The Morgan Library & Museum is pleased to announce its schedule of exhibitions opening in the winter, spring, and summer of 2026. These include the extraordinary loan of Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit from the Galleria Borghese in Rome; an exhibition featuring artworks from across all of the Morgan’s collections that explores how stories and storytelling shape our world; an unprecedented collaboration with the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg that presents the life and career of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, featuring objects on view in America for the first time; an exhibition featuring drawings by the poet John Ashbery and his artist friends; a focused look at photographer Peter Hujar through his contact sheets; and a double-gallery exhibition that explores the origins of Tarot in Renaissance Italy and its ongoing relevance as a source of inspiration for twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists.
Caravaggio’s “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” in Focus January 16 through April 19, 2026 This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary loan from the Galleria Borghese in Rome of the painting Boy with a Basket of Fruit, an important early work by Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1571– 1610). Trained in his native Lombardy, Caravaggio brought to Rome a tradition of naturalism that stretched back to Leonardo da Vinci’s work in Milan. He combined this tradition, however, with a revolutionary approach to painting that shattered the illusion of art and instead celebrated the artifice of the studio.
With his parted lips, flushed ears, and shirt slipping from his shoulder, the Boy with a Basket of Fruit was far from the idealized figures typically depicted in Roman painting at the time. Presented with remarkable frankness, the model seems to be offered to us for examination, akin to the overripe fruit he holds. The exhibition juxtaposes this remarkable work with some precedents for its naturalism, including earlier paintings from Milan and by Caravaggio’s slightly older contemporary Annibale Carracci. The installation will also include a selection of works that document the powerful impact Caravaggio had on Roman art. It concludes with Gianlorenzo Bernini’s portrait drawing of Scipione Borghese, the early owner of the Boy with a Basket of Fruit painting and the collector largely responsible for the Galleria Borghese.
Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling January 30 through May 3, 2026 Combining diverse artworks from across the Morgan’s collections and some exceptional loans, Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling explores how stories shape our world. The exhibition showcases over 130 objects, including drawings, paintings, photographs, printed books, manuscripts, artifacts, comics, and more, fostering fresh encounters with beloved works of art and literature and presenting exciting new acquisitions. Throughout, Come Together unites modern and historical artworks, underscoring conceptual, thematic, and visual links between them and stimulating new interpretations and imaginative associations.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg March 13 through May 31, 2026 In an unprecedented collaboration, the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg and the Morgan Library & Museum have partnered to tell the story of the life and career of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Objects from the Salzburg collections will cross the Atlantic for the first time, including Mozart’s own clavichord and violin, as well as famous portraits, letters, and personal objects of Mozart and his family. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Treasures from the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg also draws from the Morgan’s extensive collections of music manuscripts, letters, and first editions that feature the forms in which Mozart was preeminent: symphony, piano concerto, and opera. Evoking the cities, homes, and people that shaped the composer, the exhibition highlights Mozart’s many travels, continual quest for employment and renown, family tensions, and constant creative output amid frequent illness and other challenges. It also illustrates Mozart’s existence under aristocratic patronage, a context both foreign and familiar to modern viewers.
The exhibition focuses on the two family chapters of Mozart’s life: his youth with his father, Leopold, and sister Nannerl in Salzburg, and his adult life with his wife, Constanze, in Vienna. After Mozart’s death in 1791, Nannerl and Constanze returned to Salzburg, where they, with the composer’s two sons, preserved and built his legacy. Their collection became the foundation of the modern-day Mozarteum.
In the nineteenth century, partly through Beethoven’s influence, Mozart was reinvented as a foundation of the emerging idea of “classical music.” This exhibition explores how Mozart forged deep connections with listeners during his life and examines his enduring influence after his death, stemming from his posthumous reinvention. Organized by Robinson McClellan, Associate Curator of Music Manuscripts and Printed Music at the Morgan, in collaboration with Deborah Gatewood, Armin Brinzing, and Linus Klumpner of the Mozarteum.
Friends Who Came to See Me: Drawings from John Ashbery’s Collection May 1 through October 25, 2026 In 2019, the Morgan received a donation of some twentyfive works on paper from the collection of American poet John Ashbery (1927–2017) from his husband, David Kermani. These works form the core of this exhibition devoted to Ashbery and his artist friends. Ashbery, who worked as an art critic for three decades and often found inspiration for his poetry in the visual arts, developed numerous friendships with artists, including James Bishop, Joe Brainard, Jane Freilicher, Jean Hélion, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. With the exception of two sheets by Constantin Guys from the mid-nineteenth century, the drawings range chronologically from 1945 to 2007, with a concentration of works from the 1960s. Many were gifts to the poet from the artists. The selection includes eight portraits of Ashbery. It also features one of the very first collages that Ashbery created, while a student at Harvard in the late 1940s, signaling his early interest in Surrealism. The display of drawings will be complemented by textual material from the Morgan’s collection, notably books showing Ashbery’s collaboration with artists.
Hujar: Contact May 22 through October 25, 2026 Hujar: Contact offers an unprecedented look into the life, times, and creative evolution of a master photographer. The exhibition features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements from the Morgan’s Peter Hujar Collection, which includes over 5,700 contact sheets from throughout the artist’s career. Peter Hujar (1934–1987) began filing contact sheets and assigning them job numbers at age twenty-one. His records make it possible to track his development—from two decades as a studio assistant (1955–67), when he pushed himself to try work of every kind, into the late 1960s and his work as a freelancer in fashion, music, and advertising, through his mature period (1974–87) as a fiercely independent and influential artist in the East Village.
Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions June 26 through October 4, 2026 Conceived in two parts, this double-gallery exhibition explores the origins of Tarot in Renaissance Italy and its ongoing relevance as a source of inspiration for artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first part of the exhibition, Renaissance Symbols, focuses on the origins of the three earliest surviving decks from the fifteenth century, which were commissioned by the Dukes of Milan. It examines the rich court culture from which the cards emerged, the development of the cards’ imagery, and how that imagery became the basis for later divination practices.
Modern Visions, the second part of the exhibition, takes as its starting point the legendary 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck conceived by mystic Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by artist Pamela Colman Smith, tracing the influence of this deck and others on later practitioners and the imagery’s adoption by people like André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Jess, Niki de Saint Phalle, Betye Saar, and Kerstin Brätsch. For these artists, Tarot offered an alternative to the strictures of modernist aesthetics, allowing them to explore other universes and imaginative possibilities. Renaissance Symbols is organized by Joshua O’Driscoll, Associate Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, and Frank Trujillo, Drue Heinz Book Conservator. Modern Visions is organized by Claire Gilman, Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, with Esther Levy, Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Drawings.
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