purdy's blog

Happy Pride Month! To honor the history of Pride and of LGBTQ+ individuals in the arts, we have compiled a selection of books from the Frick Art Reference Library that highlights the work of queer artists and scholars.

The Frick Art Reference Library celebrates all our furry friends this National Pet Day! Discover recommended reads about cats and dogs, plus images of unexpected domestic animals from our digital collections and archival photos of the Frick family’s pets.

To continue our look back at the past one hundred years of the Frick Art Reference Library, Samantha Deutch, Digital Art History Lead, considers the library’s rich holdings of private collection catalogues—integral to our understanding of works of art and the history of collecting.

Joey Vincennie, Reference Lead, rings in the spring with a recommended reading list from the Frick Art Reference Library focused on botany, scientific illustration, landscape architecture, and depictions of flowers and gardens in the visual arts through the ages.

Stephen J. Bury, Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian, explores one of the most fascinating eras in the Frick Art Reference Library’s hundred-year history. A photograph from the 1940s sheds light on the creation of maps at the library during World War II, which were made to prevent the destruction of at-risk cultural sites and works of art in war areas.

Scott Calhoun, Acquisitions Assistant, looks back on some standout additions to the Frick Art Reference Library’s holdings in 2022. The library adds several thousand new books to its collections each year, including titles from all over the world that cover a vast range of topics.

In celebration of The Frick Collection’s opening to the public eighty-seven years ago, Archivist Julie Ludwig explores her research into a handbook of Henry Clay Frick’s painting collection from 1916. The handbook was distributed among Frick’s friends, associates, and visitors to his galleries, and today it gives us valuable insight into the arrangement of works of art at 1 East 70th Street while it was still a private residence.

As we continue celebrating the centennial of the Frick Art Reference Library, Stephen J. Bury, Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian, explores an unexpected strength of the library’s collections: materials on modern art. In this post, Stephen discusses a sample of the library’s exhibition catalogs from the Surrealist movement, which began in Paris in 1924, the same year the Frick Art Reference Library opened its first dedicated building.

In celebration of Johannes Vermeer’s 390th birthday this month, explore a recommended reading list from the Frick Art Reference Library on the artist’s life and work by Eugénie Fortier, Acting Storage and Retrieval Lead. All the resources on this list were published within the last two decades, speaking to the Dutch artist’s continuing legacy nearly four hundred years later.

The power of portraiture is particularly potent on the fourth floor of Frick Madison. Considering two seemingly unrelated likenesses on view—Reynolds’s General John Burgoyne and Chinard’s Étienne Vincent de Margnolas—Rebecca Leonard, Curatorial Assistant, examines the works’ uneasy balance between glory and tragedy, epitomizing portraiture’s poignant reflection of the human condition.