THE YOUNG FELLOWS BALL
March · The Frick Collection, New York · An Evening · Since 2000
The Young Fellows Ball is one evening in March at the Frick, given by the museum’s supporters under forty-five and attended by about five hundred of them.
It runs from half past eight until midnight, the galleries stay open, and people dance in a house holding three Vermeers.
The House
The Frick is not a museum that acquired a building. It is a house that became a museum.
Henry Clay Frick built it on Fifth Avenue before the first war, filled it with what he had spent thirty years buying, and left instructions that after his wife’s death it should open to the public. It did, in 1935.
Which means the pictures hang where he put them, in rooms scaled for living rather than for viewing. In the Living Hall, Holbein’s portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell face each other across a fireplace with a Bellini between them. The two men destroyed one another, and they have been looking at each other across that room for ninety years.
The house closed for several years for a renovation and has recently reopened, with the second floor, the family’s own rooms, accessible for the first time.
The Fellows
The Young Fellows are the Frick’s supporters between twenty-one and forty-five. The group exists to keep an institution of that age supplied with people who are not.
The ball has been given since 2000 and raises around half a million dollars, which goes to the museum’s education programme and to the research library that serves students across the five boroughs.
It is themed each year, generally to whatever exhibition is hanging, and the room takes the theme seriously. A Gainsborough show produces eighteenth-century silk. A porcelain flower installation produces guests in flowers.
What to Know
It sells out. Recent years have gone within a day of opening, and the only reliable way in is to be a Young Fellow, which requires joining rather than knowing somebody.
Black tie, and the room dresses past it. This is the New York evening where costume and black tie meet, and the people who commit are the ones photographed.
The galleries stay open all night. Most guests spend the evening in two rooms and never reach the Vermeers, which are three of the thirty-odd that exist anywhere in the world.
Half past eight to midnight is short for a ball and it is meant to be. Everyone goes on somewhere afterward.
The Court
The Young Fellows Ball is not the Court’s own. Places, tables and Young Fellow membership are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the evening: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. It sells within a day, so a member who wants it should say so in the autumn.
