s West Gallery. We await its fall.