Today, we're honored to have a guest post by the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator at the Morgan Library & Museum. Bevan shares with us a description of the Morgan's Morris holdings; some of her favorite items in the collection; and thoughts on Morris's techniques, collaborations, and legacy within the book world.
I’m
part of a three-person curatorial department at the Morgan Library &
Museum under the leadership of John Bidwell. Together we take care of
85,000+ volumes of printed books—from Gutenberg’s 42-line bible
to the most recent work by artist-typographer Russell Maret. The
Morgan’s twin mission (library and museum) requires us to work to
some degree with the entire history of print. As Andrew W. Mellon
Assistant Curator, I work most closely with the modern end of the
spectrum.
When
asked, art historians often cite Edouard Manet as a progenitor of
modern art. Such a figure is more difficult to identify in our field
because of competing histories of printing, paper, illustration
processes, typography, and design—all connected, yet too numerous
to neatly coincide. The reach and resonance of William Morris’s
bibliographic achievements, his ideas about the book as an everyday
object worthy of aesthetic attention, his tendency not to separate
the meaning of art from its means of production, and his belief
(devoid of metaphor) in the book as a work of art—these qualities
make him perhaps the closest equivalent book history has to a Manet.
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| The Morgan Library & Museum. Photo by Graham S. Haber |
Morris
is identified with a rejection of mechanical processes but by
studying his preparatory work on the Chaucer, one can trace how he
achieved this handmade aesthetic with the aid of modern technologies.
His type designs developed by studying, tracing, and copying
photographic enlargements of fifteenth-century type, examples of
which are in the collection. The Morgan’s platinum prints and proof
impressions of every Burne-Jones drawing for the Chaucer were
annotated by the artist and engraver, then traced and painted over in
order to simplify them into wood-engraved images harmonious with
Morris’s overall design. Some of my favorite material in the
collection bears witness to this unique way of working in holograph
statements by his collaborators, Emery Walker and Robert Catterson
Smith—oft-quoted documents, worth reading in their entirety. Other
favorites are books that serve as miniature archives in themselves,
in which Morris or Sydney
Cockerell tipped in relevant letters,
trials, proofs, and sketches of illustrations and initials. There are
also unique scrapbooks of ornaments and initials, which Cockerell
annotated and preserved, and the famous Edward Burne-Jones letter to
Charles Eliot Norton, which reveals some of the contemporary
resistance to Morris’s aesthetic. The original letter, with its
dynamic and playful handwriting, amplifies the painter’s excitement
about the book he likened to a “pocket cathedral” and explains
how his visual style came to be shaped by Morris’s mastery of
ornament.
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| The Morgan Library & Museum. Photo by Graham S. Haber |
Much
of this material is drawn from John Crawford Jr.’s gift of
Morrisiana in 1975—the impetus for Paul Needham’s exhibition and
invaluable catalogue, William Morris and the Art of the Book.
Another invaluable resource for the unique material in our holdings
(and everyone else’s) is William S. Peterson’s Bibliography of
the Kelmscott Press. In an exhibition I organized earlier this
year, Medium
as Muse, we were able to feature some of these
items and their role in the revival of woodcut illustration and the
development of the modern book.
The
collaborative nature of book production is important to emphasize to
students. At the Morgan, this is documented vis-à-vis Morris through
our extensive printed and manuscript holdings (hundreds of letters
alone) relating to his influences and immediate circle—John Ruskin,
Emery Walker, Edward Burne-Jones, Sydney Cockerell, Walter Crane, T.
J. Cobden-Sanderson, May Morris—and other contemporaneous
bookmakers, such as Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, and Lucien
Pissarro.
Contextualizing
William Morris also demands a look at the past. Kelmscott editions
were among the few “contemporary” books that Pierpont Morgan
acquired, but the early presence of Morris at the Morgan is most
palpable in the 1902 acquisition of a large part of the artist’s
private library of medieval manuscripts, incunabula, and early
sixteenth-century books. Researchers can look at many of the specific
copies and precise pages that inspired him and figured in his
writings about the art of printing and illustration. His collection
is also thought-provoking in terms of the changing relationships we
have to books: he may have begun to collect in the conventional
fashion of a 19th-century gentleman-bibliophile, but over time these
examples of fine printing became nothing less than a working specimen
library for a modern graphic designer—as utilitarian as his copy of
Shaw’s Encyclopaedia of Ornament, also in the Morgan’s
collection.
The
William Morris material and all our collections can be seen and
studied in pre-arranged classes and in the Morgan’s Reading Room by
application and appointment. Information on how to register and
request an appointment can be found here.
The Printed Books Department tries to accommodate special
requests for classroom sessions and show-and-tells whenever possible.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions related to our
holdings and their potential value for students of book history, art,
literature, and graphic design.
Sheelagh
Bevan
Andrew
W. Mellon Assistant Curator
Department
of Printed Books & Bindings
The
Morgan Library & Museum
sbevan@themorgan.org
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