Book Beat: The Morgan Library & Museum turns 100 with show on groundbreaking founding director

Clarence H. White’s photograph of Belle da Costa Greene (1911), Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. The founding director of The Morgan Library & Museum, Greene is the subject of an exhibit there through May 4.

In an age when women – and especially women of color – did not have many opportunities, let alone for a professional life of the mind, Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950) served as librarian and curator for one of the most powerful men in the world, J. Pierpont Morgan, becoming the first director of what is now The Morgan Library & Museum and continuing in that capacity until her retirement in 1948.

To mark its centennial, The Morgan Library & Museum is presenting an exhibit on Greene (through May 4) that considers her life, career, acquisitions – she was an expert in illuminated manuscripts – and complexity. Although she was born into a distinguished African-American family in Washington, D.C. – her father, Richard Theodore Greener, was the first black student and graduate of Harvard University and dean of Howard University School of Law – Greene made her way into the world, working through Columbia and Princeton, by passing as a white woman. In its press materials, The Morgan has said that it has taken great care, even appointing an advisory committee, to tell Greene’s story sensitively in the context of her time.

Through object ranging from medieval manuscripts and rare printed books to archival records and portraits, the exhibit explores the sophisticated taste and confident elegance Greene brought to her democratizing roles as librarian, scholar, curator and cultural executive, documenting her enduring legacy.

For more, visit themorgan.org.