The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street
New York, NY 10016

Tel: (212) 685-0008
Fax: (212) 481-3484
http://www.themorgan.org


The Morgan Library & Museum, occupying a newly enlarged, midtown Manhattan campus designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, houses one of the world's greatest collections of artistic, literary, musical, and historical works. Included in its holdings are original scores of Mozart and Beethoven, drawings by Rembrandt and Rubens, medieval and Renaissance works, three Gutenberg Bibles, literary manuscripts of Dickens and Twain, and five-thousand-year-old Near Eastern carvings.

Current Exhibitions:

Protecting the Word: Bookbindings of the Morgan-- One of the Morgan's core strengths is its collection of historically and artistically significant bookbindings. Begun energetically by Pierpont Morgan himself before the turn of the twentieth century, the collection has grown to over 1,000 volumes. It spans the ages—more than 1,600 years—and many regions of the globe.

Protecting the Word: Bookbindings of the Morgan presents a selection of outstanding works from the collection. Highlights include a bejeweled eighth-century binding used on the famous Lindau Gospels, a magnificent seventh-to-eighth–century Coptic work, and a seventeenth-century English Bible and prayer book in stump work embroidery. Together, these and approximately 50 additional works in the exhibition, demonstrate the skill and artistry of bookbinding at its finest.

The Lindau Gospels, purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1901, was the Morgan's first truly significant acquisition in the field of medieval manuscripts. The value of the manuscript itself, however, is rivaled if not surpassed by its jeweled covers. The lower cover is one of the most important of all medieval bindings. It is one of three contemporary pieces of Carolingian goldsmithing ascribed to the so-called court school of Emperor Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne. The upper cover is dominated by a large gold repoussé figure of Christ crucified within a jeweled cross. Surrounding Christ are ten repoussé figures in lower relief, all in mourning poses.  through March 29 2009


Mr. Morgan's Library and Study--n 1902, owning more treasures than his Madison Avenue home could hold, Pierpont Morgan commissioned Charles Follen McKim (1847–1909) to build a library for them. McKim was regarded as the dean of American architecture; his style infused classical discipline with measured grandeur and opulence, and he proposed to build Morgan an Italianate marble library that would pay architectural tribute to the High Renaissance. In 2006, a century after its completion, the McKim building has remained little changed since Morgan's day. Both the exterior and interior of the original building are designated New York City Landmarks; the secretary of the interior has designated the library a national historic landmark. ongoing

Masterworks from the Morgan Near Eastern Seals-- Pierpont Morgan took great interest in ancient Near Eastern seals, as is evident from his collection, dating 3500–330 B.C. This section of the reopening exhibition displays a number of the best examples of these objects, which are among the earliest known pictorial carvings used to communicate ideas. Created for about three thousand years in the region the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia, or "the land between two rivers," the function of seals was both practical, as a means of identification, and amuletic, intended to protect or benefit the owner in some way. They are among the smallest pictorial objects ever produced—often just one inch in size—intricately detailed by sculptors who carved them with simple tools in semiprecious stones.

This is the first time that the Morgan's collection of seals will be the focus of a theme-based exhibition—examining the development of the iconography of power as represented in the cylinder seals from their beginnings in the late fourth millennium B.C. with the emerging temple states through to the great empires of the first millennium B.C. The exhibition will end with the absorption of Mesopotamia into the Persian Empire, along with its ancient iconography, which was subsequently used by the Achaemenid kings until the arrival of Alexander the Great.

In addition to the cylinder seals, a larger-scale statue from the ancient Near East is on view to demonstrate the close relationship between seals and other major artworks. Highlights of the works on view include Nude Bearded Hero Wrestling with Water Buffalo; Bull-Man Fighting Lion (ca. 2334–2154 B.C.), an Akkadian period seal depicting two heraldic pairs and emphasizing the concepts of force and power, and A Winged Hero Pursuing Two Ostriches (ca. 12th–11th century B.C.), one of the most striking of the Morgan's Middle Assyrian seals.