"Old Masters From Texas at the Frick," New York City Tribune, Nov. 20, 1989, pp. 16,14.

Old Masters From Texas at the Frick

by Jason Edward Kaufman

A tour of New York City museums might feature such masterpieces as Van Eyck's Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych, Mantegna's Adoration of the Shepherds, Gerard David's Deposition, Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women, Rembrandt's Portrait of Nicolas Rutts, Zurbaran's Saint Lucy, Goya's Dutchess of Alba, and Ingres' Madame d'Haussonville, to cite but a fraction of the city's priceless artworks.

Such pictures, always at our fingertips, so to speak, represent not merely the apogees of their respective artists' oeuvres, but the very essence of Western civilization's notion of quality, as it pertains to painting. The works which form this canon of excellence remain predominantly in Europe, but, since the early years of this century, the Old World has increasingly shifted to the New -- not solely to New York, but to Washington, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco, Baltimore, Los Angeles, New Haven, Cincinatti, Toledo, Toronto, and Ottawa, as well. (Fortunately for Americans, Japan is yet to gain a significant portion of Western aesthetic patrimony.)

It is only relatively recently that Texas has appeared on the old masters map. Its emergence commenced 25 years ago, to be exact, with the founding of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. To celebrate the anniversary, the Kimbell has sent its greatest old master paintings to the institution that inspired their selection: The Frick Collection.

The exhibition, titled "In Pursuit of Quality: Twenty-five Years of Collecting Old Masters," comprises 17 works dating from the early 15th to the late 18th centuries. None of these paintings belonged to millionaire Kay Kimbell, whose collection formed the core of the museum when it was founded in 1965, one year after his death. Most have been acquired during the present decade.

Early on, the Kimbell's board adopted a policy "to form collections of the highest possible aesthetic quality, derived from any and all periods in man's history, and in any medium or style." The Museum's holdings today range from antiquity to the early twentieth century, and from decorative arts to painting and sculpture, characterized by a consistently high level of excellence.

The Kimbell Museum's outstanding building by Louis I. Kahn is an American architectural landmark. But, it is difficult to conceive of a more pleasant setting in which to look at pictures than the cool tranquility of the Frick mansion's skylit garden court. Arrayed on the stone walls of the columned portico that surrounds a the sunken garden, the pictures are unmistakably quite at home.

The earliest work is a remarkably well-preserved, jewellike panel in tempera and gold, painted around 1430 by the Florentine Fra Angelico. Originally part of a predella illustrating scenes from the life of Saint James, it depicts the Saint freeing the sorcerer Hermogenes who has been bound by the devils he summoned to serve him.

On the left, six fire-breathing winged demons -- hirsute hybrids between man and beast -- prod the magician with tridents, as James, to the right, calmly intervenes. The dark, furry demons, with bat wings, lizard tails, and chicken feet, closely resemble the devil in Duccio's Temptation of Christ, a 13th-century Sienese panel in The Frick Collection. Thus, it seems, in early-Renaissance Italy, the devil's appearance was less a matter of conjecture than of convention.

In Domenichino's Abraham Leading Isaac to Sacrifice (1602), the old father directs his son up the mountain where he intends to slit his throat. At the boy's feet lies a skull-like rock, prefiguring Golgotha. A student of Annibale Carracci, Domenichino prefers naturalism to idealism. In the closely observed trees and deep, atmospheric panorama, his scene recalls those of Giorgione and his followers, and may derive from one of the prints of pastoral subjects proliferated from Venice.

The artist has added naive palm trees and a llama-like camel in an effort to translate what is otherwise a north Italian countryside into an evocation of the Holy Land. Especially radiant in this oil on copper, Domenichino's landscapes influenced the great Claude Lorrain, whose remarkable canvas, The Sermon on the Mount, is in The Frick Collection.

A pair of scenes of dishonest card playing seem more appropriate to the wild west than to Baroque Europe: Caravaggio's Card Sharps (c. 1594), a beautifully painted canvas, shows two feather-capped youths at a carpeted gaming table on the edge of which sits a backgammon board. On the far side of the table, a bearded man stands behind the victim, anxiously signaling his confederate. The cheat responds by plucking a card he has tucked behind his back, while keeping a worried eye on his opponent who peruses his hand unaware. Caravaggio superbly conveys the uneasy tension of the conspirators, and by positioning the cheat with his back to the viewer, reveals the ruse in its entirety.

A similar parable of deception, La Tour's The Cheat With the Ace of Clubs (c. 1630) may have been inspired by Caravaggio's piece, but its subterfuge is somewhat more subtle. Here, a female servant pours wine for one of the trio of players, a young woman in pearls whose shifting eyes convey her collusion with the shady, moustachioed scoundrel at the left, whom we observe pulling an ace from behind his back. Their guileless victim sits to the right, identified by a tunic embroidered with gold, a fancy, orange plume, and a pile of gold and silver coins that he is surely about to forfeit.

Rubens' equestrian portrait of The Duke of Buckingham (1625) is a masterfully executed oil study that preserves the composition of a larger canvas which perished in a fire in 1649. With rapid and certain brushstrokes, Rubens portrays the Duke garbed as Lord High Admiral, Fame showering him with flowers as his horse nears the ocean's edge. Poseidon and a nymph spring from the sea weeds, causing Buckingham's steed to rear up, but with the baton of command in one hand and the reins in the other, the Duke calmly controls his mount. The notes to the exhibition point out that two military defeats led to the Admiral's impeachment the year following the commission.

 Poussin's Venus and Adonis (1628-29) shows the naked goddess sensuously bent backwards onto her lover's lap, coyly pushing away his hunting spear while pulling his head down towards hers. The details of the picture augur Adonis' tragic fate: a torch has fallen at the hunter's feet; an infant cherub in the foreground coddles a pair of doves, symbolic of the couple's love, while beside him lies another child in a deathlike sleep; near Venus' glittering chariot, others frolic suggestively with swans, but a storm cloud approaches, threatening to cancel their amuseument.

In Pieter Saenredam's sunlit Interior of the Buurkerk, Utrecht (1645), a brass chandelier hangs by a strand from the towering vault of the spare, stuccoed cathedral. The pattern of the slate floor below, a grid of red, black, and white rectangles, calls to mind the reductive geometry of De Stijl. According to The Frick's curator, Edgar Munhall, the Kimbell's oil on panel is the only work in an American collection by this Dutch "hyperrealist."

Goya's Portrait of the Matador Pedro Romero (c. 1795-98) reveals the corrida luminary as a supremely handsome, silver-haired man with piercing dark eyes, and a gentle mien that belies the fact that he killed more than 6,000 bulls. Resting in the foreground beside the crimson lining of his jacket, Romero's marvelously rendered, powerful hand serves as an understated allusion to his lethal calling.

Other artists include Ercole Roberti, Bernardo Cavallino, Louis Le Nain, Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Jacob von Ruisdael, Jean-Simeon Chardin, Giambattista Tiepolo, Luis Melendez, and George Stubbs.

The Kimbell's director, Edmund Pillsbury, remarks, "...the holdings of The Frick not only inspired the concept of the Kimbell Art Museum but also have served as a measure of quality in the Kimbell's efforts to develop its collections over the last twenty-five years."

But, notwithstanding the superb caliber of the Kimbell's works, one is still able to sense degrees of perfection, as it were, and gazing through the glazed portals of the garden court into The Frick's furnished galleries, one glimpses such works as Bellini's Saint Francis in Ecstasy, Holbein's Portrait of Sir Thomas Moore, and Vermeer's Lady with a Maid Holding a Letter and, with all due respect, one there detects a quality that the Kimbell yet pursues.

"In Pursuit of Quality: Twenty-five Years of Collecting Old Masters" continues at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, through January 14, 1990. For further information call (212) 288-0700.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©