At the Morgan Library and Museum
On Friday, Ms NOLA and I visited the Morgan Library and Museum. As at the Metropolitan Museum, there's an important show of Rembrandt's etchings on display, but what I wanted to see was the architecture, which got rave reviews when Renzo Piano's envelope opened, a year ago last April. I had not been very impressed by what I saw in the Times, but I was curious enough to accede to Ms NOLA's suggestion that we make a visit on the last of her Summer Hours afternoons. (We'd had a scheme of going to Coney Island, but the approach of Ernesto scotched that idea.) I hadn't been to the Morgan in years, and not since reading Jean Strouse's superb life of the financier.
The Morgan Library is an assemblage of three older buildings. The oldest, 239 Madison Avenue, was built in 1852 for the Stokes family; it was one of three, and Morgan eventually owned them all, tearing down the other two. (On the linked floor plan, this is the building that contains the Morgan Dining Room and the gift shot. The building was not hitherto part of the public Library.) The newest is the 1928 annex, built by Morgan's son, Jack, four years after he opened the Library to the public. The most arresting structure - at least until now - is what was called "Mr Morgan's Library." Designed by McKim, Mead, and White, it is a redoubtable pavilion of four very ornate rooms. These buildings have now been united by what feels like a vast glass sheath, although it's rather more substantial than that. One thus enters each of the older structures from the rear. The Library itself is entered from a new flight of steps on Madison Avenue. There are a few new galleries, but the principal additions are a new Reading Room and a sunken auditorium. And let's not overlook the glass-box elevators. These seemed designed to boast of the Library's spruce tidyness, and, at least for now, they do.
The original Morgan Library, completed in 1906, was something of a treasury, and more closely resembles a beaux-arts bank than a place in which to read. Here Morgan amassed his collections of the small and the rare. While accredited scholars, I presume, can gain access to the thousands of books in the old library, the Library's holdings are largely off-limits to the casual visitor. Only a few items are on display at any one time. This makes visiting the Library a somewhat precious experience, in both senses of the word. I find that other people's collections of things are almost always somewhat precious, but then I lack the collector's bug.
The combination of vaulting space and innumerable, unseen doodads is jarring. I could not suppress the sense of all hat and no cattle, where "cattle" stands not for objects but for impact. The "hat" - all that new Renzo Piano cubic footage - seems really to be the point of the newly-constituted Library, and I am sure that many, many parties will be given in it.
What did I like? I liked Sargent's portrait of Morgan's daughter-in-law. It graces a flight of stairs, so don't get stuck on the elevator. In a new exhibition space on the second floor, cases in which musical scores were displayed stood to the east of cases holding books and related materials. In one, devoted to Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, there was a sheet on which de Brunhoff brushed wonderful blobs of watercolor in grey, pale green and brown - as if showing his merry king through a fogged and rainstreaked window. I craved it instantly. As for the scores, they're of no small psychological interest. Bach seems to write with a burning impatience; there are no mistakes or erasures, but the swooping lines that bind his runs together suggest a mild panic that something might be forgotten before the composer wrote it down. Beethoven, in contrast, writes like a kid who's having problems with his sums and not having a very good time. I don't think that I've ever seen Schubert before: rather messy. Mozart's scoring looks great, until you try to read it.
And I spent a lot of time trying to read it. No matter where I looked in the manuscript, I could not make out the beginning of the Haffner Symphony. Perhaps the pages have been shuffled. The unbound sheets of Mozart's autograph score sit in an enamel presentation box in the fine, Louie-the-Phooey style so beloved by Ludwig II of Bavaria. A printed fabric lining on the open lid identifies the contents with heavy, Second Empire veneration. We're talking serious kitsch.
