Collecting strokes of genius at the Morgan Library & Museum

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Holland Cotter

“Three Standing Saints,” by Andrea Mantegna (1450-55), in “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings From the Thaw Collection.” Credit Thaw Collection/The Morgan Library & Museum

NEW YORK---Item by luminous, brain-zapping item, “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings From the Thaw Collection” at the Morgan Library & Museum has to be one of the paramount group drawing shows of the era. It is also a grand summing-up of a career, an art form and an institution’s holdings. During the past 60 years, the New York art dealer Eugene V. Thaw and his wife, Clare Eddy Thaw, gradually amassed a phenomenal drawing collection, notable not just for visual charisma, but also for chronological breadth, running from the early Renaissance to the near present, with lingering stops en route. The exhibition of some 150 choice items fills both of the Morgan’s large ground-floor galleries, which for the occasion have been divided into cabinet-size nooks sequenced roughly by date. [More]