Museum Hopper

I was in a suburb of New York City two weeks ago and had to get to the Morgan Library .  It has been a number of years since I have been able to make it there and it is probably my favorite place in New York.  This aptly was visit #10! It is peaceful and full of light in the museum.  It was busy in there, but still quiet.  I continue to love how elegantly the museum meshed contemporary with the traditional elements. Not sure if you can see it, but the grates are full of birds I focused on my visit on three major exhibits: John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal , Verdi: Creating Otello and Falstaff-Highlights from the Ricordi Archives , and the main library wing . I really like the John Singer Sargent oil painting portraits.  He is quite well known for these paintings that he completed in the early portion of the 1900s including many of the souls and their children.  He painted so many famous people of that time period.  He ended up swit...

i checked out the morgan library last friday!   it was like coming home.  they had a trifecta of exhibits going on: degas: drawing and sketchbooks , roy lichtenstein: the black-and-white drawings, 1961-1968 , and mark twain: a skeptic's progress .  the degas drawings were pretty cool.  they were the originals and for the most part, not the final paintings.  i liked seeing how the crazy artist brought his masterpieces together.   this was in the small enclosed room.    the mark twain exhibit emphasized how contrary and skeptical he really was.  it also demonstrated to me how much of a presence mark twain ended up being near the end of his life.  he really seemed to be everywhere and have an opinion about everything. the lichtenstein early drawings were fascinating.  you could really see the evolution of his trademark style with the dots.  it seems that he was really always working on ordinary objects and turning them ...

i went to the morgan library today as a last hooray before i leave new york city. i love it there. as usual, it was a completely different museum this time. i did not see a single repeat item. first i checked out the upstairs gallery. it has an exhibit about palladio , a venetian renaissance architect. the exhibit was titled palladio and his legacy: a transatlantic journey . his architecture influenced many famous american buildings including the capitol building and the national gallery of art (just visited!) in washington, d.c. the next exhibit i watched was romantic gardens: nature, art and landscape design . this was broken up into a few different deeper digs into a few countries: france, england (the most detail), united states and germany. romantic gardens were supposedly more natural (although could be completely stylized to look natural) as opposed to structured formal gardens. one of the biggest examples of the planned "natural" gardens was central park i...

after suzi and i left the new york historical society, we headed down to the morgan library for a visit to the morgan library . we wanted to see the new exhibit, a woman's wit: jane austen's life and legacy . she also had never been to the morgan and wanted to see it before she heads back to ann arbor. the exhibit was one large room broken into about four different sections. this exhibit did not really require navigating in any particular order. each wall/glass cabinet was somewhat self contained when it came to the material. the morgan library has the largest collection of jane austen manuscripts and letters in the world. it also has the only remaining complete jane austen manuscript, lady susan . i loved seeing the early editions of her novels in particular emma and pride and prejudice . this exhibit (like the ny historical society) also had a number of satirical cartoons mocking the societal customs and dress of the day. placing these cartoons side by side with ...

i decided to stop by the morgan library on saturday after my volunteering. i am really happy i did since they had the exhibit, where the wild things are: original drawings by maurice sendak . this was very timely given that the movie with the same title was just released as well. it shows some of the early drafts as well as some of the final illustrations. sendak originally had planned to name the book where the wild horses are . the morgan has an exhibit opening in 2 weeks about jane austen that i am VERY excited about, a woman's wit: jane austen's life and legacy . times visited: 6 time in museum: 20 minutes overall: A

this weekend, we (visitors and the roommate and i) headed to the morgan library to finish our christmas in new york tour. to be honest, i also really wanted to see their manuscript of a christmas carol . they were very good sports. the visitors really like the babar exhibit. we spent the most time in this section. everyone seemed to like it from the little kids to the "grown ups" wandering around. the exhibit is broken up into a room for the father's book and a room for the son's. reviewers have said that they have never seen a series written by two people so seamlessly integrated and transitioned. personally, i never realized it was written by two different people. we did see the only manuscript (not just remaining, the only one ever) of charles dickens' a christmas carol . he wrote it in 6 weeks and couldn't afford lots of paper this manuscript is a mess. we also went saw john milton's a paradise lost . they have the only remaining (in ...

i went to the morgan library today because they have a new exhibit about babar, the elephant king! i went to the morgan alone today. i love the morgan. it had a lot of little kids running around today because of the exhibit. the exhibit was drawing babar: early drafts and watercolors . they have some really cool original drawings and first editions of the books. it was so cool to see the originals. they had great captions that really explained the differences and what some of the original ideas for the books, illustrations and plot were. they also had all three of their gutenberg bibles on display! times visited: 4 time spent: 30 minutes overall: A

i will preface this by saying that the morgan library is my favorite "small" museum in new york. i have been to this museum three times. once by myself, once with my parents, my high school sister and my roommate and once with my sister in college. most recently, it had a great exhibit on van gogh . it looks like they have one coming up on art from the uffizi in florence. the stuff they have all the time: printed: 3 out of the 11 remaining gutenberg bibles, original shakespeare, jane austen, emily and charlotte bronte, mark twain, babar (the elephant), thoreau, dickens, einstein, jefferson, milton, newton and hemingway. music: mahler, brahams, mozart, chopin, debussy, beethoven bibles: they fill one 5x7 feet wall (just a note: the stuff rotates so they don't have all on display at once) the museum was just reopened about a year ago converting most of the house into a more usable museum, but some of it still orginal (the Morgan library and study). it is ...