FROM CHILDHOOD HOBBY TO WORLD-CLASS COLLECTION
Brazilian Corrêa do Lago’s amazing autograph stockpile will feature at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York
ABrazilian boy’s passion for collecting autographs, ignited almost 50 years ago, has blossomed into one of this year’s most unusual and enchanting exhibitions, “The Magic Of Handwriting: The Pedro Corrêa Do Lago Collection”, at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
On display from June 1 to Sept 16, The Magic Of Handwriting will feature 140 items — including handwritten letters, manuscripts and musical compositions, as well as inscribed photographs, drawings and documents — by, among others, scientists Newton and Einstein; artists Michelangelo and van Gogh; authors Emily Dickinson, Jorge Luis Borges and Marcel Proust; composers Mozart and Beethoven; and entertainers Charlie Chaplin and Billie Holiday.
Not coincidentally, Corrêa do Lago’s collection was inspired, in part, by the wide-ranging collection of financier J. Pierpont Morgan and a visit to the Morgan Library as a teenager.
At age 11, Corrêa do Lago began writing to individuals he admired. English novelist J.R.R. Tolkien declined to send him anything. French filmmaker François Truffaut, however, sent an illustrated, signed book about his 1969 film L’Enfant Sauvage.
In the late 19th century, Morgan began his collection of early printed books and illuminated manuscripts, as well as autograph manuscripts (the original texts, handwritten by their authors) by novelists Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, among others. He hired architect Charles McKim to design an Italian Renaissance-style palazzo for this collection, adjacent to his residence on Madison Avenue and 36th Street. His son, J.P. Morgan Jr., opened the collection to scholars and the public in 1924, 11 years after his father’s death.
In a recent interview in an ornate 19th-century parlour at the Morgan, Corrêa do Lago reminisced about his first visit to New York, and to the Morgan, when he was about 17.
“I was fascinated by the museum,” he said. “It was the top of Everest for me, with its fantastic music manuscripts and authors’ letters.”
As the son of a Brazilian diplomat, Corrêa do Lago, who turns 60 on March 15, lived all over the world and became fluent in five languages. Now a publisher, author and art historian based in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, he is married to Maria Beatriz Fonseca, a screenwriter who has written four books with him. He said he “never had Morgan’s means” but, like Pierpont Morgan, had been “very ambitious” in the scope of his collecting.
“I make money to spend on my collection,” said Corrêa do Lago, who buys autograph materials from large auction houses like Bonham’s, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as well as through dealers and private sales. “I’ve worked a lot more than I would have, to be able to support and pay for this passion. I’m basically lazy, but I knew I had auction bills to pay. Auctions never happen when your pockets are full.”
He is a member of the International Association of Bibliophiles, a group of book and manuscript collectors through which he met William Griswold, a former director of the Morgan who is now the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Conversations between them and with the Morgan’s current leadership, including its director, Colin Bailey, led to the exhibition that will open in June.
Corrêa do Lago, who is fond of saying, “Every signature is an autograph but not every autograph is a signature”, had some difficulty culling his collection of 100,000 autographs, dating from 1140 to 2017, for the exhibition. The 140 items that will be shown at the Morgan were selected in partnership with several of the museum’s curators, including, most recently, Christine Nelson, a curator of literary and historical manuscripts.
“There are many nods” in his choices to authors featured in the Morgan’s collection and in previous and future exhibitions, he said, including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Ernest Hemingway, as well as more crowd-pleasing items like a 1965 photo of The Beatles signed by the quartet.
Among Nelson’s favourite pieces in the exhibit is an 1871 letter that poet Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Adelaide Hills, who had a daughter named Emily. The letter reads: “To be remembered is next to being loved, and to be loved is heaven, and is this quite earth? I have never found it so.”
Nelson said: “It’s so moving to see in Dickinson’s own hand what she wrote to a friend in a particular moment. We think of her as a recluse, but she was, in fact, deeply connected
— through correspondence, through handwriting. My work is all about memory and collecting; these everyday traces of people’s lives allow us to remember them.”
The exhibit was designed by Daniela Thomas, a Brazilian theatre set and museum show designer who was a director of the opening ceremony for the 2016 Olympic Summer Games in Rio. To help visitors focus, each document will be displayed unframed, enclosed in a grey free-standing case with a slanted top like a writing desk; caption information will be
easily readable on a panel attached above each case.
The cases will be divided into six sections, devoted to art, history, literature, science, music and entertainment. The oldest piece will be a vellum bull dating to 1153 and signed by four popes; the newest will be a 2006 thumbprint signature of physicist Stephen Hawking.
Corrêa do Lago said he hoped his collection would appeal to anyone with “an open spirit”.
“You don’t have to be a scholar to like the exhibition,” he said. “Almost every item I’ve chosen for it is a conversation piece.” Corrêa do Lago, who declined to estimate the value of his entire collection, said that some individual items were worth six figures. As for the future, he predicted that collecting autographs of individuals well known today would be increasingly difficult. Acknowledging that he writes thank-you notes perhaps twice a year, he said: “Autographs of our contemporaries will be a lot rarer. Letters by Steve Jobs are extremely valuable because there are very few of them; they’re more valuable than Lincoln’s.”