A Jewel Box for Translucent Treasures By KEN JOHNSON

In light of the glass-box atrium plugged into the J. P. Morgan Library & Museum a few years

ago, New York cultural custodians might have been understandably alarmed to learn of plans for

architectural intervention at another great institution of Gilded Age ancestry. They need not have

worried. The Frick Collection’s transformation of an outdoor colonnade into an indoor exhibition

space, now called the Portico Gallery, is as subtly noninvasive as the Morgan’s addition is

conspicuously anachronistic.

This is admittedly an unfair comparison: the Frick’s new gallery is not a central thoroughfare but

a lateral cul-de-sac that will be used for rotating displays of decorative arts and sculpture. From

the outside the only visible change to the portico, which faces south over the Fifth Avenue

Garden, are floor-to-ceiling windows, minimally framed in bronze, inserted between the

columns.

Though just 815 square feet, the space feels much more expansive and airy than it really is.

French doors closing in the small rotunda at the end of the portico look as if they had always

been there, and so does a life-size statue of a nude Diana, frozen in midstride on one foot,

beautifully modeled in terra cotta between 1776 and 1795 by the French neo-Classical

sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. She has recently been cleaned and is back on view after a five-

year absence. Elevated on a waist-high pedestal, she seems to gaze over the traffic on Fifth

Avenue with divine disregard for mere human reality. All this was designed and carried out by

the architecture firm Davis Brody Bond.

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, “White Gold: Highlights From the Arnhold Collection of

Meissen Porcelain,” is not the sort of show that will draw overwhelming crowds. Selected from a

promised gift of 131 objects belonging to the New York banker Henry Arnhold, the exhibition

presents 65 pieces of tableware, vases and small, figurative sculptures, dating mainly from 1710

to 1730, the first two decades of the European porcelain-making industry. (The Frick presented a

more extensive show of Mr. Arnhold’s collection in 2008.)

Discovered in China sometime during the first millennium, porcelain is a glassy, cool-white

ceramic valued for its watertight hardness and ability to be molded into forms of extraordinary

delicacy. It is made from a mix of kaolin clay and rocky materials like feldspar, quartz or

alabaster, and fired at high temperatures. Because the first porcelain to be seen in the West came

from China, early European-made examples often imitated Asian styles.

Here at the Frick show, numerous lovely and curious objects invite close looking. A small

incense burner in the form of a seated, Buddha-like figure — whose widely grinning mouth is

lined with tiny teeth made of red stoneware — is a strange example of what was then called red

porcelain. Another fantastic image of the Far East is rendered in miniature and in luridly colorful

glazes on a distinctly Germanic tankard. It shows an Asian emperor addressing his followers

against an ominous background of dark clouds. A small, lavishly ornate teapot has a top in the

form of a bearded man wearing a helmet glazed in gold. A pair of large “bird cage” vases glazed

in blue-and-white floral patterns have bent rods enclosing hollowed midsections once occupied

by little ceramic birds.

To the untrained eye many pieces appear to be relatively nondescript reproductions of Asian

prototypes, the kind of thing you might find cluttering the home of a rich, genteel great-aunt. In

one display case white dishes bearing deftly glazed birds made in China are shown with nearly

exact copies from Meissen, Germany, and it is practically impossible to tell which is which just

by looking.

Early Meissen objects are particularly coveted by collectors and valued by scholars, less for their

aesthetic merit than for their rarity and the technical discoveries and innovations they represent.

As Janet Gleeson recounts in her eminently readable popular history “The Arcanum: The

Extraordinary True Story,” the importing of Chinese porcelain to Europe in the mid-16th century

started a fad akin to tulip mania. Prices skyrocketed, and alchemists ruined their bodies and

minds trying to discover the recipe for “white gold,” or porcelain, which the Chinese refused to

give up.

In 1708 the German alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger came up with a workable formula while

imprisoned and under orders to produce actual gold for the dwindling coffers of Augustus II,

elector of Saxony and king of Poland. Because Augustus II was an extravagantly avid porcelain

collector, he forgave Böttger’s failure on the gold front and sponsored a porcelain-making

factory in Meissen, which survives to this day. Involving industrial espionage, murderous

rivalries, creative persistence under tremendous duress and sad endings for most of its players,

this porcelain’s story deserves to be made into a Hollywood epic.

Today, considering porcelain’s less than magical use as a material for toilets, bathtubs and

myriad other basic objects, it is hard to comprehend the passions that once swirled around it.

Maybe one day something similar will be said of the vexatious fossil fuel known as black gold.

“White Gold: Highlights From the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain” runs through April

29 in the new Portico Gallery for Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Frick Collection, 1 East

70th Street, Manhattan; (212) 288-0700, frick.org.