Frick Madison: Xavier F. Salomon Discusses the Transformation from Mansion to Bauhaus

You’ve had to move the Frick Collection out of its historic home for renovation. What does that involve? Xavier Salomon: It’s both a renovation and an enhancement project, which will take a couple of years. While doing the renovation, we’re going to make some discreet new additions that will allow us to have a proper temporary-exhibition space, as well as a new lecture theater and offices. Our current offices will move out of the second floor of the mansion to make way for ten extra galleries where we can display a lot more of the collection. Our initial idea was to keep the house open and do the renovation and expansion in phases, but that proved impossible. Once it became clear we’d have to close, we started conversations with a number of New York museums to see if we might borrow space to display at least a small selection of highlights. It soon became apparent that the Met and the Whitney were keen to come to an agreement with us over the Breuer Building, which belongs to the Whitney and is on lease to the Met for eight years — we’re now subletting for the final three. All our offices and our entire collection, including storage, have moved to the Breuer Building. Everything is on a single site five blocks from home. It’s a pretty ideal situation under the circumstances. What percentage of what’s usually on show at the mansion can you display at the Breuer? X. S. That’s a good question, to which we don’t have a very precise answer. The collection counts around 1,500 objects, but that includes every sofa, carpet and saucer, not to mention the medals. The Breuer has more or less the same wall space as the Frick, so all the masterpieces and key works are on view, but there’s far less household furniture and fewer minor objects. The only great work of art that didn’t come over is Houdon’s Diana, which is too fragile to move.   Marcel Breuer building Image courtesy of The Frick Collection; photo: Joe Coscia. You’re showing a house-museum collection in a building from a completely different…