1col requested e-m 5-9

Ars morlendl (detail), 1494, bound with Henricus de Vrimaria, Praeceptorium divanae legis, The Pierpont Morgan Library, purchased on the Harper Fund, 2006.

FOR 5-18

MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM PRESENTS “HIGHLIGHTS” MAY 25 w/1 cut

avv/lsb set 5/11/07 # 699571

NEW YORK CITY — The Morgan Library & Museum opens an ongoing exhibition of its world-renowned collections on May 25, in the new Renzo Piano-designed Engelhard Gallery. “Highlights from the Morgan’s Collections” presents masterworks from four of the Morgan’s six collecting areas — literary and historical manuscripts, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, music manuscripts and books, and printed books and bindings.

The exhibition demonstrates the nature and scope of the museum and library, a repository of artistic, literary, musical and historical works. These collections represent the combined and evolving tastes of Pierpont Morgan, his son, J.P. Morgan, Jr, and a succession of directors, curators and collectors down to the present day.

Objects will change approximately every three months to accommodate the exhibition of as wide an array as possible of the Morgan’s vast and eclectic holdings. The exhibition includes objects that the Morgan’s curators regard as especially outstanding, as well as representative of the collections’ strengths. There will always be a sampling of the Morgan’s oldest, rarest and most valuable items.

The department of Drawings and Prints is represented in the exhibitions “From Berlin to Broadway: The Ebb Bequest of Modern German and Austrian Drawings” through September 2, and “Tales and Travels: Drawings Recently Acquired on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund” June 29–September 23. Ancient Near Eastern seals are still on display in the Marble Hall.

The literary and historical manuscripts on view span several hundred years, from the 1675 warrant for the arrest of John Bunyan, author of the Seventeenth Century bestseller Pilgrim’s Progress, to contemporary author Elmore Leonard’s revised typescript for his popular 1983 novel Stick.

The manuscripts of three Nineteenth Century works dealing with issues of labor and social organization are also included. They are John Stuart Mill’s influential 1848 treatise Principles of Political Economy; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s near-contemporary novel The Blithedale Romance, based on his experience living in an international community in Massachusetts; and William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which offers a visionary exploration of utopianism and socialism. Twentieth Century artists are also represented.

The medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the exhibition have been chosen to represent the range and depth of the Morgan’s collection. Although Pierpont Morgan acquired medieval and Renaissance manuscripts only during the last dozen years of his life, his collection of some 600 codices quickly became world-renowned.

Written by hand and often sumptuously painted and illuminated with gold (and sometimes silver) leaf, these manuscripts reflect the religious, intellectual and artistic life of their time.

Also on view is a late Sixteenth Century calendar composed of sheets of bone or ivory and written in runes. The runic alphabet was used by the ancient Germans and, in medieval and later times, in England and Scandinavia.

The department of Music Manuscripts and Books houses a fine collection of music manuscripts and also owns a large collection of musicians’ letters and a small but growing collection of first and early editions of scores and librettos.

On view is the original manuscript and first printed edition of Franz Schubert’s great song cycle “Winterreisse”; a manuscript of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride, which was hand-copied by Gluck’s admirer Hector Berlioz — a great composer in his own right — and a letter from the conductor Arturo Toscanini to Claude Debussy that was written just after Toscanini led the first performance of the composer’s Pelleas et Melisande at the Italian opera house La Scala.

The curators of the Printed Books department have chosen books demonstrating the strengths of the collection in early printing, modern literature, illustrated editions and historical children’s books. Some of their selections are recent acquisitions, including the only American copy of a pocket-size medieval treatise on the art of dying well (1494) and a profusely illustrated anticlerical satire, 1558, which earned the artist a stint in jail and a place in history as one of the best documented victims of censorship during the Reformation era.

The Morgan Library & Museum is at 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street. For information, 212-685-0008 or www.themorgan.org.