Martha Frick Symington Sanger will present a talk, “Henry Clay Frick: Mourning Became the Collector” on the influences behind one of the greatest art collections in the world, March 9, at 5:00 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts, Washington College.
Sanger, who is a great-granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick, is the author of three books on the Frick family: Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait; Helen Clay Frick: Bittersweet Heiress; and The Henry Clay Frick Houses: Architecture-Interiors-Landscapes In the Golden Era.
In a 2007 article for the Wall Street Journal, Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian cited Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait as one of the best books ever written on America’s Gilded Age philanthropists.
I reached out to the author with a few questions about her work, which is based on over twenty years research into the Frick family.
KC: Given the intricacies of family relations, were you apprehensive about telling the story of Henry Clay Frick in such intimate terms?
MFSS: There were no apprehensions on my part concerning the intricacies of family relations when writing about Henry Clay Frick in intimate terms, particularly after ten years of research. There was only anger and annoyance when roadblocks surfaced. As an author the only thing that mattered to me was writing the truth as it was revealed. Valentines to suit family needs or vendettas against family members contribute nothing to the historic picture.
KC: One of the most engaging aspects to the book is the sometimes tender picture it paints of a man who was at once hard fisted as well as sensitive. Did this picture of him develop during your research or were you aware of it prior to writing?
MFSS: My understanding of Frick as both a hard fisted and a sensitive man developed by accident when I became concerned about alcoholism in the Frick family. Frick’s maternal, Mennonite grandfather, Abraham Overholt, manufactured Old Overholt straight rye whiskey, an elixir that always exceeded the demand in the 1870s. In 1986, we intervened on my mother’s alcoholism (Henry Clay Frick’s granddaughter). She divorced my father after a forty-eight-year marriage and disinherited me and my two sisters.
Shortly thereafter I decided to study the Frick family papers then housed in the Carriage House at Clayton, Henry Clay Frick’s home in Pittsburg (now the Frick Art & Historical Center). They were jumbled about in hundreds of cardboard boxes. As I sifted through the boxes I came upon a skeletal photograph of Frick’s daughter, Martha, the ill-fated child who died in 1891 after a four-year struggle from having swallowed a pin. My mother and I were named after this child. When this photograph surfaced my interest changed from wanting answers about alcoholism to wondering about Martha. In the family we only knew “Little Aunt Martha” as the glorious, auburn-haired beauty portrayed by Theobald Chartran in an 1896 posthumous portrait. I did know, however, that Henry Clay Frick suffered a lifelong, complicated bereavement over her death. The effect of Martha’s tragic passing on Henry Clay Frick and his family seized me. His reaction to her death, I sensed, was the key to his reality, his humanity. Not until five years into the ten-year project of writing his biography did I see the relationship between the paintings Frick collected and the people, places, and events from his past. Initially I was simply going to include a list of paintings in the Appendix. But as the paintings kept revealing themselves, they became the window of his truth. With his masterpieces Frick seemed to be writing his autobiography and soothing his pain.
KC: You describe beautifully the psychological basis of selection that lies behind Frick’s art collection. As a collector, did he follow his heart, finding in art images that ran parallel to his own torments?
MFSS: Helen Frick said of her father that he purchased paintings that were pleasant to live with, paintings that fit his sense of harmony. Whether each painting he acquired struck a chord in his conscious mind or in his unconscious is hard to know. He only collected portraits, landscapes, and four personally significant religious paintings. He kept portraits that lost their attribution and touched the portrait subjects’ faces as if they were alive. He also had a strange beam of white light installed in the West Gallery skylight. When the room was darkened at night, he there sat alone staring into the the portrait subjects’ faces illumined by the odd light. The portrait subjects, as Bernard Berenson said, looked “like ghosts coming out of the gloom.”
KC: You write a great deal of his relationship with his daughter, Helen Clay Frick, a woman who was quite forceful in her own right. Did you come to see her as trapped in a family situation she could not quite control?
MFSS: Helen Clay Frick, his only surviving daughter, was certainly trapped by a family situation she couldn’t control. Bonded to her father at age three, when Martha died, hers became an on-going attempt to resolve her father’s grief. Abandoned by her mother’s retreat into depression and despised by her brother for becoming her father’s favorite, Helen lived in fear of disappointing Frick even after his death in 1919. To her married brother’s fury she, an unmarried, thirty-one-year-old woman, inherited the lion’s share of Frick’s fortune left to family and friends. Although Helen developed four different art collections, established two historic sites, created a wilderness park and a nature sanctuary, founded the Frick Art Reference Library, built four historic buildings, established the art department at the University of Pittsburgh and a fresh air home for girls working in the textile mills on Boston’s North Shore, she remained a prisoner of the family system until her own passing in 1984, at age ninety-six.
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