Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy at the Morgan Library & Museum is a wonder to behold. In honor of the institution’s 100th anniversary, the exhibition illustrates its inaugural director’s wondrous and trendsetting life. A range of archival and visual material paint a nuanced and thoughtful image of who Greene was as a “passing” Black woman and prestigious librarian who assembled a world-renowned collection of rare books, manuscripts, and art.
Upon entering, the exhibition sets the scene of Greene’s New York: Svenska Biografteatern’s silent film depicts the city at a moment of industrial transformation in which streetcars and electric trolleys coexist with horse-drawn carriages. Early 20th-century New Yorkers wear top hats and suits as they navigate a rapidly growing city. From there, visitors can enter different rooms, where installations of archival documents, artwork, books, and more are found.
We get to know Greene from various perspectives; the exhibition includes portraits of her, rare books that she collected for the Morgan, family archives, and historical material that gives insight into her sociocultural milieu. She was born Belle Marion Greener in an upper-class Black Washington, DC, community. She began passing as White, along with her mother and siblings, after moving to New York and building a notable career in library science with a focus on rare books and illuminated manuscripts.
The first photograph on view comes from a series of portraits taken of Greene by Clarence H. White in 1911. She is posed in a studio wearing white gloves, her curly hair covered by a fashionable hat. Her racial ambiguity — olive skin and dark hair — is apparent beneath her balanced facial expressions, especially given what we know of her family from the introductory wall text. We also learn from the didactics that Greene was unhappy with White’s photographs, in which her skin color is not lightened.
Archival traces — census records, personal ephemera, and photographs — related to Greene’s family provide a fascinating context for her upbringing. Her mother, Genevieve, hailed from Georgetown’s free Black community and is listed in a c. 1880 fundraising flier as a committee member at Washington, DC’s 15th Street Presbyterian Church, a vital cultural and political center for African Americans and abolitionists. Greene’s father, Richard T. Greener, was the first Black graduate of Harvard and became a notable professor, advocate, and diplomat in the 19th century.
A special archival find on display is the earliest known photograph of Greene, at the age of 20. It shows her with her peers at Amherst College’s Summer School of Library Economy in 1900. A group photograph of this nature helps indicate how Greene could blend in visually with her White peers.
In 1902, before serving as J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she took a job at Princeton University’s library in the wake of intense racial tensions. While she was likely passing as White at the time, she succeeded in acquiring numerous texts related to slavery and racism, such as a pamphlet about an enslaved woman named Matilda who was able to escape and passed as White before being captured and returned to bondage.
While Clarence H. White’s photographs represented a subtle authenticity in Greene that she found unsettling while passing as White, especially at the height of her career, other artists depicted her in more grandiose ways. French artist Paul César Helleu visited New York to design Grand Central Terminal’s original ceiling decoration and sketched a portrait of Greene as a White woman wearing a fashionable plumed hat. Greene was not a fan of the drawing, and Helleu was quoted in the New York Times expressing confusion about how she was a woman and a librarian.
Around this time Greene began to see her name in the news, especially after her monumental acquisition in 1911 of the only surviving original copy of Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century compilation of the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Le Morte D’Arthur. Such acquisitions earned her the reputation as “the soul of the Morgan library.” Since childhood, she had been an aficionado of rare books. Other highlights from Greene’s acquisitions on view include the annotated printer proofs of Honoré de Balzac’s 1833 novel Eugénie Grandet, the Gospels of Judith of Flanders (1051–64), and more cherished rare archival finds in literary history. Greene also acquired an original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend (1865) that was sent to the printer with the author’s hand-written notes and signature.
Greene collected equally fantastic art. She was ahead of her time in collecting Persian and Mughal art, especially after encountering Charles Hercules Read’s collection during a trip to Munich. She also brought works of modern art into the Morgan, such as Clara Tice’s “Anteater” (c. 1922).
The subject of Greene’s racial passing is a complex one that is not easily approached by anyone who has not shared her experience. However, the curatorial team handles it with rigor and care. While it is impossible to know Greene’s precise thoughts and feelings, especially since she burned many personal papers and diaries, the exhibition shares a context for passing that elucidates the nuance of such a phenomenon. Archibald Motley Jr.’s “The Octoroon Girl” (1925) is one of three sister paintings in a series depicting mixed-race women whose socioeconomic status is determined in part by their proximity to whiteness. Carl Van Vechten’s portrait of author (and fellow librarian) Nella Larsen is on display next to a copy of her influential novel, Passing (1929), which addresses the psychological toll of passing. Within the gallery space dedicated to the subject, a screen plays clips from the films Veiled Aristocrats (1932) and Imitation of Life (1934), both of which depict racial passing.
While the exhibition is comprehensive, it simultaneously respects that which we can never know about Greene’s interiority. Hundreds of artworks, historical artifacts, and archival documents detail the pioneering librarian’s exquisite taste, enormous privilege, and concealed family history.
Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy continues at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill, Manhattan) through May 4. The exhibition was organized by Philip Palmer and Erica Ciallela.