Morgan Library
Encyclopedia : M : MO : MOR : Morgan Library
The Pierpont Morgan Library now the Morgan Library and Museum is a research library in New York City. It was founded to house the private library of J. P. Morgan in 1906, which included, besides the manuscripts and printed books, some of them in rare bindings, his collection of prints and drawings. The library was designed by Charles McKim from the firm of McKim, Mead and White and cost $1.2 million. It was made a public institution in 1924 by his son, John Pierpont Morgan, Jr..
Today the library is a complex of buildings which serve as a museum and scholarly research center. It contains many illuminated manuscripts, as well as authors' original manuscripts, including some by Sir Walter Scott, and Honoré de Balzac, as well as the scraps of paper on which Bob Dylan jotted down "Blowin' in the Wind" and "It Ain't Me Babe" . It also contains a large collection of incunabula, prints, and drawings of European artists—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Gainsborough and Picasso, early printed Bibles, amongst them, three Gutenberg Bibles, and many examples of fine bookbinding. Other holdings include material from ancient Egypt and medieval liturgical objects, Emile Zola, William Blake's original drawings for his edition of the Book of Job; a Percy Bysshe Shelley notebook; originals of poems by Robert Burns; a Charles Dickens manuscript of A Christmas Carol; a journal by Henry David Thoreau; an extraordinary collection of autographed and annotated libretti and scores from Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mahler and Verdi, and Mozart's Haffner Symphony in D Major; and manuscripts of George Sand, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Byron, Charlotte Brontë and nine of Sir Walter Scott's novels, including Ivanhoe.
The Library, located in mid-town Manhattan at the edge of Murray Hill, was designed by Charles Follen McKim in 1903. Its first director was Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, who served from the Library's inception until her retirement in 1948. Her successor, Frederick Baldwin Adams, Jr., managed the Library until 1969 and was also world-renowed for his own personal collections.
The Morgan Library was closed while it underwent a major expansion project designed by architect Renzo Piano, his debut in New York City. In the interim it sponsored numerous traveling exhibitions around the country. When the work was was completed, "The Morgan" reopened, now as the Morgan Library and Museum, 29 April 2006. With the expansion above and below street level, the Morgan's exhibition space had been doubled; Piano set its new reading room under a translucent roof structure, to allow scholars to examine manuscripts in natural light. Piano's four-storey steel-and-glass atrium links McKim's library building and the Morgan house in a new ensemble. Added storage facilities were obtained by drilling into Manhattan's bedrock schist.
E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime featured a dramatic denouement in the newly-opened Morgan Library.
See also
External links
|
History · Government · Geography · Demographics · Economy · Transportation Culture · Media · Music · Sports · Neighborhoods · Architecture · Museums · Education New York City Lists · · New York State |
| The Five Boroughs: The Bronx · Brooklyn · Manhattan · Queens · Staten Island
| |
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.