New York, NY, August 21, 2012

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM’S

FALL 2012 EXHIBITION SEASON

Two galleries will be devoted to this extraordinary exhibition of rarely-seen master drawings from the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, one of Europe’s most distinguished drawings collections. The Morgan’s organizing curators were granted unprecedented access to Munich’s vast repository of drawings, ultimately choosing one hundred masterworks that best represent the breadth, depth, and vitality of the collection. Dürer to de Kooning marks the first time the Graphische Sammlung has lent such a comprehensive and prestigious selection of works to a single exhibition.

Spanning the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, works on view will include drawings by such celebrated old masters as Mantegna, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Raphael, Titian, Dürer, Rubens, and Rembrandt; nineteenth-century sheets including those by van Gogh, Caspar David Friedrich, and Johann Friedrich Overbeck; and modern and contemporary works by Emil Nolde, Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, David Hockney, Georg Baselitz, and Sigmar Polke, among many others.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other books by Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) have become classics of children’s literature and represent one of the most successful publishing enterprises in the history of the British book trade. Yet Peter Rabbit began not as a commercial publishing venture but in a private letter to the son of a family friend, the whole story told in eight pages illustrated with pen-drawn vignettes. Potter wrote such picture letters throughout her career, many of them serving as the basis for some of the most beloved children’s books ever published.

Bringing together twenty picture letters from three major collections—the Morgan; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton—as well as loans from important American private collections, the exhibition will include Potter’s first picture letter, as well as the “Peter Rabbit” picture letter that eventually launched her publishing career. These and other picture letters will be exhibited with their related printed books, along with manuscripts, illustrations, and early merchandise inspired by the stories.

This fall, the Morgan will be home to an important loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore: Rosso Fiorentino’s Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist. Executed around 1520 and one of only three paintings in America by this complex and mysterious artist, the Holy Family will serve as the centerpiece of a focused presentation of Florentine drawings from the Morgan’s collection.

Also represented in the exhibition are artists Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolommeo, the leading Florentine masters of the High Renaissance; Jacopo Pontormo, Giorgio Vasari, and Francesco Salviati—the next generation of painters who were, like Rosso, exponents of Mannerism, a stylistic idiom that placed a high premium on artifice, grace, and bizarre invention; the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, Michelangelo’s self-professed rival; and the Medici court artist Agnolo Bronzino. These works will be complemented by a small selection of letters penned by leading artistic and literary personalities of the period, and a rare drawing by Rosso himself on loan from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Images:

Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557)
Two Standing Women, after 1530(?)
Inv. 14042 Z
© Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München

Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540)
Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1520
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore