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:

Lizt in Paris: Enduring Encounters-- The show begins by introducing Franz Liszt as the prodigy who at an early age was already composing as well as concertizing. The section includes an edition of his first published work written at the age of eleven and a playbill for a concert at which Liszt performed a "New Fantasia on Piano-Forte," at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in London at the age of fifteen.

The viewer is then introduced to the maturing Liszt and his encounters with fellow musicians Berlioz, Chopin, Paganini, and later Wagner. Liszt met Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) on December 4, 1830, the eve of the premiere of the Frenchman's Symphonie fantastique. Liszt's transcription (published in 1834) and performances helped popularize the piece, which was not published in its original form until 1845. Both an album leaf in Berlioz's hand containing the waltz theme from the second movement and an early edition of the orchestral score are on view. through November 16


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.

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