More than five years since the Frick Collection abruptly shuttered due to the pandemic, the storied institution is back home at its Gilded Age mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue. An ambitious $220 million expansion and renovation by Selldorf Architects finally opens to the public on April 17—but we got a sneak peek at last week’s press preview, and we are happy to report that visitors are in for a treat.

“All I can say is the Frick is back,” Axel Rüger, the museum’s director told journalists at the event. Rüger himself is a new addition to the museum, having stepped into the director post this month from London’s Royal Academy of Arts after the retirement of longtime leader Ian Wardropper.

After a successful run at the nearby Breuer Building—formerly the Whitney Museum, briefly the Met Breuer, and soon to be Sotheby’s new headquarters—and a high-profile loan of its three Johannes Vermeer paintings to the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, the Frick Collection’s masterpieces have returned to their original home: the Beaux-Arts mansion built in 1914 by industrialist and collector Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919).

The new Frick Collection. Photo by Nicholas Venezia courtesy of the Frick Collection.

But it’s not just the Frick you remember—for the first time, the museum has opened up the family’s original living quarters on the second floor to the public with 10 new galleries.

Spaces that had been converted into staff offices are now showcasing treasures of the collection, some of which have been returned to where they would have been during Frick’s lifetime.

The Frick Garden Court. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr., courtesy of the Frick Collection, New York.

The added space means old favorites might be in new locations, and that works long kept on storage can finally enjoy the spotlight—the percentage of the collection on view has jumped from 25 for 47 percent.

The project is the biggest change for the Frick since John Russell Pope (1874–1937) remodeled the original building designed by Thomas Hastings (1860–1929) ahead of its opening to the public in 1935.

The Frick’s new reception room, with marble staircase leading to the second floor. Photo by Nicholas Venezia, courtesy of the Frick Collection, New York.

Altogether, the museum has added an additional 18,000 square feet to its footprint, including a massive marble staircase, cafe, and gift shop, plus 60,000 square feet in repurposed space. The renovation, first announced in 2014, also delved underground, excavating to create a new auditorium space (an earlier, controversial design would have destroyed a Russell Page-designed garden).

So what can you expect from the new and improved Frick? Here are five highlights from the fully renovated institution.

1. Floral Accents

A purple artichoke flower by Vladimir Kanevsky at the foot of Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80) at the Frick Collection. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

In a fun touch that speaks to the start of spring, and perhaps new beginnings more generally, the Frick has commissioned Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kanevsky (b. 1951) to create a suite of porcelain floral arrangements for display throughout the museum.

The exhibition, titled “Porcelain Garden: Vladimir Kanevsky at the Frick Collection,” is curated by Xavier F. Salomon, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator, who was inspired by the museum’s own rich holdings in porcelain.

With an eye toward turning his home into a public museum, Frick spent massive sums amassing an impressive collection of 18th-century French Sèvres porcelain in the last three years of his life. The Kanevsky exhibition honors that legacy.

Vladimir Kanevsky’s porcelain sculpture of anemonies on view in the Portico Gallery at the Frick Collection. Photo courtesy of the Frick Collection, New York.

“We worked with Vladimir to create specific installations for specific spaces. All the flowers are envisioned for specific rooms to go with those works of art,” Salomon told me, noting that the project pays homage to the original floral arrangements when the museum first opened 90 years ago.

Kanevsky’s sculptures of fruits and flowers include lemon tree in the Frick’s already show-stopping Garden Court, a pomegranate plant in front of a fireplace, and a purple artichoke flower at the foot of St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1475–80) by Giovanni Bellini (1425–1516).

It’s a celebratory display that brings a refreshing contemporary touch to a museum often seen as firmly rooted in the past.

2. A Literal New Light

The Frick West Gallery, with skylight overhead. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr., courtesy of the Frick Collection, New York.

The Frick’s famous Old Master paintings, including works by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), look refreshed as well—but they haven’t gotten any work done.

“It’s the light,” Joseph Godla, the museum’s chief conservator, said. “We have a much better balance of natural and artificial light.”

The museum has installed a new state-of-the-art Athena lighting system from Lutron, with a high Color Rendering Index (CRI) to ensure the paintings are illuminated in their true color. (Previously, the museum’s most recent lighting upgrade was in 2010.) The temperature of the new LEDs is set to 3200 Kelvins, a warm but neutral light. And to maintain the domestic feel of the house museum, there are custom-made picture lights trained on most of the works, with very little light spilling onto the walls.

One of the entrances to the West Gallery at the Frick Collection. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

But perhaps the most significant change is the massive skylight over the grand West Gallery that houses some of the Frick’s biggest and most impressive works.

“The skylight used to be pretty filthy,” Godla said, noting that the glass had turned green and “gave a funny cast to the paintings.”

Replacement windows, partially funded by a grant from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, are equipped with screens that will be deployed seasonally to block direct sunlight and reduce glare. The double-paned glass blocks harmful rays while also preventing leaks and condensation.

3. J. Alden Twachtman’s Ceiling Mural

J. Alden Twachtman’s ceiling at the Frick Collection. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Don’t forget to look up after ascending to the second floor, long cordoned off by a velvet rope. The long hallway at the top has a beautiful light blue ceiling mural that’s well worth craning your neck.

Not much is known about the chinoiserie work, other than that it was painted on canvas by the now-obscure artist J. Alden Twachtman (1882–1974) in 1914. But Frick hired the Elsie de Wolfe (c. 1859–1950), an actress who was the nation’s first professional interior designer, to decorate most of the second floor. (That included the Boucher Room, which we’ll get to later.)

One of the grotesque details in J. Alden Twachtman’s ceiling at the Frick Collection. Photo by Michael Bodycomb, courtesy of the Frick Collection, New York.

“We don’t have a smoking gun connecting it by receipt or correspondence to decorator Elsie de Wolfe,” said Heidi Rosenau, the Frick’s associate director of communications, “but we feel strongly that it is a part of her conception for these more intimate family rooms.”

Twachtman’s design was likely based on a ceiling Chistophe Huet (1700–59) painted in 1737 for the Château of Chantilly in France, Rosenau added. Both ceilings feature Asian-inspired imagery, which was popular in 18th-century Western decorative arts and painting.

A monkey in J. Alden Twachtman’s ceiling at the Frick Collection. Photo by Michael Bodycomb, courtesy of the Frick Collection, New York.

There are pagodas, grotesque decorative elements, birds with fabulous plumage, and anthropomorphized monkeys wearing costumes, hunting, fishing, playing badminton, and waiting on men and woman in ornate robes. (It’s definitely giving White Lotus—France for season four?) Twachtman, the son of American Impressionist John Henry Twachtman (1853–1902), actually had a pet monkey named Coco. The species was even the subject of their own genre, singerie, from the French phrase for “monkey trick,” which was especially popular among Rococo artists, including Meissen porcelain.

The painting was in excellent condition and required very little restoration to ready it for the grand reopening—just an upgraded cove lighting system to better showcase the work.

4. The Gilded Gold-Ground Room

The Frick Gold-Grounds Room. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr., courtesy of the Frick Collection, New York.

It wasn’t just Frick who built the museum’s storied collection. After his death, his daughter Helen Clay Frick followed in his footsteps, focusing on collecting early Italian Renaissance paintings. The wealthiest unmarried women in the U.S., she was also responsible for turning the family home into a museum, and establishing the Frick Art Reference Library, which the new renovations makes contiguous with the museum for the first time.

Previously, Helen Frick’s collection of small but sparkling works created by Piero della Francesca (1410–1492), Fra Filippo Lippi (1406–1469), Gentile da Fabriano (1370–1427), and Paolo Veneziano (1300–1365) was tucked away in the museum’s first floor. There, they felt like something of an afterthought after the grandeur of the West Gallery.

In a tribute to Helen Frick’s important role in the museum’s history, these works are now on display in what was her own bedroom.

Paolo Veneziano with Giovanni Veneziano, The Coronation of the Virgin (1358). The Frick Collection, New York. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.

“They were on view before, but they were less noticeable,” Salomon said. “They are now highlighted in a different way. It’s a small homage to Ms Frick.”

These paintings are relatively small, but they literally shimmer, their backgrounds featuring paper-thin sheets of hammed gold affixed to a layer of red clay called bole. The works were fabulously expensive when they were first made, with a show of material wealth meant to reflect god’s divinity, and they are perhaps even more treasured hundreds of years later, having beguiled art lovers for centuries.

As impressive as the new gallery is, it isn’t even complete. The true stars of the show are paintings by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255–1318) and Cimabue (1240–1302), which are currently on loan. The Duccio altarpiece panel, The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain (ca. 1308−11), is at the National Gallery in London for the second leg of “Siena: The Rise of Painting,” recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cimabue’s The Flagellation of Christ (ca. 1280), is at the Louvre in Paris for “A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting.”

5. The Beloved Boucher Room

The Frick Boucher Room, now moved back to the second floor. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr., courtesy of the Frick Collection, New York.

Perhaps the most challenging part of the restoration was returning the Frick’s incredible Boucher Room, featuring the cherubic designs of French Rococo painter François Boucher (1703–70), to the second floor.

Frick purchased the panels from famed dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939) and de Wolfe had custom panels built to create a private sitting room, or boudoir, for Adelaide Childs, Frick’s wife.

“Each one of these panels are channel grooved, so you have to place everything exactly right,” Godla said. “There were a lot of broken edges and missing carvings.”

Part of the paneling had also been discarded when the room moved downstairs, where the doorway is larger, and had to be rebuilt by a Brooklyn craftsman. And then there was the ornately paneled parquet de Versailles wood floor, which also had to be removed and reconstructed upstairs, along with the heavy marble fireplace.

If the Frick is a jewel box, the Boucher Room is a gesamtkunstwerk, showcasing not only the artist’s adorable paintings, but de Wolfe’s vision for the Frick’s living quarters—now finally seen by museum-goers as she originally intended it.

The Frick Collection reopens on April 17 at 1 East 70th Street, New York, New York. “Porcelain Garden: Vladimir Kanevsky at the Frick Collection” will be on view April 17–October 6, 2025.