Mr. Morgan's Library Opens Its Doors

For the better part of a century, the Morgan Library & Museum was the New York museum world's best-kept secret and exuded a sense of privacy. On the inside there a club-like atmosphere — a place known mainly to its members.

But today, after a three-year, $106 million expansion and makeover by architect Renzo Piano, the once-stodgy old Morgan is now welcoming people in. It turned its face to Madison Avenue with a big front door as bold as brass.

Charles Pierce will retire this year after 20 years as director of the Morgan. He said some members were opposed to the changes he oversaw.

"There were others who said to me, 'Well, Charlie, I guess some change is all right but please be very careful what you do to it'" he told 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer. "We were very sensitive to that very strong feeling that this was a special place in New York."

With an additional 75,000 square feet of space, this special place can now show off its vast collection which is made up of more than 350,000 objects — from centuries-old miniatures and medieval art, to illuminated manuscripts, jeweled bindings, sacred books and classics of our culture. Their museum showcases works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Beatrix Potter and the elegant elephant Babar — not to mention Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.

"It's really an amazing rank and that's leaving aside all of the great artists from Raphael and Michelangelo all the way to Cezanne," Pierce said. "The library, in fact, has 2½ copies of the Gutenberg Bible, which is more than any other institution in the world."

The library was founded by legendary businessman, John Pierpont Morgan. Morgan was born in 1837 in Hartford, Conn. By age 20, he worked as a banker in New York where he made his name and his fortune. In 1901, when Morgan bought out Andrew Carnegie and founded the U.S. Steel Corporation, J.P. Morgan & Company was one of the most powerful banking houses in the world, and Morgan one of the richest men on Earth.

Pierce said Morgan loved the written word and almost all the library's treasures have one thing in common: Paper. Morgan was absolutely convinced that the invention of movable type was one of the great moments in the history of western civilization.

Mr. Morgan's Library, as it was called, epitomizes America's Gilded Age. Designed by the architect Charles McKim, it was built between 1902 and 1906. The total cost was $1.2 million — the price of a small apartment in this neighborhood today.

The museum contains two panels by Hans Memling, a Tintoretto, and underneath a painting inspired by Botticelli, a vault where Morgan stored 600 of his Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

Morgan worked very closely with McKim to design the bookshelves and some extraordinary murals. In 1924, after his father's death, J.P. Morgan, Jr. opened the library as a public institution.

The museum reopened last April with a masterworks show — the greatest hits in the collection, followed by a wonderful collage of everything from Mozart to Bob Dylan to Fragonard. Currently, the iconic drawings of Saul Steinberg are being shown in an exhibit called "Saul Steinberg: Illuminations." From the Morgan the exhibit moves on to the Smithsonian in Washington.

Steinberg, born in Romania in 1914, escaped Fascist Italy and arrived in New York in 1942. His drawings appeared in dozens of periodicals. He created murals, stage sets and greeting cards. He is best known for his work for The New Yorker where he did 90 covers and more than one thousand drawings. His most famous drawing, "View of the World from 9th Avenue," is at the Morgan.

Steinberg, who called himself "a writer who draws," drew using every medium — paper bag masks, fake drawing tables, thumbprints, rubber stamps and extremely grandiose signatures.

"It's wonderful to see this work in context of the Morgan library," curator of the Steinberg exhibit, Joel Smith, said. "It's all of the same family of graphic gestures and attempts to leave something behind."

Pierce must also leave something behind when he retires. He said the one thing he would take with him if he could is the manuscript of "Paradise Lost" by John Milton.

"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the World, and all our woe,'" Pierce read from the manuscript. "Now it doesn't get much better than that!"