Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera 
The Frick Madison, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY
Until March 3, 2024

Pastel, that vivid yet exceedingly delicate medium, is at the heart of the Frick collection’s new show setting the contemporary work of Nicolas Party in dialogue with a portrait by 18th-century Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera. 

Carriera was a pastel portraitist who flourished in Venice during the Rococo period. She is not currently a household name, but she was one of Europe’s most sought-after portraitists in pastels. 

Carriera welcomed pilgrims — a euphemism for revellers on their way to Venice’s decadent Carnaval — and recorded their commissioned likenesses. Pastel is a quick medium, and she would complete as many as three portraits in a day. 

“You might liken these portraits to selfies taken by someone on their way to Vegas,” the Frick’s deputy director, Xavier Salomon, quipped at the installation’s unveiling last Wednesday. 

The show focuses on Carriera’s “Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume,” which Mr. Party has placed in the center of an astonishing pastel mural. The mural itself is an enlargement of another famous work, Maurice Quentin De La Tour’s portrait of the Marquise De Pompadour. 

Specifically, it portrays the enlarged and voluminous folds of the Marquise’s dress. Two other walls of the installation feature Party’s own whimsical pastel portraits of De La Tour — himself a lover of the pastel medium — and placed against more mural enlargements of drapery by Jean Etienne Liotard. 

Taken as a whole, it’s an exploration of Rococo sumptuousness and luxurious excess, rendered with fragile delicacy. Mr. Party’s adeptness with pastel is virtuosic, and he uses it effectively to explore the visual resonances between artists who are not necessarily grouped together in the minds of art historians. Mr. Party skillfully draws together the work of Carriera, De La Tour, Liotard and his own with pastel as the link. 

Another area of fascination for Mr. Party, as is evident from the voluminous brocaded folds that spill over the walls of the installation, is fabric.  

“I focused on fabric because that is one area where I think artists of earlier eras could really unleash themselves creatively,” Mr. Party said at the opening of the show. “You couldn’t really go crazy with renderings of faces in Carriera’s era — with three eyes or five noses, say — as modernist or contemporary artists might do.” 

Mr. Party added that while “Carriera’s portraiture is very humane, very psychologically astute, fabric is where you can see she — and the other artists I’ve referenced — really let themselves have fun.” 

It was in the process of researching Carriera for a biography that Mr. Salomon, who curated the current installation, discovered Mr. Party, whose work was featured during a 2019 show at the Flag Art foundation. 

While temporarily housed in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s former home — which has been acquired by Sotheby’s — the Frick has been pairing the work of contemporary artists with artists from its permanent collection. Previously, the museum paired the work of Monet with that of Icelandic installation artist Olafur Eliasson.

The current installation marries art scholarship, intrigue, friendship, and consummate skill, awash in vibrant Rococo drapery.