Van Dyck at the Frick

The exhibition of works by Anthony Van Dyck at the Frick Collection is really two shows – one extraordinary, one middling. In three downstairs rooms and one small cabinet upstairs, the Frick has assembled works on paper from the world’s great collections that show how perceptive and nimble, not to mention brilliant, Van Dyck was as a draftsman. There is nothing dated, other than costume, about his portraits of officials, friends and artists. Despite their small scale, they thoroughly engage the modern viewer and make you wish you could have your face drawn by this master. In several cases a chalk drawing is shown next to a grisaille of the same subject, both often preparatory to a finished painting, and you’d be hard pressed to choose between them.

The main course, however, is upstairs on the paintings floor, where the Oval Room and East Gallery have been given over entirely to portraits by Van Dyck. Not surprisingly, the Frick seems to have had a harder time wresting loans of major paintings, and the result does not do justice to Van Dyck’s greatness. While there a few “A” works, including the Frick’s own portraits of Frans Snyders and his wife, there is a lot of hack work, commissioned portraits that don’t seem to have captured the artist’s imagination, or perhaps were largely done by studio assistants. (Judging by Van Dyck’s prodigious output, his training in Rubens’s workshop and some unfinished examples on display, much of the paint must have routinely been applied by others.)

The other problem is surely a main reason the show was planned to begin with: Henry Frick was evidently enamored of Van Dyck and bought eight large paintings for his collection and none, except for Mr. Snyders, is a standout. The largest – the Genoese Noblewoman – is simply bizarre, a pinhead atop a monstrous seven-foot body. I was glad to see the most important visitor, Cardinal Bentivoglio, as he will be absent from the Pitti Palace when we arrive in Florence next week. My favorite, however, was a small self-portrait at the foot of the stairs, painted when Van Dyck was 15. The streak of white paint representing the young man’s collar is as expressive as the stroke of a Zen calligrapher, and the eyes, lips and wispy hair all captivate. As a bonus, I later discovered that this work, from Vienna, was used as the frontispiece of Abrams’ 1994 monograph on Van Dyck, written by our friend, the late UCSB professor Alfred Moir.