For the Morgan Library’s 100th Birthday, a Look at Its Formidable First Director

B elle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy isn’t a title that glitters on a marquee, but this exhibition at the Morgan Library is fascinating. It’s a 100th-anniversary show for the distinguished library and art museum based on the collection of the Gilded Age mogul J. P. Morgan. Greene (1879–1950) was Morgan’s librarian and curator from 1905 till his death in 1913, advising the collector willing to spend anything for the very best in rare books and manuscripts. She continued working for Jack Morgan, J. P.’s son and heir, running and expanding what was still a private library until the place opened as a public museum in 1924. She was then appointed the Morgan Library’s first director, serving until she retired in 1948.

Of the Morgan Library, “hope to be able to say some day that there is neither rival nor equal,” Greene wrote in 1909, and I think we can say it today since the Morgan Library’s unique. The collection is superb, and its location in Morgan’s Renaissance Revival palazzo, much expanded since 1924, is glorious. And, still, more than 75 years after Greene retired, it’s her baby. She was extraordinary for her drive and smarts, and extraordinary for being among the tiny number of women museum directors in her era. She was extraordinary, too, in being a black woman who, her entire adult life, passed as white.

A Librarian’s Legacy has three core themes. The first is biographical, starting with Greene’s birth in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Richard Greener, Harvard’s first black graduate, and Genevieve Fleet Greener, a school principal and music teacher whose family was for generations among Washington’s freeborn, black intellectual aristocrats. The Greeners moved to New York, where Richard worked for the foundation that built Grant’s Tomb. Greene’s family was passionate about education. Greene went to Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies — now Northfield Mount Hermon School — and Amherst College’s special program to train aspiring librarians.

Her first job — as a librarian at Princeton starting in 1902 — developed her expertise in incunabula, which are books printed before 1500, and early illuminated manuscripts.

She met Morgan through his nephew, and the two made a perfect intellectual and aesthetic match, though less so a romantic one. “We tried,” Greene wrote in one of the many hundreds of letters the exhibition’s curators uncovered. I think Morgan gave it a heroic try, given Greene’s beauty. There are lots of photographs of her in the show. Clearly, he liked her looks and thought she was exotic. Before Greene was 30, she was traveling to Europe buying art for Morgan, whose respect for her eye was immense. Morgan trusted her with pricy acquisitions but, hating to pay taxes, also admired her skill in evading customs duties as she brought haul after haul back to New York.

Greene’s parents split — we’re not sure why — and after around 1900 she, her siblings, and her mother pretended to be white. Greene’s parents were likely mixed race and certainly, as black Washingtonians went, light-skinned. Greener, who later became dean of Howard University’s law school, dropped from their lives. During the McKinley presidency, he was appointed to a minor diplomatic post in Vladivostok, hooked up with a Japanese woman, had three more children, and eventually died in Chicago.

Greene changed her name, inventing “da Costa” to suggest Portuguese heritage and explain her complexion, which, while light, wasn’t as fair-skinned as an Irish redhead’s. Her mother, who dropped the final letter from their surname, took a Dutch middle name for herself, evoking links to Peter Stuyvesant and Old New York. I don’t think she lost sleep over passing as white, and we don’t learn whether anyone cared among her many, many colleagues and friends. Greene had a lively social presence in Manhattan, never married, and torched her letters and diaries before she died.

Greene and Bernard Berenson had a long fling, and I’m glad for the two of them. The 600 letters she wrote to him are online via Harvard’s I Tatti website. They’re not on the Morgan Library website but should be. I read a few of them. Nothing’s salacious, but who’d want to read about Berenson’s love life?

The exhibition conveys all of this engrossing, even seductive material in the context of slavery, racist stereotypes and slurs, racial passing, and colorism, which is racism within races and based on darkness, with lighter-skinned blacks higher on the social pecking order. This is really the core theme of A Librarian’s Legacy and sullies the intellectual flow of the show, which is about Greene. She never wrote about any of these subjects and doesn’t seem to have been anguished by the choice she made, with her family, to put race politics behind her. New York was the perfect place for it. It’s where people remake themselves.

“Passing is a deeply private and personal decision,” the introduction to the catalogue tells us, as if we didn’t know, but all in death become public property, and Greene is outed, and in great detail. What would she have made of revelation after revelation, on the walls of her museum? We can only guess, but I suspect she’d be horrified. She lived her life and didn’t expect the institution she built would dig up dirt on her. I read the catalogue, and after 100 pages, my interest in the dynamics of passing and colorism were well milked.

The exhibition places too much emphasis on Greener who, after all, was persona non grata by the time Greene was in her teens and out of the picture forevermore. His presence juices the part of the exhibition on racism, colorism, and passing, but it doesn’t add anything to our knowledge of Greene’s role as an institution builder, which is truly this librarian’s legacy.

Still, however opportunistic the Morgan Library is, and however much it bootlicks woke ideology, I couldn’t resist a section on Imitation of Life, which I know best as the two movies, one in 1934 and the remake in 1959, about a mixed-race, passing teen whose mother is a cook and housekeeper for a narcissistic movie star —  Claudette Colbert in the first, Lana Turner steaming my glasses in the second. Another section describes Virginia’s “one drop rule,” defining race as a blood characteristic and labeling as black or mixed race anyone and everyone with a black ancestor, no matter how deep in the past. It seems so medieval, insanely so, but people one day might very well feel the same way about our own cult of abortion, “women can have penises,” and pumping children full of puberty blockers.

After a while, the Morgan Library’s obsession with passing is overkill. I was happy to get to the third core section of A Librarian’s Legacy, which concerns Greene’s acquisitions. She was certainly intrepid. In 1916, she traveled to the U.K., buying a set of French Old Testament miniatures from the 1240s. Cecil B. DeMille could not have conceived a more convincing battle scene. The Miscellany of the Life of St. Edmund from 1130 is one of the earliest illustrated histories of an English saint. She bought Dickens’s manuscript of Our Mutual Friend. My favorite object in the exhibition is a Gainsborough drawing Greene got for the museum in 1943 when Jack Morgan died. Lady Walking in a Garden from 1785 looks like she’s about to walk out of the museum.

Greene was a New York celebrity in her lifetime since Morgan’s library was famous in his lifetime, and as a woman librarian, she was an item of fascination. She wasn’t the only woman to be counted as a titan in the arts. Dorothy Miller, Edith Halpert, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Lizzie Bliss were her peers, but, to me, Greene’s parallel is Isabella Stewart Gardner. Greene didn’t have Gardner’s megabucks, though Morgan’s $50,000 bequest to her in 1913 made her financially secure. Like Gardner, she had vision, ambition, and taste.

The catalogue, edited by the curators Erica Ciallela and Philip Palmer, is very good, with a dozen essays. While the race shtick becomes obvious, it reads like a novel, and Greene’s a memorable character. Tom Hoving and Chick Austin are the only two museum directors with biographies, or autobiographies, that sizzle, and we can add Greene. Hers might be the only riveting book about a librarian. My quibbles aside, A Librarian’s Legacy is for everyone with good taste and the feel for a good and different story.