Communications and Marketing Department

Al Taylor "Fish Tales"

Submitted by Isabelle Dervaux on Thu, 04/02/2020 - 3:44pm

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.

Architecture and Access: A History of the Morgan's Print Room

Submitted by Jennifer Tonkovich on Mon, 07/20/2020 - 12:00pm

A print room—a space to house a collection of drawings and prints, the curators who are responsible for it, and the scholars that come to study the collection—has been an essential feature at the Morgan since 1906 when J. Pierpont Morgan closely collaborated with Charles Follen McKim on the interiors of the library housing his collections.

Comparing Curtains

Submitted by Yona Benjamin on Thu, 10/03/2019 - 12:04pm

The Morgan's Exhibitions on Verdi and Sendak as Explorations of Collaboration and Creativity

One might consider the Morgan’s current exhibitions Verdi: Creating Otello and Falstaff—Highlights from the Ricordi Archive and Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet to have little in common, save for a shared connection to opera. But in fact, there is much linking these two exhibitions, which explore similar themes of artistic resurgence and the power of collaboration and adaptation.

Drawing as Process, Process as Art

Submitted by Yona Benjamin on Wed, 01/22/2020 - 5:13pm

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.”

From "Near East" to "Western Asia": A Brief History of Archaeology and Colonialism

Submitted by Erhan Tamur on Wed, 12/09/2020 - 3:30pm

For peoples of ancient Western Asia, things did not exist until they were named. Names were believed to derive from the intrinsic qualities of things, resonating in perfect harmony with their past, present, and future. At the same time, naming reflected humans' inclination to give an order to the plethora of things, both animate and inanimate, that surrounded them. Being able to name things, then, also denoted control, authority, sovereignty.

Hired in 1936, Retired in 2002: Ruth Kraemer's Extraordinary Career

Submitted by Jennifer Tonkovich on Mon, 12/14/2020 - 5:00pm

When I joined the Morgan’s Department of Drawings and Prints as a graduate intern in 1993, one of my tasks was to aid Ruth Kraemer (1908–2005), the department’s indefatigable researcher who assisted curator Cara Dufour Denison with cataloging the French drawings.

Lady Sybil: hidden histories of the underrepresented in the artistic world of John Singer Sargent

Submitted by Yona Benjamin on Tue, 01/07/2020 - 12:15pm

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

Listen to the Morgan: Playlists from the Music Collections

Submitted by Robin McClellan on Fri, 05/14/2021 - 12:30pm

These playlists open the Morgan’s music collections to your ears. The one rule is that every track is a piece of music that we hold, in physical form, in the Morgan’s vault—either a unique manuscript or a rare print edition. With thousands of scores both handwritten and printed, spanning six centuries of musical creativity, the Morgan’s collections offer plenty of playlist possibilities.