Four Artists Pick Their Favourite Works from the Frick

Jesse Wine on Hans Holbein

In 2013, a friend came up with a brilliant game called ‘Best Quality Worst Quality’ (BQWQ). Each player takes it in turns to say what their BQ and WQ is. And so, gathered in a pub, the fun/hell/therapy ensued. After around 30 minutes, a patently obvious pattern was emerging: someone’s BQ was often also their WQ. A classic might be, ‘BQ: My confident nature. WQ: Friends find me overbearing.’ The game showed that the same quality can be interpreted as negative and positive about the same thing at the same time.

In 2016, I moved to the US. America’s BQ is definitely the Q I found most difficult to grapple with. It is informal. There is a distinct lack of rules and life unfolds in ways that are hard to anticipate. It was a daily shock to see a driver racing up the slow lane, undertaking as if their life depended on it. It emerged that, here, the BQ was also the WQ – for me, at least.

The paradigmatic example of this is ‘sure’:  a word that means both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ all at once – not so much a case of two things being true at once, more that neither thing is true at all!

Sometimes, though, despite the findings of BQWQ, two things are not allowed to be true at once. This is what draws me to the two paintings by Hans Holbein in the Frick: one of Sir Thomas More (1527), devotee of the Catholic Church; the other of Thomas Cromwell (1532–33), devotee of the Church of England and the reformation. At the time, it was not allowed for the two things in which these men believed to both be true at once. More and Cromwell could not exist at the same time: their belief systems were so strict that, should one prevail, the other must inexorably fail (by losing his life).

But, at the Frick, we find them as eternal bedfellows. So, what are Holbein’s BQWQ? Is he offering paintings to the future that contain profound insights into the political and ideological titans of his world? Or is he a commissions mercenary, taking jobs from the highest and most influential bidder? Or are both these things true at the same time? 

I look forward to revisiting the Thomases: Cromwell’s crown of wallpaper sitting atop his head; More’s earnestness so visceral it defies photography. In a US that frequently seems to deny even the existence of ‘truth’, these two embodiments of their respective faiths live on alongside one another, maybe each needing the other to make sense of his own reality. We can play BQWQ with these men, too: so finely painted, so exquisite in their silk and velvet garments, so enlightened, that the way in which their respective BQs and WQs actually manifested – in their capacity for dogma, for cruelty, for intolerance – becomes almost an abstraction.

Jesse Wine is an artist. His work is presented by the Modern Institute at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand A4). He lives in New York, USA.

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi on Eugène Delacroix

I lived in Harare and Johannesburg for 12 years prior to attending university in the US. Once there, I suddenly had a perception of myself as lagging behind in my knowledge of ‘art history’. Euro-American art history, that is. Knowing more than anyone in my painting class – including my lecturer – about African art history didn’t seem to count. I was in a game of catch-up, and my insecurities were spotlit one day in my second year when a lecturer asked if we all knew who Eugène Delacroix was. I reluctantly lifted my hand to admit that I did not and was scolded in front of the entire class: ‘How can a second-year art student not know who Delacroix is?’ Followed by: ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

Delacroix has occupied a unique place in my thinking ever since. Moroccan Interior (1832) – a sketchy watercolour-and-gouache painting over a graphite drawing – is his only work in the Frick Collection. It’s from the artist’s visit to Tangier in the early 1830s, during which he filled notebooks with images of people, mostly women, as well as a few interiors, including this one. A simple stroke of graphite describes an Islamic-style horseshoe archway; a smudge of brown watercolour denotes the back wall of an interconnecting room. Delicate but unfussy details of rugs and cushions tell a small story, turning the space into a specific, personalized place. I love it for its careful and poetic functionality as much as for the unintended questions it raises about the European gaze on Africa. Over the years, it’s become a symbol to me: a reminder to pay attention to how histories are told or taught, and by whom. I think of this work, in its spare beauty, as a complex reminder that I belong.

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi is an artist. Her work is presented by Stevenson at Frieze New York 2025 (Stand D3). She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ann Craven on Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I’m counting down the days until I see Renoir’s La Promenade (1875–76) again at the Frick. I am obsessed with the paint and that the girls are similar, probably twin sisters, and dressed the same. I find myself transported into an intimate moment between mother and child that critics have too often dismissed as merely pretty. Meanwhile, it took me no time to understand why I gravitate toward this painting, yet years to brave repeating my own subject matter, as I always thought I was a twin separated at birth, and that this, too, sends me flying.

The mother’s and little girls’ repeated eyes look upward with such tender assurance that I find myself reaching, too, wanting to touch not just the imagined flowers but the paint itself. Renoir’s painted edges kill me softly: there’s no beginning and no end, just hovering brushstrokes and colours against lights and darks. The dresses of the woman and the children dissolve into the surrounding greenery while remaining distinct. It’s so Renoir to play with the brushed edges melting into reflected light that turns into a symphony of blues, pinks and violets that would shock those who consider him to be decorative. 

This is radical painting. The edges where woman meets nature, where dress meets foliage, where hat meets sky – these are the places where Renoir’s magic happens. Critics call them imprecise, but I see them as brilliant painted time. Nothing in nature is permanent nor has the hard edge our rational minds want to impose. It is always moving. Renoir understood this viscerally. His brushwork creates transitions rather than boundaries, relationships rather than separations. 

This masterpiece reveals everything that makes Renoir revolutionary, even as contemporary viewers continue to overlook his genius. The dappled light filtering through leaves creates a moment suspended in time – not frozen, but alive and breathing before our eyes.

Ann Craven is an artist. She is represented by Karma (Stand B2). Her work is included in the group show ‘A Rose Is’ at FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA, until 21 June. She lives in New York and Maine, USA.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy on François Boucher

There she is, sitting in my mind, her sakura-pink face greeting NYC’s teenage art students visiting the Frick with their art history professor: Boucher’s A Lady on Her Daybed (1743). It is always a welcome distraction from Bronzino’s painting of Lodovico Capponi (1550–55), with his Funny Games pouty face and bulbous white codpiece. Boucher’s model was Marie-Jeanne Buzeau, his collaborator and wife. In this painting, she is so 18th century, with her trendy little shoe and all that blusher; this messy queen, an ADHD creative, her sewing projects thrown on the floor, feeling cute on this Louis XV méridienne.

According to historians, many of Boucher’s figures were based on his wife. Her curvy nude form is a blueprint for his image – she is everywoman. ‘What makes a rococo girl?’ People – myself included – are obsessed with Boucher’s 1759 painting of his patron Madame de Pompadour. What a great pairing: the most famous French royal mistress depicted by the man who would go on to become official painter to the king. Two court functionaries creating the lasting image of rococo royalty.

But here we sit in a more humble, yet decadent, Parisian apartment, in Madame Boucher’s boudoir. The humdrum girlie, posing for her man, giving us a PG version of one of his more risqué bottoms-up nudes, all cheeks pink. Also on display is his collection of Chinese objets: a folding screen, a porcelain tea set and a ceramic figurine placed on a hanging shelf. They emphasize transcontinental interests bridging art and design. His collection reminds us of art’s new replacement for religion: capitalism. Paintings are collectors’ items belonging to networks outside the church. By folding layers of domestic pleasure into their universe, the Bouchers’ creative intimacy shows us bodies no longer framed by the blue robe of Mary or the billowing clouds of Apollo, but by the trappings of contemporary life.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy is an artist. He is represented by Mendes Wood DM (Stand B7). His solo show ‘Princess Pom Pom: Medicine Blue’ is on view at Kamel Mennour, Paris, France until 28 May. He lives in Paris.

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