Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 89

Bln Frick Collections New Room Is Worth Waiting For 3 4- ''o-s-ss'vv -1' 'S-i 'V Ik'" -5' ysV; JS5-. Courtesy the nick Collection, Hi York Architect John Bayley's photo of the Frick's new wing. was to make more of everything, reacting against the modern, less-is-more tradition of austere white boxes. We decided it would be weak to mimic Hastings style, Bayley said. Every generation sees something different it likes in the past.

Hastings was working with Edwardian ladies trailing tea gowns. Were not like tht anymore. We want something rougher. Vigor and robustness is what we wanted Were so tired of little details that get lost. Refinement isnt what were interested in.

The architects wanted something more dive and gutsy, Poehler said. So they chose as their inspiration another exaggerated toy, the Grand Trianon at Versailles, built around 1687. For details, they looked to three lunettes (semicircular decorations) which at one point had been stripped from above the windows of the original Frick mansion. The lunettes are now set in three curved niches in a new walled garden behind the Frick, and the three arched windows of the new waiting room face them. The lunettes had a sea theme; so do the room's indoor friezes (the band of decoration at the top of the wall).

There are lots of seashells and such, and the length and narrowness of the room naturally lead the eye up 20 feet to the carvings. Of course, the danger with this sort of exaggeration is that it can ctobs the line into vulgarity. A committee of trustees insisted on punting the walls of the room tangerine and the details white in a sort of Williamsburg tea room reproduction that was indeed vulgar. However, that is to be repainted to blend all that robustness into a new classicism. Its all a bit difficult when a museum is largely supported by a single family.

Also, since its a small museum where everyone shares responsibilities, Everett Fany, the young director who came to his post after being curator of European paintings at the much more impersonal Metropolitan Museum, wanted to involve his curators in the weekly planning meetings for the new wing. So, to a certain extent, the addition was planned by committee. Among the happy things the project did was to involve craftsmen in enlarging the hand-forged gates, or chipping at the limestone. It might seem it would be their only chance to take on such an artistic assignment. No such thing, Bayley said.

We thought wed be No. 1 on their hit parade. Not at alL Wed march in and expect them all to fall on their heads because we wanted some handmade hinges, and theyd say, Wait a minute. We have a 56-room job for Sheikh so-and-so in Iran. ii By Ante! Wallach The Frick Collection, that island of reassuring opulence at 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, appears to be one of the few things, in a persistently changing world, that never change.

Paintings are seldom moved. So Vermeers Mistress and Maid at the foot of the grand marble stairway, or Rembrandt Polish Rider and De La Tours The Education of the Virgin on the north wall of the West Gallery, can become old friends. The Hogarth and the Reynolds paintings are at home in the dining room of the former mansion, still set up as a dining room. And it seems that there was never a time when it was impossible to sit under the skylight facing the fountain in the indoor court. In fact, there was such a time.

Henry Clay Frick himself, who built the house between 1913 and 1914, never had such a court. And while never seeming to change, the Frick Collection illustrates well the changes that different generations and different styles of taste can bring. At the end of this month, if all goes well, the Frick Collection will open a new wing to the public. The collection hates to draw attention to itself, and, indeed, in the past it has not been necessary. The wing had to be built because the crowds, which numbered about 50 visitors a day when the collection first opened to the public in 1935, have recently grown to as many as 1,500 a day.

Since fire laws permit only 250 persons in the galleries at a time, lines have formed on the street, making a waiting room the best possible tnsw6r So now there is a new waiting room, which will open with minimum fanfare the moment it is finished. There is also a formal garden, a new cloak room and card shop, a seminar room and print library, and all sorts of fire prevention and air conditioning equipment. There are 16,468 new square feet in all, built at a cost of about $2,110,000, or more than $128 a square foot, plus $2,850,000 more for mechanical systems. Although the collection began this month charging an admission fee of $1 for the first time in its 58-year history, that is attributed to a $100,000 deficit. The deficit was caused by a new tax law, charging a 4 per cent excise tax on investment income derived from private operating foundations.

Most of the Fricks operating money comes from Fricks original $15 million bequest The whole point of the new wing is the new waiting room, a 54-foot-by- 16-foot space with 25-foot-high ceilings aid three massive arched windows looking onto the garden on the outside long wall, and echoing arches on the facing interior wall. It is, if anything, more grand and more opulent than the original mansion itself. The trim is deeper and more elaborate and juts out more; the marble on the floor is deep red and deep gray instead of shades of either. The Renaissance restraint of the original facade gives way to the confectioners fantasy of the new'. And all this in spite of the fact that the new wing is designed in the classical style of the original.

Classical buildings are hardly ever built these days, and only a few other buildings even have new classical additions. The Morgan Library is one of the few. So one might think that architects tackling a classical addition to a beloved old classical building would want to copy a good thing when they saw it. But the architects thought classical ought to be interpreted for its time. Classical architecture in the 1970s would have to be different from classical architecture of 1913-14 or even the 1930s.

And they had precedents to go by. When Thomas Hastings, whose firm also designed the New York Public Library, designed the original building in 1913, Beaux-Arts was in frill sway. There were rules of symmetry to go by and details to copy from earlier build ings that would give suitable solemnity and weight to tne houses of the rich. Frick died in 1919, bequeathing his collection to the public as a center for the study of art and related subjects. In the 1930s, John Pope Hennessy, a fashionable architect of his day, was chosen to convert the space tor the public.

Where a carriage yard had been, he added the fountains of the Garden Court, plus an oval room, an entrance hall and a lecture hall. His spacious designs, still in the classical manner, echoed the outdoor-indoor ambience of the 1930s. For the 1970s addition, the architects had their own point to make. John Bayley, the designer, is president and one or the founders of Classical America, an organization bent on reintroducing classical architecture to Americans. Toward that end, among other things, he organizes tours of New Yorks best classical buildings and was a vocal critic of the Metropolitan Museums new facade when that was renovated some 10 years ago.

Harry van Dyke, the architect of record, has designed modern as well as classical buildings in his day, and is willing to swing either way. G. Frederick Poehler, who translated the designs into reality, has also worked on both, including residential colleges at Yale and the Library of Congress. What they decided to do at the Frick Greene St. Included in the opening exhibition are works by James Bishop, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockbume, Robert Ryman, and Douglas Sanderson.

Chicago artist Thomas Kovachevich will give a of performances entitled Paper Comes 3 a Tuesdays, 11 AM-6 PM, and Wednes-days-Saturdays, 11 AM-9 PM. Becoming bigger boslnem The New York State Council on the Arts has just completed a study which, in chairman Kitty Carlisle Harts, words, shows that New York States nonprofit arts groups are not only a big business but also one that is getting bigger. An analysis of 900 cultural organizations that received fluids from the council from the 1974-75 fiscal year through the current one ending Much 31 showed that their operating costs increased $70 million in those three years, to $110 million. Their payrolls during that time increased from $45 million to $240 million. Revenues also rose, from $329.8 million three years ago to $371.3 million in 1976-77.

Display of qnllt set Twenty quilts by contemporary American Quiltmakers will go on view Feb. 2-25 at the Emily Lowe Gallery, at University in Hempstead. The 14 craftsmen, who made the quilts in everything from quaint designs to abstract patterns and social satire, for the most part come from New England. IX SnOBT In Manhattan, drawing Drawings seem to be enjoying a spate of popularity in Manhattan. Larry Rivers' drawings are on view at Marlborough Gallery, 40 W.

57th through Feb. 5. Jim Dines drawings, as well as his paintings and etchings, are on view at The Pace Gallery, 32 E. 57th through Feb. 12.

And in SoHo, The Drawing Center, a nonprofit center for the exhibition and study of drawing, has just opened at 137 new Alive at the Drawing Center. Its a kind of choreographic work created by making paper float on water and will take place at 8 PM Wednesdays through Saturdays. In addition to drawings, the center will shtiw architectural drawings, sketchbooks, theatrical designs, musical manuscripts mid paper models. Hours are Mondays and.