Discover the Story Behind the Reimagined Frick Collection in New York

Helen’s bedroom now displays the museum’s world-class holdings of gold-ground paintings by Piero della Francesca, Fra Filippo Lippi, Gentile da Fabriano, and Paolo Veneziano, among other early Renaissance artists. (Star works by Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giovanni Cimabue will join the installation after returning from loan exhibitions.) “Not a lot of people know that Frick himself would never have laid eyes on these,” Ng says of the religious paintings. The works have been relocated from the first-floor Enamels Room, restored to its original function: presenting French and Italian decorative arts.

Born in 1888 and self-trained in art history, Helen often participated in her father’s buying trips and kept extensive travel diaries, noting in 1909 her fascination with Cimabue and Giotto at the Louvre. (Her father preferred landscapes and portraits.) Upon his death, Frick bequeathed the 1914 Beaux Arts mansion, designed by Carrère and Hastings, and his collection of more than 700 artworks to the public. The museum opened almost two decades later after additions designed by John Russell Pope.

Helen headed the acquisitions committee from the 1920s until 1961. She stewarded prominent accessions such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1845 portrait of writer Comtesse d’Haussonville, transferred upstairs to Frick’s bedroom and staring forthrightly across the room at George Romney’s 1782 portrait of Lady Hamilton, returned to its original placement over the mantle. “They’re really having a bit of a face-off—they see each other,” Ng says of the conversation between the two works and, by extension, father and daughter, who was the wealthiest unmarried woman in America when she came into her inheritance. “She was very strong-willed.”

Helen’s other major contribution to the institution was the founding of the Frick Art Research Library in 1920, housed in the home’s basement bowling alley before moving to a nine-story building designed by Pope and adjacent to the mansion with access on 71st Street. She remained its director until just before her death in 1984. “Most of our public hasn’t known we had a library, open and free of charge, because there was no direct connection from the museum,” says Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s retiring director, who will be succeeded this spring by Axel Rüger. Visitors can now access the grand reading room by navigating through the new education wing.

“Our goal in this whole project has been to preserve the atmosphere, the quality, the character of the Frick,” he says, “but to add the spaces that we need to make the institution continue to be able to thrive in the future.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Spring Issue under the headline “Leading Lady.” Subscribe to the magazine.