Guests enjoy dining in the newly reinstalled, reconceived, and relit East Gallery.
On
Monday, October 19, 2009, The Frick Collection honored Philippe de Montebello
at its annual Autumn Dinner. One of the world’s most influential
and widely admired cultural leaders, Philippe de Montebello was the longest-serving
director in the history of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Frick
Collection was pleased to pay tribute to this consummate museum director
whose vision and dedication to the field will continue to inspire the
next generation of museum professionals.
Margot and Jerry Bogert, Agnes
Gund, and J. Tomilson Hill were Benefit Chairmen. Mrs. Stephen M. Kellen
and Paul Singer were Dinner Benefactors and The Bank of New York Mellon,
John and Constance Birkelund, Mr. and Mrs. Walter A. Eberstadt, Mrs.
Henry Clay Frick II, Mr. and Mrs. Franklin W. Hobbs, Pat and John Rosenwald,
Sotheby’s, and Aso O. Tavitian were Dinner Patrons.
This year’s
Autumn Dinner was a terrific success, inspiring a generous level of support,
raising over $975,000. Proceeds will support the full range of programs
of The Frick Collection, including educational and curatorial initiatives
and the Frick Art Reference Library.
As guests arrived, they found many
choices: a receiving line in the Entrance Hall, cocktails and hors d’oeuvres
in the Garden Court, the remarkable permanent collection galleries, and
special access to the acclaimed fall special exhibition, Watteau
to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection (downstairs galleries).
In the Cabinet, they could also view the first presentation by the Frick’s
new (and first ever!) Associate Curator of Decorative Arts, Charlotte
Vignon, Exuberant Grotesques: Renaissance Maiolica
from the Fontana Workshop.
Guests next drifted into three magnificent galleries to find their seats
for dinner, enjoying the splendor of the dramatically uplit masterpieces
they contain. Two grand banquet tables ran the length of the mansion’s
West Gallery, with paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Veronese, Turner,
all illuminated from below. Guests in the Oval Room found themselves
at more intimate round tables surrounded by four of Whistler’s
most beloved full-length portraits. In some sense, the East Gallery became
a special private salon, as a feature of the evening was that room making
its formal debut to supporters, as it had been in recent weeks entirely
rethought, reinstalled, and relit. There, guests enjoyed great Spanish
works such as Goya’s iconic painting The Forge, and El Greco’s
portrait Vincenzo Anastagi. Other paintings presented for the first time
in this newly conceived room included William Hogarth’s Miss
Mary Edwards and Joshua Reynolds’s General
John Burgoyne, while returning
favorites included canvases by Chardin, Greuze, Manet, and David. Benefit
Chairs Margot and Jerry Bogert funded the installation of a new soft
coral wall covering against which fine works become masterpieces.
Guests
dined on House Smoked Trout with Ruby Grapefruit Mache Salad Avocado
and Pickled Mustard Seed, Griggstown Farm Pheasant Breast Sous Vide with
White Wine-Thyme Jus Chestnut Gnocchi and Wilted Tuscan Kale and Apple
Tarte Tatin with Sour Cream Ice Cream.
The decorative scheme was devised
by Galen Lee, the Frick’s Horticulturist and Special Events Designer
(and executed with his associate Bernadette Morrell). Arrangements were
created in neoclassical urns they custom painted in natural earth colors
that, in some cases, matched the pigments and origins of the paintings
in the room. The East and West Gallery arrangements were thoroughly autumnal
in flavor with a bounteous mixture of flowers and fruit. Tables in the
East Gallery featured bittersweet, calla lilies, pomegranates, and three
shades of red roses; the West Gallery featured bittersweet and persimmons,
while the Oval Room arrangements were replete with lemons, variegated
ivy, clematis, gentian, and hydrangea (favorite flower of Whistler’s
subject Robert de Montesquieu). The schemes of all three rooms were unified
by the use of a ribbed golden fabric tablecloths alluding to the glowing
fields of fall in evening light. For the Garden Court, where the evening
began with cocktails, Lee selected Japanese chrysanthemums in pale lavender
for a positively lush effect.
