The Frick has always held special distinction for certain New Yorkers, especially those who reside in the Upper East Side. But among those milling about the famed picture galleries at the museum’s Autumn Dinner Monday night was an interloper from downtown: Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He reserved the highest praise for his former neighbors uptown: “The Frick is one of my favorite museums in the world.”
Weinberg was there because of Sidney Knafel, the telecommunications magnate and a recently inducted trustee of the Frick’s board.
“I’m a great admirer and [he] is also a great friend of mine,” Weinberg continued. No doubt.
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It is Knafel who made possible the museum’s current exhibit on French porcelain. He and Weinberg go back to the director’s time at the Phillips Academy’s Addison Gallery of American Art, Weinberg’s previous home before the Whitney.
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Circulating among the exhibition, underneath the Frick’s regal Renaissance masterpieces, were more usual suspects and board members like Irene Aitken, Margot Bogert and Duane Hampton.
“It’s the only dinner we ever have in the gallery,” said the museum’s curator, Xavier Salomon.
Amory McAndrew made sure to point out that there were also young fans of the museum in the room, the future generation, if you will.
“Usually this is the board’s purview but tonight we’re actually having a table of the younger fellows here,” said the chair of the museum’s steering committee. “It’s a nice integration of the board and the junior board.”
Their attendance was appropriate. In his remarks, Knafel said his relationship with the Frick started not as a mature philanthropist, but when he was a young man, beginning in 1938 with a family trip to what he used to call then a “treasure house.”