What Arts Did Jp Morgan Donate to the Metropolitan Museum What Arts Did Jp Morgan Have
Art Review | 'New at the Morgan: Acquisitions Since 2004'
J. P. Morgan'southward Shopaholic Approach to Art Collecting Gets an Update
"He'southward got to be stopped" was, y'all imagine, a phrase never far from the lips of J. P. Morgan's business partners. Morgan, they knew, was an addicted shopper. His drug of pick was fine art. And because his ambition was bottomless, his habit price a lot.
In 1901 he paid a Paris dealer $400,000 — a king'southward bribe at the time — for Raphael'southward "Colonna Madonna." Then, in a fit of impulse buying, he grabbed a Rubens portrait, a Titian "Holy Family unit" and an English language hunting scene on his fashion out the door.
And painting wasn't fifty-fifty his thing. What he really craved were exquisitely worked decorative objects, the more than ornate the ameliorate. These he tended to collect in bulk: roomfuls of article of furniture, porcelains by the crate, and books by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, from hand-painted medieval manuscripts to modern deluxe editions.
Some of this he stored at a family home in London, and some at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art, where he was president of the lath. The rest concluded up at his neo-Renaissance library-pavilion on Madison Artery. To visit him at that place, surrounded by Madonnas, missals and brocaded walls, must have been some kind of papal experience.
Nearly a century later on Morgan's death, his library is nevertheless collecting — less spectacularly, but even more eclectically, on the evidence of "New at the Morgan: Acquisitions Since 2004," a potpourri of 100 drawings, manuscripts, books, messages and photographs at the Morgan Library & Museum. A few of these items might give him suspension — an Andy Warhol poster of a liquor store receipt; a note from Oscar Wilde to his boyfriend — only most would probably make perfect sense, and, of course, leave him wanting more.
Certainly Anthony van Dyck's suave and ladylike ink portrait of the 17th-century architect Jacques Dubroeucq would have pleased him. So, no doubtfulness, would John Singer Sargent's watercolor of the creative person Paul-César Helleu, the original painter of the K Central Terminal ceiling, whose long, lithe, leisurely course stretches right out of the movie.
If there are no grand paintings in the show, in that location are studies for some. The head of a young woman fatigued in chalk by Watteau as well graces the central figure in his 2 great "Cythera" paintings. Here, as there, you wonder what she is feeling as she looks back over her shoulder. Anticipated pleasure? Sinking-in regret? The paintings exit open up the question of whether she and her band of amorous friends are setting out for the Isle of Love or departing from information technology.
Van Gogh'southward ink study of his Arles sleeping accommodation, drawn in a letter to Gauguin from October 1888, is nearly identical to his painting of the same subject field. Both images are true-to-life portraits of a place. Only they are also projections of a fantasy: a wished-for safe haven as solidly grounded as obviously country furniture.
Samuel Palmer's "Oak Tree and Beech, Lullingstone Park," done around 1828, works in the opposite psychic direction. Using a mix of pencil, ink, watercolor and gouache, Palmer creates an exacting depiction of natural forms in shades of greyness, then sets a line of yellow and red paint sizzling along the afar horizon: the granite-hard earth nosotros know will soon be a bonfire of lite.
Equally an creative person, Palmer, at least early on on, had it all: skill, passion, focus and imagination. In the way true visionaries do, he managed to get outside himself, across himself, and to record what he saw from that distant but intimate place. If I were to recommend a scattering of underappreciated historical figures for young artists to seek out today, he would be among them.
Speaking of today, the show — organized by Isabelle Dervaux, curator of Modernistic and contemporary drawings at the Morgan — has a surprising corporeality of post-World War Two material. There'south that Warhol poster, done in 1967 to raise money for The Paris Review. And in that location are masterly sketches for projects by Bruce Nauman and Robert Morris. Mr. Morris's proposal to control the earth'south temperature past burying heaters and air conditioners here and there had no takers in 1969, merely seems very much of the present global-warming moment.
Morgan himself might have been tickled by Red Grooms's 1974 watercolor portrait of the lensman Rudy Burckhardt dressed in hiking boots and a squashed-down sun hat on a visit to Machu Picchu. Information technology'due south easy to envision a time-traveling Rembrandt in simply such togs for just such a trek.
What Morgan would have made of Diane Arbus's 1966 portrait of Frank Stella with a big grin and no front teeth is harder to surmise. To be honest, with then many photography-collecting museums in the city, the Morgan's involvement in the medium seems abreast the point, except, maybe, when the photos are part of something else, as they are in a 46-page alphabetic character with pasted-in snapshots by William Randolph Hearst detailing — and I do mean detailing — his 1905 summertime trip through Spain.
Very much to the point, all the same, is the continuing expansion of the Morgan'due south book and manuscript collection. The gem among the new arrivals is an early-16th-century French prayer book made for, and possibly commissioned by, Claude de France, married woman of François I. Smaller than a BlackBerry and sweetly illustrated, it is open to an image of the Holy Trinity framed by a truelove knot, François'southward signature keepsake.
The show is total of signatures. Some, like this one, are symbolic; others are traced by famous hands. When the 18th-century English novelist Samuel Richardson expounds on the narrative intricacies of his novel "Clarissa," he writes similar a nonstop talker, in a pinpoint fine hand, border to edge on the folio and right to the very bottom, using minimal punctuation and wasting non a millimeter of space.
Oscar Wilde, on the other mitt, comes across as utterly relaxed in a brew note to Lord Alfred Douglas that reads, "I should awfully similar to go away with y'all somewhere where it is hot and colored." The words, widely spaced, drift languidly downwards the page. If spoken, they would be interspersed with pauses and sighs.
Sound isn't a sensation usually associated with manuscript displays, but it's ever nowadays, at least by implication, in this ane. Sometimes it comes through written tone. The voice in a business letter past Johann Sebastian Bach is crisply polite, a dutiful thank yous from a very busy man.
George Frideric Handel, past contrast, comes across as personable and expansive in a letter to one of his English librettists, in which he both flatters the writer and nudges him into sending — immediately, please — the words for Act III of an opera in progress.
Opera fans will option upward the fizz of excitement emanating from the show's musical ephemera: a playbill for the 1788 Leipzig premiere of Mozart's "Don Giovanni"; a set up of tickets for Wagner's "Ring" cycle during the 1876 debut season at Bayreuth festival in Germany. And the music itself is there, soundless but clear, in written and printed scores.
Beethoven spins out ideas for a symphony — his Seventh — on a strip of notebook paper dating to 1812. Wagner marks upward a vocal-piano proof of "Die Meistersinger," telling the printer where stage directions should go. You tin hear recordings of excerpts from both works at a listening station ready in the gallery. Only the sight of familiar scores is moving in distinctive ways.
A beginning-edition copy of Palestrina's Pope Marcellus Mass, printed in Rome in 1567, evokes memories of vocal textures every bit lucid every bit flowing water, which feel at dwelling in this mini-Vatican of an fine art museum. The score is too a reminder of what fueled Morgan's shopping mania, uncurbable and lifelong. What compelled him was not primarily a love of dazzler or ideas or status, yous gauge, but the primal need for things: firm, tangible, right here, correct now — or rather hither and there, now and then, in this polyphonic, time-leaping show.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/arts/design/17morg.html