Sunday, July 16, 2023

Old Travel Technology Teleportation

Blog 161







This is an amusement park in New York Are rheybtryingbto twll us something?

Trinity Church Manhattan New York  Battery Park
This is an old building. Did they knew something ?


Saint Michael Carhedral Alba Iulia Romania











Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Vienna Kaiser Thesaurus

Kaiser Thesaurus Vienna Austria 

Kaiser as a noun means Any of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806), of Austria (1804–1918), or of Germany (1871–1918)..

 

Unicorn Horn 

Precious Stones 

Gold Objects and Jewelries

Fasces

Coat of arms - serpent eating a child.

Double headed eagle coat or arms

Maltese Cross

Dominican Republic History

 

Thursday, October 13, 2022

New York 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, February 10, 2020

Henry Clay Frick Museum and Colection and History

The Frick Collection is an art museum located in the Henry Clay Frick House on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York City at 1 East 70th Street, located at the northeast corner with Fifth Avenue. It houses the collection of industrialist Henry Clay Frick.
 
Henry Frick once resided in this 18th-century French-style mansion; now its the home of his impressive art collection, which includes Titian, Vermeer, Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, Whistler and more.
Suggested Duration:1-2 hours
Address:1 E. 70th St. Fifth Ave., New York City, NY 10021-4994
Frick Park opened in 1927. Between 1919 and 1942, money from the trust fund was used to enlarge the park, increasing its size to almost 600 acres (2.4 km2). Following the death of Adelaide Howard Childs Frick in 1931, the Frick Collection was opened to the public as a museum in 1935.
Born: December 19, 1849, West Overton
Died: December 2, 1919, New York
Spouse: Adelaide Howard Childs
 

Decades before Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) moved to New York City and began filling his mansion with artistic masterpieces, another extraordinarily wealthy collector was populating his own mammoth structure with books and art in exactly the same location. James Lenox (1800–1880) was one of the richest men in New York in the second half of the nineteenth century, and one of its most influential philanthropists and bibliophiles. His public library stood where The Frick Collection stands today and did so from 1877 until Frick demolished it in 1912. Was it or was demolished only the second floor and made some additions



The Lenox Library was one of the earliest libraries that were open to the public in New York (Reed, 18-19). Lenox had been collecting books, bibliophily, and fine art since 1845. Before he decided to formally establish his library, Lenox stored his book collection in piles in his townhouse on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. He simply remembered where he put his books when they were added to his collection. As Lenox aged, this system became less reliable, and he decided to construct a building to house his book and art collections. (Stevens, 144-146)..


 For the site of his library, Lenox chose a plot of land, located on Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st Street, on the farm he had inherited from his father. This area of New York was rural, though it was quickly developing. The farm’s hay field remained active for years after the opening of the library.  Lenox hired the well-known and highly regarded architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895) to design the building. Construction began in 1871 and ended in 1877. In January of that year, the galleries of painting and sculpture opened to the public. The manuscript and rare book rooms opened later in the same year. The remaining reading rooms did not open for access to the book collections

 until 1882. The library was not easily accessible. Approved visitors had to apply for admission tickets via mail before they could enter (Stern, 198).

The Lenox Library was considered one of the most notable architectural attractions in New York at the time of its completion. It was designed in the Neo-Grec style, though critics also considered it modern classic—citing the French influence of Hunt’s École des Beaux Arts education. Some visitors felt that the façade was too severe, but others loved its grandeur and stateliness (Stern, 200). 
The building spanned the length of the city block it occupied. A central courtyard faced Fifth Avenue, flanked by two wings. The first floor rooms had twenty-four foot ceilings, and the second floor rooms had forty-foot ceilings—creating incredibly lofty and grand spaces (“The Lenox Library,” American Architect). Through the courtyard, visitors entered a large vestibule with two majestic staircases. To the south was a reading room, and to the north was a gallery. On the second floor, the main gallery ran parallel to the street. It featured large windows that overlooked Central Park and contained five arcades, paintings and sculptures were placed throughout the space. Repeating the first floor layout, a reading room was located to the south, and a gallery was located to the north. The building continued up for another half floor, with a balcony gallery running along the entire length of the courtyard (“The Lenox Library,” American Architect).

  Early reviews of the library recount that after entering the south wing reading room on the first floor, the initial thing visitors saw was the Gutenberg Bible in a rosewood case (“Biblia in the Lenox Collection”). This bible was the first of its kind to enter the New World and was perhaps the greatest treasure of the library. Its display suggests that the finest books in the library’s collections were exhibited in its reading rooms and meant to be admired as much as to be used for research.
In the art galleries, visitors reported that the “individuality of the collector” was quite apparent in the collection and arrangement of the pictures (Strahan, 8). The works were not arranged according to artist or genre but rather according to the taste of Lenox. His art collection was described as “decidedly solid rather than brilliant,” an opinion that seems consistent across criticism in the past and today (Saule, 319). Highlights included works by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), Gilbert Stuart (1775–1828), Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), and Thomas Cole (1801–1848) (Lenox Library: A Guide to the Paintings and Sculpture). A large scale painting by Minhály Munkácsy (1844–1900) was added to the collection in 1879 and was greeted with much acclaim (Strahan, 8).
The Lenox Library was not only one of the first public libraries in New York, but it was also one of the first public art exhibition spaces. Aside from the burgeoning institutions of the National Academy of Design and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Yorkers had few places to view fine art in their city. The Lenox Library helped pave the way for future cultural institutions by becoming a part of the founding collection of the New York Public Library as well as conceding its plot of land to what would eventually turn into The Frick Collection.
To learn more about the architecture of The Lenox Library and of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)’s Frick Art Reference Library, look for the tours given by the Frick every year for Open House New York (OHNY) Weekend.


Henry Clay Frick



Henry Clay Frick was born, from relatively modest Mennonite stock, on December 19, 1849, in West Overton, a rural community in southwestern Pennsylvania. The second child of an immigrant farmer who married the daughter of a flour merchant and whisky distiller, Frick worked as a salesman in one of Pittsburgh's most prominent stores and became the well-paid chief bookkeeper of the family distillery; he retained an expertise in accounting for the rest of his life.

West Overton was eight miles north of Connellsville, a center in the fledgling iron industry, whose rich coal beds yielded seams of high-grade bituminous coal, ideal for coking. In March 1871, Frick, in partnership with a cousin, invested family money to acquire low-priced coking fields and build fifty coke ovens. Within a decade, H. C. Frick Coke Company would operate some thousand working ovens and produce almost eighty percent of the coke used by Pittsburgh's burgeoning iron and steel industries.

Once launched in the coke industry, Frick moved permanently to Pittsburgh, establishing residence in the prosperous Homewood section of the city after his marriage in December 1881 to the twenty-two-year-old Adelaide Howard Childs, daughter of a boot and shoe manufacturer. The Fricks' first home was an eleven-room, two-and-a-half-story house purchased for $25,000 in August 1882. This Italianate residence, called Clayton, was remodeled in 1891 into a twenty-three-room four-story Loire château, a style popularized during the 1870s in New York. It is now home to the Frick Art & Historical Center.

Frick and Adelaide had four children, only two of whom survived into adulthood: a son, Childs, born in 1883, and a daughter, Helen, born in 1888. Helen, who never married, founded the Frick Art Reference Library in memory of her father in 1920. She remained its director until 1983, the year before her death at age ninety-six. Childs Frick's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have served as presidents of The Frick Collection and members of the Board of Trustees since the museum formally opened to the public in December 1935.

In May 1882, Frick entered into partnership with the Scottish-born steel manufacturer Andrew Carnegie. For the next two decades, as the expansion of the railways created an ever-increasing demand for iron and steel, Frick dedicated himself wholeheartedly to the joint fortunes of the H. C. Frick Coke Company and the Carnegie Brothers Steel Company. He was a lifelong opponent of organized labor, and his refusal to allow union workers at his mines led to the infamous Homestead strike of July 1892, in which ten men were killed and sixty wounded. The same month, Frick himself was attacked in a failed assassination attempt by a twenty-five-year-old Russian anarchist. He cabled both his mother and Carnegie: "Was twice shot, but not dangerously."

Frick grew disenchanted with Carnegie and became honorary chairman of the board in December 1894. Five years later, Carnegie abolished Frick's position as chairman of the H. C. Frick Coke Company and the two went to court over the value of Frick's interest. In March 1900 a settlement was reached in which Frick received $30 million in securities. In 1901, having moved from Pittsburgh to New York, Frick became one of the directors of J. P. Morgan's newly incorporated United States Steel Corporation; his official biographer noted that he was the largest individual railway stockholder in the world.

  A visit to William H. Vanderbilt's art-filled mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue spurred Frick to begin collecting paintings himself (his first purchase was a Pennsylvania landscape), much of it under the guidance of art dealers Roland Knoedler and Joseph Duveen. The Vanderbilt mansion, with its elegant furnishings and art-lined galleries, made quite an impression on Frick; according to biographer (and great-granddaughter) Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Frick later remarked, "It is all I shall ever want."  

Before he could pursue his mansion dreams, misfortune began to hound Frick. On May 31, 1889, the dam gave out at Lake Conemaugh, a private lake at a fishing and hunting club Frick had helped found. The dam collapse sent millions of gallons of water downriver toward Johnstown, PA, killing 2,209 people—at the time, the worst disaster in American history. Though Frick quickly set up a relief fund for the victims' families, he couldn't fully dodge the club's—or his own—role in the tragedy. Soon thereafter, his young daughter Martha died, and a year later, his son Henry, Jr.
A national scandal followed when Carnegie Steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, went on strike, in part due to Frick's ongoing attempts to break the union. On July 6, 1892, a battle broke out between steelworkers and the Pinkerton agents Frick had contracted to reopen the mill. In the skirmish, nine union members and three Pinkerton agents were killed. In retaliation, anarchist Alexander Berkman burst into Frick's office two weeks later and shot him twice at close range. Remarkably, Frick not only survived the attack but was back at his desk within the week. But Frick's reputation was sullied, and it was the beginning of a decade of strained relations between Frick and Carnegie that would ultimately send Frick from Pittsburgh to New York. (Not, however, before Frick built his company's Pittsburgh headquarters right next to Carnegie's—and taller—so that his building would overshadow his rival's.)

After a brief stay at Sherry's Hotel in New York, Frick rented the Vanderbilt mansion, the same house that had started him on his path as an art collector, in 1905. He packed up fifty paintings from Clayton, his Pittsburgh mansion, and moved them to New York, allegedly because the pollution from his own coke ovens and Carnegie's mills was damaging the art. This was the beginning of what would become the Frick Collection.

In New York, Frick began to collect paintings that (in Sanger's words) "reflected the high society into which he was moving," including portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough, a Turner landscape, and El Greco's Saint Jerome. Then, in 1906, Frick took a step to ensure his ever-growing art collection would be preserved for future generations: he purchased the lot at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 70th Street so that he could move out of the Vanderbilt house into a grand mansion of his own.
There was only one problem—a beloved Beaux-Arts masterpiece stood in Frick's way. 

This was the Lenox Library, a rare book and manuscript collection founded by philanthropist James Lenox and housed on the block of Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st streets in a building designed by the "dean" of American architecture, Richard Morris Hunt. The Times had deemed the library "a structure of chaste and simple design…gratifying to the eye," and its reputation as a Hunt masterpiece only grew with time. Ostensibly a public library, it was nearly impossible to visit: it was only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays and admission required written permission of the librarian. 

By the time Frick set his sights on the property, the Lenox Library was on the verge of moving out. In 1895, the brand-new New York Public Library, which had been struggling to get off the ground, approached both the Lenox and Astor libraries with the idea of a merger. When the Lenox trustees agreed, the NYPL considered moving into the Lenox space, perhaps building an expansion onto what was then vacant land stretching toward Madison Avenue. 

Instead, the New York Public Library chose to build from scratch at its current 42nd Street location. But that didn't immediately clear the way for Frick. The terms of James Lenox's will dictated that if the Fifth Avenue land wasn't going to be used for a library, it would revert to his heirs. Luckily for Frick, the New York Public Library was so eager for the $2.25 or $3 million (sources differ) he was offering for the property that they convinced the Lenox heirs to back the deal, adding the provision that Frick could not begin construction until the library was emptied in 1912.

However, before construction could begin, Frick had to clear the hurdle of public opinion. Even though few people had used the Lenox Library, it had become a part of the fabric of Fifth Avenue. Even Richard Morris Hunt, who'd died in 1895, still gazed at it every day: his grand memorial, designed by Bruce Price and sculpted by Daniel Chester French, had been erected on the other side of Fifth Avenue in 1898, specifically placed to forever enjoy the view of the Lenox Library facade. Frick was going to ruin everything.

In May 1912, to appease lovers of Hunt's edifice, Frick offered to have the Lenox Library torn down and rebuilt, stone by stone, inside Central Park. While the park's commissioner and Art Commission agreed (they hoped to demolish the 1848 arsenal that served as the park's headquarters and use the Lenox Library in its place), there was an immediate public outcry: people feared that Frick's gift would set a dangerous precedent of haphazard construction. What other buildings would get dumped in the park for posterity's sake?

At a hastily called meeting of the Parks and Playgrounds Association, numerous citizens, political leaders, and architects condemned the plan; as one letter-writer put it to the Times: "Something must be very wrong with things as they are if it is possible for the public to lose any portions of such a Park. Surely something can be done to prevent this ever-recurring danger of stealing, under one pretense or another, any portion of so valuable a fresh-air space in a great city like this."

Angry at the rebuff, Frick withdrew the offer within a week. Despite pleas for him to rebuild the Lenox Library elsewhere, Frick instructed his architects, Carrere & Hastings, to demolish the Lenox building as soon as possible and begin the construction of his mansion.

In Frick's mind, he and Andrew Carnegie were still in competition, and it irked Frick that Carnegie's home at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street was one of the grandest in the city. (Today, it houses the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.) Purportedly, Frick's instructions to architect Thomas Hastings were to make Carnegie's 64-room home "look like a miner's shack." Whether that's true or not remains unclear, but what is certain is that Frick selected Hastings on the advice of art dealer Joseph Duveen with the intention of building a home that would be turned into a public art museum after his death (and the death of his wife, Adelaide). 

As Frick succinctly put it: "I want this collection to be my monument." What remained unspoken, of course, was Frick's worry that he would be remembered as the man who broke the Homestead Strike and caused the Johnstown Flood. As surely as Carnegie's libraries and endowments were securing his legacy, so too would Frick's collection.

In the decade Frick lived in the Vanderbilt mansion, he turned his attention to improving his holdings with old masters, including Rembrandt's Polish Rider and a trio of Vermeers. Upon the death of J.P. Morgan in 1913, Frick purchased the series of Fragonard panels called The Progress of Love from the banker's estate and had a special room constructed in the mansion to house the panels. Frick spent upwards of $5 million on the new house (not including the price of the land or demolition of the Lenox Library), but that was nothing compared to the fortune he was spending on art: the Fragonard panels were worth $1.25 million alone. Henry and Adelaide moved into the home in the autumn of 1914 ("a trifle north of what has been called the centre of the fashionable city life," the Times sniffed), but Frick got to enjoy his new digs for just five years: he died on December 2, 1919. Only at the time of his death did the public learn that the house and art collection would one day become a museum "for the purpose of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects."

Frick had started to collect paintings seriously in his late forties and began to focus on his collections even more after his move to New York in 1905. In 1913, construction began on Henry Frick's New York mansion on Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st Streets. The home he erected cost nearly $5,000,000, including the price of the land. The firm of Carrère and Hastings designed the house to accommodate Frick's paintings and other art objects. Even the earliest plans for the residence take into account Frick's intention to leave his house and his art collection to the public, as he knew the Marquess of Hertford had done with his London mansion and comparable collection some years earlier. Frick changed the arrangements of the rooms as he acquired new works to fill the house.

Frick died in 1919. In his will, he left the house and all of the works of art in it together with the furnishings ("subject to occupancy by Mrs. Frick during her lifetime") to become a gallery called The Frick Collection. He provided an endowment of $15 million to be used for the maintenance of the Collection and for improvements and additions.

Unlike other house museums, such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, the trustees of the museum continued to collect art after Frick's death, many of the acquisitions overseen by his daughter, Helen. Despite the feeling inside that Henry Clay Frick has, perhaps, just stepped out for a moment, the museum is not a 1914 home frozen in time, but an ever-expanding, world-class collection. It plays host to traveling shows, such as the recent blockbuster Mauritshuis exhibit featuring both "The Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Goldfinch," and if such crowded exhibitions are to become more frequent, the current expansion plans seem understandable. Some would argue that crowds are not what the Frick needs, but Frick might not agree. When he was still alive, nearly anyone who wanted an admission ticket to the mansion's West Gallery was given one; as Sanger notes in her biography, Frick derived so much pleasure from those who enjoyed his paintings that he "would often step silently in [to the gallery], observe the observers, and...steal out again, unnoticed." 

Links
https://www.nyarc.org/content/frick-remembering-lenox-library
https://www.frick.org/
https://www.frick.org/about/history/henry_clay_frick
https://ny.curbed.com/2014/7/29/10068128/the-controversial-origins-of-new-york-citys-frick-collection