Paper Weight

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The almost unbearably excellent show “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection” begins with a love story. In 1954, the dealer Eugene Thaw—the son of a heating contractor and a high-school teacher, from Washington Heights—had a prescient assistant who suggested that he start buying art for himself. He took her advice. He also proposed to her. When Clare Eddy Thaw died, this summer, on her ninety-third birthday, the couple had been married for sixty-three years. Over time, the Thaws’ collection diversified, but Old Master and modern drawings were always its heart—not to mention how Thaw made his money.

A hundred and fifty works on paper—landscapes, portraits, Biblical scenes, still-lifes, interiors, letters from Vincent van Gogh—are hanging now (through Jan. 7) at the Morgan Library & Museum, the cream of a much larger gift from the Thaws to the institution. Divided chronologically into nine sections, they span five hundred years, from a strikingly modern study of drapery by an unknown German artist, circa 1480, to a black-and-white Ellsworth Kelly collage, from 1976, as elemental as an eclipse.

The practice of drawing in Europe is as old as the lines on the caves at Lascaux. But there was a sea change during the Renaissance, when the earliest pieces on view here were made. Artists began to think with their hands, working through ideas on paper, rather than merely recording the world. In one sublime pen-and-ink sketch, from 1450-55, Andrea Mantegna posed the same columnar saint in three variations, changing the thrust of his hips, the angle of his head, and the height at which he holds a book. The sheet has the immediacy of a live rehearsal.

The hit parade proceeds through Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, and Pollock (and Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Matisse). For every blockbuster name there’s an unfamiliar astonishment, like the ink-and-watercolor menagerie by the Netherlandish painter Jacques de Gheyn II, from 1596-1602, which splices together exquisite realism and outlandish fantasy, as a toad, a frog, and a dragonfly share the page with a mutant bird-moth. A transfixing 1828 landscape by the English Romantic Samuel Palmer features a subtly anthropomorphized oak that trumps any weirwood on “Game of Thrones.” It hangs near an ingenious nocturne by Caspar David Friedrich, from 1808: the moon in the high-lonesome landscape has been cut out and replaced with a circle of paper for lamplight to shine through.

It’s thrilling that these masterpieces of Western art are here to stay at the Morgan. Consider their future. If canonical lines could be blurred, the museum might borrow another marvel from the Thaw collection: a bound book of drawings by the Lakota chief Black Hawk, from 1880-81 (recently shown at the Met). The penumbral horse that Georges Seurat let loose with his black Conté crayon in 1882, on view here, might be up for a wild ride with Black Hawk’s “Buffalo Dreamers.” ♦

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