COLLECTING STROKES OF GENIUS

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

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.

In 1975, the couple promised the still-growing collection to the Morgan. Earlier this year, they formally gave it more than 400 items, as a gift outright, one that the museum is calling transformative. The present show, a celebration of proprietary welcome and thanks, coincides with Mr. Thaw’s 90th birthday. (Clare Thaw died, at 93, this past summer.)

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. Mr. Thaw started out selling new art (in the 1950s he had a gallery-bookstore in the Algonquin Hotel, where he gave the painter Joan Mitchell her first New York solo), and the bulk of his collection is in 18th- and 19th-century material, but some of the show’s most arresting images are from Renaissance Europe.

An undisputed centerpiece is “Three Standing Saints,” a 1455-60 sketch in brown ink on paper by Andrea Mantegna. A committed, even doctrinaire classicist, Mantegna learned to paint by studying antique marbles. Some of his figures have the crisp perfection of 3-D printed sculpture, and he is thought to have used artificially stiffened fabric as a model for draped clothing. (A 15th-century German drapery study in the exhibition, of a shaped white mantle with no visible wearer, suggests how this might have worked.)

The Thaw drawing, though, looks hands-on and in progress. The three saints don’t have distinguishable personalities. (They may, in fact, represent three variations on one saint.) But, with their dense networks of ink lines, they give living pillars of sanctity an organic softness. And they convey some sense of the experimental effort that lay behind the Mantegna effect of precision-tooled poise.

Other Renaissance drawings on view feel comparatively relaxed and personable. From the workshop of the 15th-century painter Pisanello comes a sheet with five drawn of heads of young boys, each with a distinctive coiffure, and each ready to be, basically, Photoshopped into a painting………………………

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/arts/design/a-gathering-of-greats-in-a-trove-of-drawings-at-the-morgan.html