Forces of Expression at the Frick

“I thought that I liked the Turners because they opened out onto the world rather than closing me in with the pantheon, but it was the wrong world. Turner’s glowing shores were proxies for what I longed to see: a different heat and haze, a native landscape, some record of the places that made this mansion possible. The Collection, perhaps by no fault of its own, makes apparent our ignorance of all the processes that precede it, coal into coke into steel into canvas. I would have preferred two large paintings that opened out onto that, the furnace of an older history that we have so few windows into, that barely even haunts us, that we allow the barons to replace with idylls and seascapes, a fictional European scrim over the fearsome topography of the country.”

Ben Tapeworm on the reopening of the Frick Collection.