From 1920 to 1924 the Library was housed in thebowling alley in the basement of the family residence (now The Frick Collection). For the next decade, it occupied a single-story Indiana limestone structure designed by Thomas Hastings at 6 East 71st Street, the site that had been intended for Frick's sculpture gallery. The Library opened its doors to the public at its present location, formerly 10 and 12 East 71st Street, adjoining the Collection, in 1935. The new structure, which is equivalent to a six-story building, was designed by John Russell Pope, who transformed the residence during the same period as part of an overall project to create two important public institutions dedicated to the study and appreciation of art. It incorporated the latest technologies. The floors were supported by the shelving pillars. There was air-conditioning in the book stacks. A dumbwaiter lift moved books between floors, and there was a Telautograph, an electrical writing system used to communicate written requests for materials. Unusually and farsightedly, there was room for seventy years growth in the collection. The firm of Buttrick, White, and Burtis renovated the third floor Reading Room and the sixth floor office spaces in 1996.

During the comprehensiverenovation of The Frick Collection's historic buildings begun in 2020, the museum and Frick Art Reference Library moved to a temporary home,Frick Madison. From spring 2021 into summer 2024, the Library continued to serve students and scholars from a reading room in the Breuer building. During the residency, the Library marked the centennial of its public opening with acelebratory publication, ongoing video series, and more.

Photo Expeditions

As early as 1922, Helen Clay Frick commissioned photo-expeditions to record significant and seldom reproduced works of art in Europe and America. With characteristic determination and resourcefulness, she gained access to otherwise inaccessible private collections with the help of art experts and photographers such as Lawrence Park, Mario Sansoni, W. W. S. Cook, and Mme Clotilde Briere. Over the next four decades, the Library amassed a collection of more than 56,000 negatives that are today among its most valued resources. In many cases, these negatives record works that have subsequently been damaged, altered, lost, or destroyed. They are part of thePhotoarchive collection and many of the images can be accessedonline.

War Years

During World War II, the Committee on the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas of the American Council of Learned Societies was based at the Library. The Committee used the Library's visual records and location indexes to help pinpoint sites of important works of art that should be spared the devastations of war. For six months, the Library closed its doors to the public in order to serve the war effort. After the war, these records were used to aid in the repatriation of art and continue to be used for this purpose.

Growth

In 1984, the Library, which was its own institution and financially supported almost entirely by Helen Clay Frick, became an integral part of The Frick Collection. 

In 1997, the Library established an Archives department that organizes and makes accessible the institutional records of The Frick Collection and manuscript materials acquired by the Library related to the history of art and collecting such as the Loewi-Robertson, Rosenberg and Steibel, and Peter Johnson archives.

In 2001, the Library established a digital preservation program under the supervision of the Library Conservation department, which was founded in 1980, to scan or photograph images, books, and ephemera from the collections of the Library. These items can be accessedonline.

Since 2006, the Library has been a partner in theNew York Art Resources Consortium(NYARC), along with the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The three libraries share acatalog and a web-archivingprogram.

From 2007 to 2021, the Library supported theCenter for the History of Collecting to encourage and support the study of the formation of collections of fine and decorative arts, both public and private, in Europe and the United States from the Renaissance to the present day. The Center offered fellowships and seminars, hosted symposia and study days, published symposia proceedings, and created tools to assist with accessing primary documents generated by art collectors and dealers. A list of its publications can be found in Library'scatalog.

In 2014, the Library established adigital art history program to provide art historians with the digital tools and data necessary to explore new methodologies and to stimulate collaborations between art historians and specialists from a variety of fields.

In 2015, the Helen Clay Frick Foundation donated theFrick Family Papers, which had been on deposit since 2001, to the Library.

Further Reading:

Barker, Nicolas. "The Frick Art Reference Library." The Book Collector, Summer 1992.

Bury, Stephen J., Ed. One Hundred Objects in the Frick Art Reference Library. Axminster: Uniformbooks, 2022.

Knox, Katharine McCook. The Story of the Frick Art Reference Library: The Early Years. New York: Frick Art Reference Library, 1979.