The Frick Collection Autumn Dinner Honoring Philippe de Montebello
On October 19, 2009 the Autumn Dinner was held at The Frick honoring Philippe de Montebello. The Autumn Dinner plays a unique role in the social landscape of New York and is a much-anticipated highlight of The Frick Collection’s social and fund-raising calendar. Each year, it attracts those who appreciate the significance of the Frick’s contribution to the life of the city and the greater international cultural community. It has been named one of the most memorable parties of the year by The New York Times. This year’s black-tie dinner honored Philippe de Montebello, one of the world’s most influential and widely admired cultural leaders, who 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.
During his thirty-one-year tenure, that institution’s collections and programs flourished: the museum acquired significant collections and individual masterpieces, mounted acclaimed international loan exhibitions, developed wide-reaching educational programs, vastly increased its exhibition space, and reinstalled much of its permanent collection in new or refurbished galleries. Last fall, the curators of The Metropolitan Museum of Art paid tribute to Mr. de Montebello by mounting an unprecedented exhibition of some 300 major works that entered the collection under his leadership, The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions.
In 2008, Mr. de Montebello joined the board of trustees of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and became the first scholar in residence at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. This fall he became the first Fiske Kimball Professor in the History and Culture of Museums at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and a special adviser for NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus. He serves as special adviser to the Leon Levy Foundation, and, with Paula Zahn, is co-host of WNET/Channel 13’s weekly culture series SundayArts. He continues to lecture throughout the world on art, museums, and other cultural matters.
educational and curatorial initiatives and the Frick Art Reference Library. Over 230 guests attended.
VIP cocktails upstairs in the Frick mansion kicked off the event. 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 (no other chance to see these rooms quite in this way throughout the year…the paintings look different, as does the architecture right up to the ceilings, which glowed that night in gold and pastel tones that one never otherwise would notice during the daytime. (The use of these galleries for the Autumn Dinner goes back 4 years, and has been a smash success.) 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.
After the first main course, Margot Bogert (who is also Chairman of the Frick’s Board of Trustees) initiated the evenings remarks in the East Gallery, discussing first the room, and then acknowledging various instrumental staff involved in the event. Sweetly, she then veered off of the notes on her page to make a heartfelt and unrehearsed tribute to the Frick’s Director Anne L. Poulet.
Next all eyes turned towards the podium at the far end of the West Gallery, where Anne Poulet stood. She introduced Philippe de Montebello as an individual no central casting office could match in trying to fill the role of museum Director, erudite, diplomatic, charismatic, and debonair, AND possessed of a voice with the power to engage any visitor….quintessential!
She spoke of her first meeting with him in 1968 when she was a Ford Fellow in the European Paintings Department. She discussed how it fell to her, as the lowest person on the totem pole, to answer letters of inquiry addressed to him. She spoke of a particular list he prepared for her to use to indicate proper forms of address in French—all in a hilarious range in tones. Poulet next turned to discussing his accomplishments during his decades-long tenure at the Met, from physical enhancements to acquisitions of individual masterpieces…this combination of having the heart of a scholar and the administrative skills of a chief executive officer…she discussed then his path in the last 2 years since announcing his retirement as well as recent honors received. She then introduced the great granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick, Helen Clay Chace, who approached the podium and presented to Philippe de Montebello a commemorative silver charger. It was a lovely moment and as the honoree accepted it he spoke graciously of the true group effort that all of the aforementioned successes had been at his institution…He pondered then the question of similarities and differences between the Met and the Frick, paying tribute to the fine concentration of excellence on the walls and mentioning his two favorite Frick works being Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert and Velazquez’s portrait Philip the IV (which he divulged is not up at the moment as it has been undergoing a very exciting cleaning and study in Conservation at the Met!) , and the freedom from chronology we experience here in our displays and then went on to discuss the great meaning and contribution that museums make in all of our lives…the transcendence ….the experience beyond the self and how important that is to preserve. His remarks were warm and sincere, and in such galleries, in the shimmering, candlelit painting-filled rooms where you could hear a pin drop other than his voice, they seemed quite personal, spoken to each guest in attendance.
After dessert, guests lingered in the galleries….the one drawing the most attention perhaps being the new East Gallery… gift bags (silk scarves after a vase design in the collection for the ladies and a bureau tray based on an original architectural blueprint for the men)….and off into the night.
The decorative scheme took its cue from the recent series of gallery changes and follows a different course than in previous years. It 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 urns in the East Gallery were painted Verona green, while those in the long West Gallery were tinted Pompeii red sienna and Tuscan burnt sienna—all pigments from the regions from which they are named. The urns in the central Whistler-filled Oval Room were a French ochre, a shade of yellow that recalled the wall color the artist stipulated as a backdrop for his print shows (to which the Frick adhered this summer, in presenting his Venice Set). 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.
Benefit Chairpeople: Margot and Jerry Bogert, Agnes Gund, and J. Tomilson Hill
Benefactors: Mrs. Stephen M. Kellen, Paul Singer
Patrons: 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
Benefit Committee: Cetie Nippert Ames and Anthony Ames, Peter and Sofia Blanchard, Mr. and Mrs. I. Townsend Burden III, Mark and Susan Dalton, Mr. and Mrs. Marvin H. Davidson, Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Davis, Mr. and Mrs. Jean-Marie Eveillard, Elise D. Frick and John A. Garraty, Michael and Mary Gellert, Gail and Peter Goltra, Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Hoerle, Thomas L. Kempner, Jr., Lucia Woods Lindley and Daniel A. Lindley, Arthur L. Loeb, Anne and John Marion, Mrs. and Mrs. Jeremiah Milbank III, Mr. Peter G. Peterson and Ms. Joan Ganz-Cooney, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Phipps, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Charles M. Royce, Louisa Stude Sarofim, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen A. Schwarzman, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley DeForest Scott, Melvin R. Seiden and Janine Luke, Mrs. Suzette de Marigny Smith, Beatrice Stern, and Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw
Contribution: Vice Chairman, Benefactor and Patron tables Tables of ten at $100,000, $50,000, and $25,000 Benefit Committee and individual tickets $5,000 and $2,500 per person Caterer: Danny Meyer’s Hudson Yards Catering Menu: 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 Apple Tarte Tatin with Sour Cream Ice Cream Wine: Mas Cal Demoura L’Etincelle Ven de Pays de l’Herault Blanc 2006 Buisson Saint Romain Blanc Sous la Velle 2006
