Stop 6. Gilbert Court
Colin B. Bailey, Director
In 2006, Renzo Piano created a ground-floor entrance along Madison Avenue. Visitors pass through the admissions area into a light-filled central piazza, surrounded by the Morgan’s historic buildings. The piazza is called the Gilbert Court, after S. Parker Gilbert, a past President of the Morgan’s Board of Trustees who championed the expansion of the museum’s campus.
From the court, visitors can choose to take a break in the café or to explore the historic Library, the Annex exhibition galleries, the modern Thaw and Engelhard Galleries, or the Morgan Shop in the brownstone.
Stop 8. Wall Drawing 552D
Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007)
1987
Color ink wash
Gift of the LeWitt family in honor of Richard and Ronay Menschel; Installation made possible by the Charina Endowment Fund
Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings
In 2018, the family of artist Sol LeWitt donated to the Morgan Wall Drawing 552D. The gift included detailed instructions for the creation of the drawing, which was executed by a team from LeWitt’s studio.
LeWitt first became known in the mid-1960s for his modular sculptures based on the cube. In 1968, he made his first wall drawing by tracing lines directly on the wall according to a pre- established system. Over the next forty years, he conceived more than 1,200 wall drawings in pencil, colored ink, and acrylic. Although the wall may ultimately be painted over, each drawing exists as a set of instructions that can be re-created on another wall by another person.
In the early 1980s, inspired by the rich colors of Italian Renaissance frescoes, LeWitt began using colored ink wash applied with rags, mixing wiping and pounding techniques. He limited his palette to four colors—gray, yellow, red, and blue—which he layered and superimposed to produce variations. This wall drawing was first created in 1987. The artist described its motif as “not quite a cube.” The tilted form produces an illusion of volume while the black border that interrupts it preserves the sense of flatness of the wall.
See time-lapse video of installation
Stop 9. Morgan’s Art Collections
Bottle vase, the “Morgan Ruby”
China, Qing dynasty, Kangxi period (1662–1722)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1907.
Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator of Drawings and Prints
Pierpont Morgan’s taste encompassed global art. The Morgan family brownstone was filled with art objects from China, Japan, southeast Asia, and the Islamic world. These were displayed alongside objects from western Europe and America. Morgan also acquired significant collections of non-Western art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he served as President from 1904 until 1913. He kept a few examples of Chinese vessels for his personal collection, including this bottle-shaped vase with its Langyao, or copper-red, glaze, known as the Morgan Ruby.