The Robber Baron Who Built a Serene Art Museum After Surviving an Assassin's Knife

The elegant galleries of the Frick Collection sit inside the former home of a man who, thirteen years before he began assembling this collection, had ordered an armed private security force against his own steelworkers. Henry Clay Frick's 1892 crackdown on the Homestead strike ended in a pitched battle that killed several men on both sides, and weeks later an anarchist gained entry to Frick's office, shot him twice, and stabbed him repeatedly with a sharpened file before being wrestled to the ground. Frick survived and went on to spend much of the rest of his life quietly acquiring Vermeers, Rembrandts, and Titians — the same paintings that now hang, in near-total silence, in the mansion he built on Fifth Avenue.

Frank Lloyd Wright never saw the reaction to his most famous building. He died six months before the Guggenheim opened in 1959, and the reaction that followed was not what the museum's namesake had hoped for: more than twenty artists, including Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, signed a public letter of protest before the doors even opened, arguing that the building's curved, sloped walls would overwhelm and distort the paintings hung on them. Critics mocked the design as an "upside-down washbasin." Wright, who had fought the museum's own board for years over the unconventional plan, missed both the backlash and the decades of visitors who came to agree the spiral itself was the real masterpiece.