Belle Da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy

The Book Collector interviews Philip Palmer, co-curator of the Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum, open until 4th May 2025. Philip is Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head of Literary and Historical Manuscripts.

 

Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy is the first exhibition that solely focuses on the Morgan's most influential librarian. Tell us why she was the 'soul of the library'.

Belle da Costa Greene was the longest serving librarian and director at what is now known as the Morgan Library & Museum, working there for a total of forty-three years (1905–1948). She left an indelible mark on the institution by transforming a private collection into a public resource, as well as through her leadership, acquisitions, and professional relationships. Staff and researchers at the Morgan can literally see this mark on nearly every collection object, as she left behind pencil notes on the inside covers of books and on album leaves for mounting unbound manuscripts. A 1949 New York Times article described 'Miss Greene's personality fill[ing] the building', and even after her death librarians continued to work on projects she initiated. Today we count her among the pantheon of key institutional figures, alongside Pierpont and Jack Morgan.

 

Why do you think it has taken this long to give her the recognition she deserves?

Well, this is not actually the first exhibition the Morgan has mounted about her or in her honour. In 1949, a year after her retirement, the library displayed her greatest acquisitions during her time as director. In 1983, during what was then believed to be the centennial of her birth, the Morgan mounted another exhibition about her. Both of these shows predate not only the expansion of the institution into a modern museum but also Jean Strouse's 1999 revelation about Belle Greene's African American background. In 2020 I curated a small display on Greene's interest in the Romantic poet John Keats, and in 2022 my colleague Erica Ciallela (co-curator of Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy, now Instructional and Outreach Librarian at Harvard's Schlesinger Library) organised another small exhibit on Belle da Costa Greene and the Woman of the Morgan. This display highlighted the professional papers Greene left at the Morgan, all of which were processed as part of Erica's Belle da Costa Greene curatorial fellowship. But our current exhibition is the first to attempt a major presentation of Greene's full biographical arc, drawing upon key loans from over twenty institutions. She deserves this treatment, of course, and opening the show during the Morgan's centennial (1924–2024) really felt right in terms of timing. The exhibition was formally initiated in 2017, with planning beginning in earnest in 2019.

I also think that museums have not always thought about their institutional history as worthy of major exhibitions. But the landscape has changed in recent years, with comparable exhibitions at MoMA (Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern) and the Met (Making the Met: 1870–2020). The Morgan has long recognised the contributions of Greene – she's a legend around here – but it was not until Jean Strouse and Heidi Ardizzone wrote about her that she received more widespread recognition. The two recent historical novels about her life (Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray's The Personal Librarian and Alexandra Lapierre's Belle Greene) have even made her somewhat of a global phenomenon.

 

You must have had access to so much material, it must have been difficult to make a decision about what to include and what not. What were your biggest challenges?

Yes, there were many difficult decisions. Simply deciding which medieval manuscripts to show was a huge challenge! In terms of the exhibition's scope, we knew we could have focused the show entirely on her acquisitions, but that would not have been a sufficient or satisfying approach. We had to balance that focus with discussions of her family and racial background, the larger backdrop of race in Jim Crow America, her education, her work as a librarian and executive, and her personal life outside of the library, including her private art and book collection. We consulted, either in person or through digital images, archives at over thirty libraries, museums, and repositories, so there was quite a bit of material we did not use. But many of these archival sources served an unsung role in the exhibition, informing bits of label text or appearing exclusively in our catalogue. Greene had thousands of friends and professional colleagues, so conceivably the papers of any one of those contacts could contain correspondence with her or references to her. There is still a lot of material out there to sift through, in other words. We also have the Morgan Archives: she saved everything, including boxes of illuminating correspondence with British booksellers like Bernard Alfred Quaritch and his associates. Yet at the same time she destroyed her personal papers, incoming personal correspondence, and diaries before her death, so we also faced an enormous gap in the archive. Telling her story around and through this gap was another significant challenge for us.

 

When starting to plan the exhibition did you come across any documents that really surprised you?

We were always on the hunt for a photograph of Belle's mother, Genevieve. She was the one who decided the family would pass as white, and she lived with her daughter almost her entire life. We spent hours going through archives in Washington, DC, where Genevieve was born and raised, looking for photographs of her, but never found anything. Then one day the exhibition's co-curator, Erica, found an envelope misfiled in a desk at the Morgan. It contained a letter from a woman named Gertrude Tuxen, a Danish immigrant who worked for Greene as a chambermaid c.1939–1940, as well as a group of photographs. One of those photographs happens to show Genevieve around the age of 90 on a picnic in the Hudson River Valley: the household staff had taken her on an outing one day. I remember clearly when Erica came into my office, saying, 'So I think I found the only known photograph of Genevieve …' This was one of those exciting yet completely unforeseen moments: we did not expect to find this material randomly stashed away in a desk at the Morgan, just as we did not expect that the only photograph of Genevieve we would find would date to near the end of her life. There were other research discoveries as well made by other colleagues – Daria Rose Foner's discovery of Belle Greene's education at a Massachusetts boarding school in the 1890s and Amherst College's discovery of the earliest known photograph of Greene – but this one was the most surprising.

 

Presumably you had to borrow from other institutions to illustrate the first part of the exhibition about Belle's family and upbringing? Or had the Morgan started to collect relevant material a while ago?

We always knew this exhibition would require a fair number of loans to tell different parts of Greene's story. To that end, we have borrowed material from the Library of Congress about her family's milieu in Washington DC; letters and photographs she sent to Bernard Berenson, now at Harvard's I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies outside of Florence; her father's diploma, from the Harvard University Archives; and objects related to her father’s book collecting from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research Culture as well as New York Historical. We borrowed a large portion of her student file from the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. We borrowed a ledger book in her handwriting from Princeton University Library. We even borrowed one of her old master paintings (National Museum for Women in the Arts) and a pair of 5th-century Byzantine earrings she owned (Dumbarton Oaks). There are several more loans I do not have space to mention. But by and large, the story of Greene at the Morgan can be told through our collection and institutional archives, which make up a sizeable portion of the exhibition. About five years ago we started collecting new material on Greene and her family, including typed letters by her and a copy of the 1870 Harvard College senior yearbook containing a signed photograph of Richard T. Greener (Belle's father). Very little material about Belle Greene comes on the market, so we try to purchase it when we can. We were given an early handwritten Greene letter recently by a Morgan family member, in fact.

 

The second part of the exhibition looks at how Belle built the library. Medieval illuminated manuscripts obviously formed the main part of J. Pierpont Morgan's library and Belle seemed to have loved them, too. What are the highlights she bought?

We created a whole section of the show on her interest in medieval illuminated manuscripts, which was her main area of expertise. It is no accident that this section features some of the Morgan's greatest medieval treasures, most of which have an interesting Belle Greene acquisition story. For instance, she acquired a set of 13th-century French miniatures of the Old Testament –

now known under many names including the Crusader Bible, the Morgan Picture Bible, and the Shah Abbas Bible – during the First World War (1916) at a time when Jack Morgan had temporarily halted acquisitions. Recognising its importance, she ignored Jack's injunction and bought the manuscript for £10,000 (and in the end Jack was very pleased with her decision). Three years later, she acquired many notable treasures from the sale of Henry Yates Thompson's famous collection, which was known for containing exactly 100 manuscripts. There she purchased a stunning 10th-century Spanish manuscript of Beatus's commentary on the book of Revelation, often regarded as the most important manuscript from medieval Spain held in North America. That she successfully bid for this manuscript at only £1,000 shows not only how undervalued the manuscript was when it sold in 1919, but also Greene's foresight in making acquisitions whose research value would be more fully revealed in the course of time. Another manuscript in the exhibition – the 12th-century illustrated manuscript of the Life of St. Edmund the Martyr – should have been given to the British Museum outright, according to Greene. After the owners raised the asking price at the eleventh hour and the BM was unable to buy it, the manuscript ended up in the hands of Greene and Morgan. But the relationship between the two institutions was not typically characterised by competition: the connection began when Pierpont donated art and antiquities to the BM in 1907, and in 1929 Jack Morgan would essentially give the BM an interest-free loan to acquire two of its greatest manuscript treasures, the Luttrell Psalter (Add MS 42130) and the Bedford Hours (Add MSS 42131).

But she was also responsible for broadening the collecting area for manuscripts. Which ones would you rate most?

Anne-Marie Eze has a great essay on Greene as a Medievalist in our exhibition catalogue, and in that essay she offers a useful summary of acquisitions that might reflect what we would call today 'the global middle ages'. For Greene truly was interested in expanding the geographical scope of the manuscripts collection, headlined perhaps by her acquisition of important Egyptian Coptic manuscripts and bookbindings in 1911. Another key acquisition in this area came after she attended a landmark exhibition of Islamic art in Munich with Bernard Berenson. There she saw an album of Persian and Indian miniatures owned by the British Museum curator Charles Hercules Read, a colleague and friend of hers who would sell his album to the Morgan. These miniatures prompted Greene to describe, in a letter to Read, her efforts to attain representation for these 'important schools' of illumination in Morgan's library. I also really like the Ethiopian Gospel book she acquired the year she retired, 1948. Also digitised online, this volume was made in the early 15th century for Princess Zir Ganela. In a set of notes on the book Greene remarked that she had known of this manuscript and had been trying to acquire it for a decade.

 

It's a beautifully staged exhibition. How closely did you work with the designer?

Thank you very much indeed! The designer and curators worked very closely. It was truly a pleasure to work with Amy Forman, with whom I first collaborated in 2023–24 on the Morgan's touring version of Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, curated by the V&A and the National Trust. I appreciate and value her creative contributions to these projects. She's not afraid to tell curators if something is not going to work or fit from a design perspective, and that clear communication helped make this exhibition look its best. She added these little flourishes that really worked too, including the red curtains flanking the two gallery entrances and a looping clip from a 1911 silent film of New York City street scenes, which we have presented as 'Belle Greene's New York, 1911'. This clip plays in the more relaxed space between the two galleries (replete with couches and exhibition catalogues) and has become a focal point for visitors moving around the exhibition, who stop and become mesmerised by its scenes of well-dressed New Yorkers walking in the streets. Amy also ensured that the show reflected the Morgan's exhibition design aesthetic, namely to let objects breathe without overcrowding and to keep a good balance of visual and textual material.

Tell us a little bit about the reception the exhibition has received – you seem to have attracted a diverse group of visitors. Do you think this will open up the library and museum to new groups of visitors in the long run?

The show has driven high attendance figures since it opened in October, and it would not surprise me if this is our best attended exhibition of all time: at the time of writing (March 2025) we have welcomed over 125,000 visitors to the exhibition. We have also reached thousands more audience members outside of New York, as I have given lectures on Belle Greene in multiple cities and for multiple zoom audiences, while also taking part in two different all-day symposia. And people from around the world can of course take advantage of numerous new digital resources about Belle Greene, including a website made with Harvard to digitise and transcribe her letters to Bernard Berenson, a digital portrait gallery, and even a 3-D tour of the gallery space at the museum. The press coverage has been fantastic, with reviews in the New York Times, New Yorker, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as segments on NPR, CBS Saturday Morning, and NY1. Many of our visitors are readers of one of two works of historical fiction about Belle Greene: Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray's wildly successful The Personal Librarian and Alexandra Lapierre's Belle Greene, originally published in French. In fact, ever since The Personal Librarian (2021) was published we have been attracting many new visitors to the Morgan, especially book club participants. The Morgan still has a long way to go in diversifying its audience, but I have definitely noticed a more diverse audience attending the exhibition and the museum, and I think that this attention will persist because the connection between Greene and the Morgan will always be there. This is an evergreen story for us.

 

You must have learned so much more about Belle – what was your most astonishing discovery about her as a person?

We have uncovered so many interesting and amusing glimmers of her life, facets of her experience that did not make it into the exhibition in a meaningful way, but that we sometimes allude to in the catalogue. Here are a few:

• She signed her own pay cheques! And she did this at a time when women in the United States could not open their own bank accounts without a male co-signer.
• She drove a Pierce Arrow convertible and enjoyed 'motoring' in the countryside.
• At Yale University's Beinecke Library there is preserved in the Georgia O'Keeffe papers a short manuscript in Greene's hand titled 'Gertrude Stein'. It is a parody of Stein's prose, most likely written in the 1910s. It's pretty funny!

 

Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy

The Morgan Library & Museum

Open until 4th May 2025

If you can't make it to New York in time, you can explore the exhibition online here > 

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