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First Thoughts
John Haberin New York City
Jan van Eyck to Piet Mondrian: The Kupferstich-Kabinett
Building the Morgan Library and Its Garden
Who would not give anything to know Jan van Eyck's first thoughts? They would reveal the thought processes behind the birth of the Renaissance.
Loans from the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden open with a rarity, van Eyck's sole surviving drawing. Yet they look very much like his last thoughts, from an artist of unmatched insight and precision. He could give nothing away, even as every his every observation was a gift. And then, among some sixty works on paper from the Renaissance to the present, 
all but unknown artists seem to have been thinking ahead. It makes for a provocative exhibition at the Morgan Library, but the Morgan's holdings stand up well to European visitors. So does its newly restored building.
The museum has remade itself—not this time to expand, but because it had to. Its masonry has had more than a century to deteriorate. Still, need presented an opportunity. With restoration complete, visitors can take a closer look from a new garden, open for tours four times a week and to wanderers on Wednesdays, weather permitting. After hours, new lighting sets its recessed former entrance in high relief. As always with the Morgan, welcome vies with drama. It also serves as the occasion for a look back at its origins, as "Building the Bookman's Paradise."
After life?
Jan van Eyck marks the start of an era, but also the end of one. In no time, drawing became essential as artists sought to derive the body in motion from anatomy and the sacred from observation of the human. Michelangelo drawings, at the Met in 2018, and early Italian drawings, at the Morgan a year later, show just how it was done. No doubt artists have always drawn for themselves and others. One can almost think of illuminated manuscripts, a specialty of the Morgan, as presentation drawings. Copying past masters must have been a requisite of art education as well. Still, artists were hardly roaming the streets to draw from life, and they did not have a Medici garden where they could draw from classical sculpture.
If so little on paper from van Eyck survives, that says a lot about his thinking in any case. He seems never to have had first thoughts because he never had second thoughts either. His paintings do have a complicated history, and scholars still debate their debt to his older brother, Hubert van Eyck. Still, he attended to every detail, not just because of his skill, but also because for him a greater artist, his god, had fashioned the world. Saint Barbara, who was imprisoned in a tower, often holds a tower in her hands in art to identify her, but Jan makes it just one structure among many in his real but nonetheless ideal city. Even his finest student, Petrus Christus, leaves the tower larger than life, as if floating just outside the window—a compromise that points out its role in a painting's symbolism, or iconography.
When Jan sketches an elderly man, he adopts metalpoint, a demanding medium that does not permit corrections. The man's face and torso are also all but indistinguishable from the same subject in oil on panel. (The Morgan sets them side by side in the catalogue, at the same size, and reproduces the painting as a thumbnail in wall text.) If anything, the man in the painting looks more relaxed and less formal. That illusion could stem from oil's bright reds and flesh tones, or I could be reading too much into his eyes or the parting of his lips. Either way, he sets an impossible standard for art to come.
The artists at the Morgan excel regardless. I had not known of the Kupferstich-Kabinett, in my rush to Raphael and the Sistine Madonna at the city's great art museum, but it proves quite an education. The show bills itself as running from van Eyck to Piet Mondrian, but it concludes instead with a living artist, Georg Baselitz. His brushwork conveys an eagle's savage flight while bringing the work close to abstraction. The show also extends to China and India in the seventeenth century, but its interest is clearly a history of European art. Picking winners would be ridiculous.
The curator, Austeja Mackelaite, has her share of big names and trademark gestures. Already in the Renaissance, Correggio has his ink washes and Hans Holbein the very hairs of a man's beard and pointed eyebrows. The Morgan identifies a head by Agnolo Bronzino as a child's, although it has the upward gaze of a cherub and served as the model for the infant Jesus in a Holy Family. Antoine Watteau brings his Rococo fantasy and realism together on one sheet, with pilgrims, a cupid, and a woman. Francisco de Goya presents monks reading as a carnival of fools. In drawing the Virgin Mary, Andrea del Verrocchio reserves the greatest detail for her brooch, in part to clarify the outlines of breasts where a god's human incarnation would have nursed.
Verrocchio does allow for second thoughts. The head of Jesus appears twice, lightly traced, as the artist reconsiders the child's relationship to his mother and his position in space. Much later, in 1883, Adolph Menzel draws a crouching man more often still. In the process, a working man with his tools becomes a crowd of commoners praying for work, food, and hope. Hendrick Goltzius in the early Baroque lends a near caricature a winning smile. As the aging figure takes on hints of a man or a younger woman, the viewer can have second thoughts as well.
Tricks with time and place
Just as often, the show asks to rethink art's history. Matthias Grünewald in the Northern Renaissance shares the mass and symmetry of the High Renaissance in Italy, but with such raw emotion that his best work can look downright lurid in reproduction. Here the back of an apostle, possibly still asleep, could be humbling himself or hiding from the Resurrection. Peter Paul Rubens has his Baroque command of form in motion, but his figure here all but dissolves in a cloud. Rembrandt still evolves from youthful boasting to murkier old age, but on paper his wild early zigzags are of a piece with the rapid curves of a sketch thirty years later.
Anton Raphael Mengs can seem the very image of an academic artist. Here he appears in 1740, at age twelve, before he had time for higher education. His self-portrait looks accomplished and arrogant all the same, where Carlo Maratti in 1680s had been all curly haired show. No one would disdain James McNeill Whistler for his formal portraiture, but his house front in Amsterdam look plain and clearly observed. Caspar David Friedrich had his natural light and supernatural quiet. Yet his stony beach from the 1830s gains from its plainness, too.
Unfamiliar names demand a still greater revisionism. Forty years before Friedrich, Adrian Zingg anticipates his clarity and Romanticism. Does Lucas Cranach in the early 1530s bring to life a dead bird? Sixty years later in Dresden, one dead bird by Zacharias Wehme swoops down on another. Mondrian has his large, busy rectangles, with an oval thrown in. Still, one might prefer the interplay of black, white, and gray wedges by Hermann Glöckner around 1932.
Women receive only modest attention. Sofonisba Anguissola, known for the Renaissance portrait, has her own self-portrait. Charlotte Rudolph in the 1920s gives an impetus to dance photography with her double shadow. Käthe Kollwitz has the fiercest self-portrait of all, with black shadows and billowing dark hair. She also depicts a failed worker's uprising as a scene from a murder mystery. It is, she laments, The End.
As with Kollwitz, the Kupferstich-Kabinett favors German Expressionism—starting well before the Nazis denounced it as degenerate art. When Otto Dix titles two works To Beauty and In Memory of Glorious Times, you can count on the grotesque quite as much as with Edvard Munch and his Angst. Two girls dress for Oskar Kokoschka as early as 1908, where one could almost be the other's child. Here, too, the show plays tricks with time and place. A profile by Gustav Klimt might be the same woman in Paris for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec a decade earlier.
One can always fall back on the known. Albrecht Dürer directs his skill in engraving to the familiar image of the Holy Family in a half rural, half urban landscape. They underscore the new role of drawing from life. Most of all, though, I kept returning to the early Renaissance. Drawing and prints can do only so much, as prelude to other works or in themselves. They should, though, aspire to at least half as much as Jan van Eyck.
Behind the black fence
J. Pierpont Morgan hired a gardener for his library, but she could not have had much to do. On the way to its grand entrance on 36th Street, one could have ascended steps and trod not on vegetation but tiling. One would have encountered a wrought-iron fence, an ancient sarcophagus, marble lions, and bronze doors inspired by The Gates of Paradise in Renaissance Florence. Nothing less imposing would do. Nowadays, the entrance has shifted around the corner to Madison Avenue, on the way to an atrium by Renzo Piano that eats up much of its 2006 addition. Museums love such wasted space, but the real welcome and drama lie elsewhere.
Morgan hired a gardener because he attended to every detail. He rejected plans for the library by Whitney Warren in 1902 and sought out Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White, whose epic Penn Station no longer stands but whose Italianate mansions still define luxury. He pored through fabric samples to upholster his study, where he brought his oversized desk and High Renaissance paintings. He also gave himself a library within the library, with shelves for fourteen thousand books. Those who did make it inside would have found themselves within a marble hall filled with light from its rotunda, not visible from the street. Construction took four years and over a million dollars.
Others had to take care as well. Edward Clark Potter, the sculptor for those female lions, made studies at the Bronx Zoo. White left niches for larger than life sculpture and filled them in his drawings, although they remain empty to this day. (The iron fence was not in his plans.) The Morgan attends to detail, too, like the hourly rates for stonemasons (high) in the Bronx and for workers (low)—and a reminder that the land once belonged to the Lenape people. It credits anyone who had a hand in anything, right down to gutters and guard rails.
Not that Morgan started as much of a collector. He inherited a love of books from his father, along with close to half a billion in today's dollars. Still, the library in his previous home on the corner had a notable absence of books. (An addition on its site, which houses current exhibitions, dates to after his death, by Benjamin Wistar Morris in 1928, while he had moved up the block to a brownstone by R. H. Robertson that now holds offices, a gift shop, and a dining room.) He was more into autographs, and he turned to books seriously only when he turned sixty. His collection, including more than a hundred works by Rembrandt took him just ten years.
It became the basis of the museum today. The exhibition includes a Gutenberg Bible, his first of (my goodness) three—and (surprise!) a Bible in the language of Native Americans. He disdained popular novels (Nathaniel Hawthorne's "damned mob of scribbling women") but did find room for the Bronte sisters and a lavish edition of George Sand in France. The Morgan also points to two exceptional advisors. A nephew, Junius S. Morgan II, was indifferent to finance but an "honorary associate librarian" at Princeton. Sneer all you like at the title, a reward for throwing around money, but he took the job seriously. He also brought Belle da Costa Greene, an African American who became J. P. Morgan's librarian (with an office off the rotunda) and, later, the first museum director.
Morgan looks ruthless enough in a photograph by Edward Steichen, the arm of his chair gleaming like a knife blade. Still, the robber baron did not rob a black woman of her achievement, and he left the world a library. The exhibition takes a sunny view, and it goes by quickly, but sunlight on stone does not look bad either. The garden, by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan with lighting by Linnaea Tillett, takes one only a few feet closer, but still behind the black fence. The lions lack the fierce articulation of those outside the New York Public Library, but they are all the more welcoming for that. Trees along the street lean over the fence to bask in the light.
Work from the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden ran at The Morgan Library through January 23, 2022, "Building the Bookman's Paradise" through September 18. The garden opened in June.