Mark Twain Exhibition opened at Morgan Library
Mark Twain
Exhibitions of visual arts are the most common types of exhibitions that are displayed in a museum or gallery. Nevertheless, they are not the only type of exhibitions that are worth being displayed, as art is not only visual, but also written and read. Therefore, the Morgan Library in New York will hold an exhibition of the woks of American writer Mark Twain.
The exhibition coincides with the 175th anniversary of Twain’s birth in 1835 and opened yesterday, September 17, 2010. It includes more than 120 manuscripts and rare books,among which there are original manuscript pages from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Life on the Mississippi (1883). The exhibition also features letters, notebooks, diaries, photographs, and drawings associated with the author’s life and work. Called Mark Twain: A Skeptic’s Progress, the exhibition runs through January 2, 2011 and revolves around the theme of modernizing America, which he deals with criticism and uneasy attitude.
He used this theme in a vast array of his work, as he experienced the shift to industrialization of America in almost no time. When he was a child, he walked barefoot, he traveled by horse and riverboat, for his entire adulthood to be able to travel by railroad and steamship, also being able to look in the future of the automobile.This shift in culture Twain experienced was too fast for his taste, so that nearly all his novels speak about it in a very critical way.
But these changes were also dealt with through humor, wit and philosophy, as he was very skeptical regarding the benefits of these changes. His skepticism comes from the love he had for the Southern traditions and his observations of the natural world. This skeptical side of him was reinforced when he saw the advance of European imperialism and its attendant atrocities in Africa and Asia.
The exhibition enhances all these and more. Being a traveling lover, the exhibition will also feature photographs from his journeys across the ocean, as well as sketches and memoirs. Among them, there is the sketch of a memory game that he tried to develop in order to remember all kind of facts and dates. The game is made of a board with the printed game on one side and the rules on the other, produced by Charles L. Webster & Co. in 1891. At the same time the exhibition includes handwritten manuscripts and typescripts of other works by Twain, his letters, drawings and illustration mock-ups for printed editions, and some three-dimensional artifacts.
A writer worth being celebrated, this exhibition is just the right gift a library could have made to honor a national writer. Mark Twain is considered one of the greatest writers of America and his work influenced other writers that succeeded him. He was made famous by his humor and wit, his irony and skepticism, as all his works are proof of it.
