Renaissance & Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection

I'm here today with Janine and Jay Tomlinson-Hill, whose exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes is currently at the Frick Collection, and I'm delighted that you're both here today. Welcome. Well, thank you, Ian. We are thrilled to be here. I thought we'd just start with how it's presented in your apartment, because the people who come to the Frick will see it in a very beautiful installation, but a museological presentation. And what's fascinating about your collection, the moment one steps through the door, you're in a different kind of world which you created. As we were thinking about putting two collections together, which was first a modern and contemporary collection, and also a Renaissance and Baroque collection, we wanted a dialogue specifically between the bronzes and the contemporary works of art. Could you talk a little bit about the evolution of your collection? The first two pieces that we bought, one in the contemporary, was a Warhol soup can, and really at the same time was a bronze by Le Seur, a very beautiful Venus. And at the time, we didn't really know whether we were going to engage in a lot of collecting in both areas, but we knew we loved both pieces. I grew up on Fifth Avenue and had the benefit of not just the Frick, but also the Metropolitan Museum, and bronzes, and particularly in the Frick collection, were an intimate part of what was a home. And you could see the bronzes, they were accessible. You could actually walk around the tables in the main rooms and see how the Turner or the Rembrandt interface with the bronzes there. Mentioning Henry Clay Frick in this is really interesting because, as you know, he first got his collection of Renaissance bronzes almost 100 years ago, and it is one of the most distinctive aspects of the Frick's presentation of art, the intermingling, and not by school, but more intuitively. Well, when you come in, you are presented first with a large de Kooning picture from 1978, and you immediately turn around and see a Twombly chalkboard. And in front of the Twombly is a Venus astronomy, and when you look at the curvature of the back of the astronomy, it is very similar to the curvature of the Twombly. In this case, it's essentially a formal relationship that you're setting up, isn't it? I mean, there's the increasing spirals of his oil stick looking like a chalkboard. Giovanni de Bologna, he was so well known for inventing sculptures that could be viewed from the round, that had almost equally attractive viewpoints from every point, almost kind of flame-like twisting of the form, and that's the hallmark of his style. We now have a Fontana crucifixion juxtaposed to an Algardi crucifixion, again with a Twombly in the middle over the fireplace, and what we found is having a Fontana juxtaposed to an Algardi really is a very interesting dialogue. You're talking about the Twombly picture, and you've put the Riccio strigil bearer in front of that. What relationships do you see there with the figures you have in front of that Twombly? The paint is just gobbed on and rough with a palette knife. And Twombly is also kind of erasing and changing, scouring the surface as part of the roughness. Just as Riccio also is known for this kind of hammered surface where every inch of the bronze is alive. From a dialogue standpoint, you have a very interesting opportunity to think about different centuries and think about the craft of bronze. The Lichtenstein itself is a very beautiful image of the sun rising, and you have the beautiful Susini, who's asleep, and on the other side the Taka pair, which are very feminine and beautiful. And then juxtaposed is this lion that's about to pounce. It stands out in this whole grouping that is very quiet and gentle. It's a surprising grouping, but it works somehow. I mean, I never would have thought to put them together. That's part of the pleasure of being a private collector. The most thought-provoking to me of the juxtapositions of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes with more recent paintings is the lineup of Herculean and Mars subjects and a Rape of the Sabines that you have in front of Ed Ruscha's paintings. I keep thinking of the words that Ruscha has on the painting in this kind of medieval-type script with exclamation points at the edge, War, Plague, Taxes, Damsels. It speaks to a feeling of the 17th century. A good conversation piece, and it becomes even more interesting with the bronzes in front of it. Virtually all of those bronzes are action. To have the Rape of the Sabines, to have Hercules and the Centaur, to have Mars striding forward, it is men in action. Invariably, we get a lot of comments about, boy, that is a lineup full of life. I invite you to visit the exhibition, Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection, on view at the Frick Collection through June 15, 2014. The exhibition has been organized at the Frick by curator Denise Allen. For more information, please visit our website, Frick.org.