Blog

This blog post is an excerpt by curator Isabelle Dervaux from the catalogue accompanying the Morgan’s exhibition The Drawings of Al Taylor.

In 1991, the German art dealer Fred Jahn visited Taylor’s studio and bought sixty-eight drawings. He subsequently offered to show the artist’s work regularly in his Munich gallery. From then on, Taylor was able to devote himself to his art. He had his first museum exhibition in 1992, at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland.

These three pieces from the Morgan’s music manuscript collection tell a lovely little story, moving the listener from the cold bleakness of winter into the brightness of spring. They are also three of the most popular digitized manuscripts on our website.

In this unwelcome new age of social distance and self-isolation, when many of us hardly venture beyond the thresholds of our homes, I find myself thinking about Nellie Mae Rowe’s “playhouse.”

The most recent acquisition by the Morgan’s Department of Drawings and Prints is a Head of a Girl dating to around 1590 by Denys Calvaert, purchased at Christie’s old master drawing auction in late January 2020. Because we have no immediate plans to exhibit the drawing, a blog post seems a good way to talk about Calvaert, the Head of a Girl, and why the drawing is a welcome addition to the Morgan’s collection.

After finishing my master’s thesis in the history of art and medieval history and working at and with different European museums, I wanted to gain more knowledge about other international collections, their history as well as how their art is handled. My interaction with the Morgan Collection started a few years ago in Germany.

Chalk, pen, wash, paper. Simple materials that create an overwhelmingly complex picture. Until February 2, 2020, the Morgan Library & Museum will exhibit Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman, a reflection on choice pieces from the Morgan’s collection by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino (1591–1666), who was “arguably the most interesting and diverse draftsman of the Italian Baroque era.”

One of my favorite aspects of my job as a curator at the Morgan Library & Museum is when high school and university classes come to see rare materials. The Morgan is not affiliated with a university, so, like Chaucer’s pilgrims, classes must make a bit of a trek to visit these relics.

On October 4, 2019, John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal opened at the Morgan Library & Museum, showcasing heretofore underappreciated aspects of Sargent’s iconic oeuvre. Known primarily as a portrait painter of European and American elite in the early twentieth century, the public is most familiar with his finished, glossy representations of the grand and great.

This is a guest post by Sam Bussan, a PhD student in the Department of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

I spent this summer at the Morgan working with the Literary & Historical Manuscripts Department to catalog the Maria Knox Letters. This collection of sixty-three letters, almost exactly two centuries old, records the life of a British family in India from 1816 to 1822.

This is a guest post by Dawn-Elin Fraser, Associate Arts Professor, Head of Spoken Voice and Speech for the New Studio on Broadway at NYU.

As an Associate Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I teach in the New Studio on Broadway, where our students focus on both musical theater and heightened text. Our student body is talented, eager, and hungry for opportunity. It is also a student population that is overwhelmingly female identified, though the cannon of heightened text (particularly period centered) is primarily written by men with male characters at the heart of the narrative. I wanted to do something to shift that.