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A Fresh Makeover for Familiar Faces

07.01.10

The paintings appear to be freshly restored. They’re not. They simply benefit from the soft velvet coral, which sharpens details, brightens colors, clarifies compositions and deepens meanings. Suddenly this room stuns, becoming as never before one of the Frick’s destination galleries.

The East Gallery’s refurbishment also includes upgraded lighting and the addition of a large, comfortable cushioned bench. A good thing, since Frick-obsessed art lovers may need a seat when they realize that two of the museum’s best-known canvases have been relocated from their usual positions on the dark green velvet walls of the grand, emblematic West Gallery. These are El Greco’s “Vincenzo Anastagi,” an early portrait of an Italian war hero from the 1570s, and “The Forge,” the most developed of Goya ’s late dark paintings, an hommage to common labor, from 1815-20. They’ve never looked better.

The coral amps up the green britches of El Greco’s portrait of the skeptical-looking Anastagi, along with the brilliant whites of his stockings, collar and cuffs, and his silvery cuirass. In the Goya, it brings out the great X formed by the three men at the anvil, the sliver of red-hot paint denoting the metal they work and, most of all, the subtle, unsettling mixture of raw strength, concentration, and vulnerability their forms and faces convey. Among other things, this painting precedes worker-safety rules.

Source: New York Times