twi-ny recommended events

DHARMA FRIENDS: NUALA CLARKE AT TIBET HOUSE

Who: Nuala Clarke, Crystal Gandrud, Rob Ward, Megan Mook, Kevin Townley
What: “Alchemy and Art on the Spiritual Path”
Where: Tibet House NYC and online, 22 West Fifteenth St.
When: Monday, March 24, free – $20 – $225, 6:30
Why: “I swim in the sea, and my experience of cold has changed. I can no longer be trusted with the question ‘Is it cold out?’ I experience it without the tightening of torso muscles and raising of shoulders. It has become separate from the whole, less readily identifiable. In my hands it feels like leanness, the appendages pared away to the essential; in my back and around my ribs it tingles; it is fresh on my lips; in my toes it is clear and my chest, above my heart, accepts it as youngness, in need of care. I am an effervescent being.” So writes Irish artist Nuala Clarke in her new book, Irish Moss of a Dead Man’s Skull (the Owl Circus, March 18, $33).

Influenced by the work of Irish alchemist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–91), author of Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, with Observations on a Diamond that Shines in the Dark, as well as by installation artist Robert Irwin, serigrapher and ceramicist Robert Brown, and spiritual coach and meditation teacher Robert Chender, Clarke has spent nearly five years “thinking about whether a painting could be prescribed for an ailment.” The result is a work that Clarke calls “an ode to light, color, loss, and the elements.” The 224-page book features 86 full-color images and details the impact each of the four Roberts has had on her art and her meditation practice.

On Monday, March 24, Clarke will launch the book at Tibet House as part of the Dharma Friends series, joined by experimental writer and acquiring editor Crystal Gandrud, Food Will Win the War violist, songwriter, and lead vocalist Rob Ward, and monthly Dharma Friends hosts Megan Mook and Kevin Townley, who will lead guided meditations. Having participated back in 2010 with composer Roarke Menzies, Gandrud, my wife, and others in a performance Clarke curated for her show “You Delight Me” on Shelter Island, I can vouch for how terrific her events are, and this one should offer its own numerous pleasures.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE NEXT GENERATION OF DANCE: AILEY II RETURNS HOME

Ailey II brings Houston Thomas’s Down the Rabbit Hole back home in two-week NYC season (photo by Nir Arieli)

AILEY II AT CITIGROUP THEATER
Ailey Citigroup Theater
405 West Fifty-Fifth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
March 26 – April 6, $62.25
ailey.org

Ailey II has been on the road, visiting more than two dozen cities, but the company called “the next generation of dance” is coming back to New York for its annual season at the Ailey Citigroup Theater on West Fifty-Fifth St. Running March 26 to April 6, the season is dedicated to longtime Ailey dancer, choreographer, and artistic director Judith Jamison, who passed away in November at the age of eighty-one.

“Ailey II is thrilled to come back to our home stage after an incredible tour across the country as we leap into our sixth decade,” artistic director Francesca Harper said in a statement. “We are eager to welcome both our loyal supporters and new audiences to experience the exciting artistry of Ailey II through two programs that bridge the past and present, celebrating how each generation shapes the future. Whether audiences find joy, connection, or a sense of empowerment, I want them to carry that discovery into their lives long after they leave the theater.”

The company of twelve dancers — Carley Brooks, Meredith Brown, Jennifer M. Gerken, Alfred L. Jordan II, Xavier Logan, Kiri Moore, Corinth Moulterie, Xhosa Scott, Kayla Mei-Wan Thomas, Darion Turner, Eric Vidaña, and Jordyn White — will present “Echoes,” comprising Harper’s Luminous, the world premiere of Houston Thomas’s Down the Rabbit Hole, and a new production of Alvin Ailey’s Streams, and “New Vintage,” consisting of an excerpt from Jamison’s Divining, excerpts from Ailey’s Blues Suite, The Lark Ascending, and Streams, Down the Rabbit Hole, and Baye & Asa’s John 4:20. Each program is approximately 105 minutes with two intermissions; tickets are $62.65.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SCORED BY YASUAKI SHIMIZU: CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Documentary tells the engaging story of a pair of Japanese artists and the life they have made for themselves in Brooklyn

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday March 22, 5:00
metrograph.com
www.facebook.com/cutieandtheboxer

Zachary Heinzerling’s Emmy-winning Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully told story of love and art and the many sacrifices one must make to try to succeed in both. In 1969, controversial Japanese Neo Dada action painter and sculptor Ushio Shinohara came to New York City, looking to expand his career. According to the catalog for the 2013 MoMA show “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” which featured four works by Ushio, “American art had seemed to him to be ‘marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting.’” Four years later, he met nineteen-year-old Noriko, who had left Japan to become an artist in New York as well. The two fell in love and have been together ever since, immersed in a fascinating relationship that Heinzerling explores over a five-year period in his splendid feature-length theatrical debut.

Ushio and Noriko live in a cramped apartment and studio in DUMBO, where he puts on boxing gloves, dips them in paint, and pounds away at large, rectangular canvases and builds oversized motorcycle sculptures out of found materials. Meanwhile, Noriko, who has spent most of the last half century taking care of her often childlike husband and staying with him through some rowdy times and battles with the bottle, is finally creating her own work, an R. Crumb-like series of drawings detailing the life of her alter ego, Cutie, and her often cruel husband, Bullie. (“Ushi” means “bull” in Japanese.) While Ushio is more forthcoming verbally in the film, mugging for the camera and speaking his mind, the pig-tailed Noriko is far more tentative, so director and cinematographer Heinzerling brings her tale to life by animating her work, her characters jumping off the page to show Cutie’s constant frustration with Bullie.

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in Emmy-winning Cutie and the Boxer

During the course of the too-short eighty-two-minute film — it would have been great to spend even more time with these unique and compelling figures — the audience is introduced to the couple’s forty-year-old son, who has some issues of his own; Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe, who stops by the studio to consider purchasing one of Ushio’s boxing paintings for the museum; and Chelsea gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who represents Ushio. But things never quite take off for Ushio, who seems to always be right on the cusp of making it. Instead, the couple struggles to pay their rent. One of the funniest, yet somehow tragic, scenes in the film involves Ushio packing up some of his sculptures — forcing them into a suitcase like clothing — and heading back to Japan to try to sell some pieces. Cutie and the Boxer is a special documentary that gets to the heart of the creative process as it applies both to art and love, focusing on two disparate people who have made a strange yet thoroughly charming life for themselves.

Cutie and the Boxer is screening March 22 at 5:00 as part of the Metrograph series “Scored by Yasuaki Shimizu” and will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with composer Yasuaki Shimizu and writer Yumiko Sakuma. The Saturday tribute also includes a double feature of Hiroyuki Nakano’s 1990 Pace and Nam June Paik’s 1986 Bye Bye Kipling at 2:35 and Buntarō Futagawa’s 1925 silent jidaigeki Orochi at 7:30, which will be introduced by Shimizu, about which he explains, “This film is a silent samurai movie made and released in 1925, directed by Bunta Suga. It is the first production of the Banto Tsumasaburō Production and a landmark work that sparked the ‘sword-fighting boom’ in Japan. This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of its release! I composed music for a film concert. A few years later, the master film of Orochi was rediscovered, and in 2023, a digital master version was produced. I revised the score for this 4K digital restoration, which was released the same year. This film holds great significance for me.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BOXED IN: JOSHUA WILLIAM GELB’s [untitled miniature] AT HERE

Joshua William Gelb spends three hours a night in a tiny box at Here through March 25 (photo by Maria Baranova)

[untitled miniature]
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
March 18-25, $27-$102 (livestream only $10), 7:00, 8:00, 9:00
here.org
theaterinquarantine.com

In January, Joshua William Gelb, who had transformed his eight-square-foot closet in the East Village into a pristine white digital stage during the pandemic, escaped the safety of his home in order to present The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [Redux], a staggeringly inventive hourlong multimedia play performed in a replica of his closet, accompanied by live and prerecorded video segments interacting with each other.

Gelb, whose collaborative virtual productions, dubbed Theater in Quarantine, include I Am Sending You the Sacred Face: One Brief Musical Act with Mother Teresa, Footnote for the End of Time, and Nosferatu: A 3D Symphony of Horror, now steps further into the technological avant-garde with the hybrid [untitled miniature], running through March 25 at Here. Each evening from 7:00 to 10:00, Gelb, nude and covered in white talcum powder, will perform in a white box measuring only 35″ wide by 19.5″ tall. His actions, which begin with him seemingly asleep, can be seen on an iPhone facing the box, a screen on the back of the box, three video monitors in the hallway, and a wall around the corner with nine screens that alternate between live and prerecorded scenes of Gelb in the box, sometimes bathed in yellow, pink, or other colors, along with television test patterns, the SMPTE color-bar grids that, sixty years ago, appeared on television sets after broadcasters shut down for the night — and which, if they came on today, would signal the end is near.

Audience members can relax on the vivid blue floor in the central space, sit in a chair, or walk around the room, following the show on an app that shares different views of Gelb and encourages everyone to participate in a chat that is read out loud by a female AI voice, audible to both the audience and Gelb. The only other items in the room are a red fire extinguisher and an old metal first-aid kit on the wall; after I accidentally knocked my head against it, one of the black-clad stage managers silently came over, opened it up, took out a small package that said “bandages,” and offered me a brown Tic Tac.

[untitled miniature] features a live video feed broadcast to numerous screens and online (photo by Maria Baranova)

In an Instagram post, Gelb delves into the nature of the work, explaining, “Why am I naked? . . . The naked body is the foundation of art. . . . I’m trying to see if it’s possible to find a real impression of tactility in the digital medium. I wanted to make a piece that really felt distilled down to its most essential elements, the smallest performance space possible and a human body. That shouldn’t be controversial, but try putting a naked body on the internet outside of OnlyFans and you hit a wall — algorithmic sensors, AI moderators, the corporate infrastructure that decides what is and is not acceptable. . . . Art isn’t about comfort or what’s acceptable. And artists need a digital space where they can push boundaries, even ones that make us uncomfortable.”

Gelb certainly looks uncomfortable as he wiggles, turns, squirms, and reconfigures his limbs; often, when he bumps into or purposely strikes the box, harsh, loud sounds reverberate blast out, a cacophonous symphony. At times the audience is enveloped in the much more rewarding sounds of chirping birds and a gently rushing river. Gelb occasionally lets out a grunt but is mostly quiet as he struggles inside the claustrophobic box.

Durational performance offers numerous ways to experience it (photo by Maria Baranova)

Gelb is clearly not enjoying himself, grimacing, staring out blankly, seemingly unable to get out of his predicament. Although one side of the box is open, he is trapped, in a cage he has built for himself. It’s as if he’s been sent to solitary confinement for an unnamed crime. Maybe he wakes up, wrestles with another difficult day, and goes back to bed — or perhaps has decided, once awake, to eventually stay under the covers, avoiding facing the world. He could be stuck on a social media platform on which he no longer wants to reveal himself. Or maybe he has experienced an entire lifetime in forty-five minutes, being birthed from the womb and later laid to rest in a grave.

The piece can also be taken more literally, applied to how we were all penned in at home during lockdown, terrified of leaving, spending too much time with our little electronic boxes that kept warning us of impending doom — and with which Gelb has carved out a unique and fascinating career.

At the show’s conclusion, there are no bows, no applause. Some members of the audience gingerly leave, and others stay, no one sure whether anything else is going to happen, sort of like life itself, before, during, and after a pandemic.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE GREAT PRIVATION: BLACK BODIES IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA AND TODAY

Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) seeks comfort in Nia Akilah Robinson’s The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE GREAT PRIVATION (HOW TO FLIP TEN CENTS INTO A DOLLAR)
Soho Rep at Playwrights Horizons, Peter Jay Sharp Theater
416 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $45
sohorep.org

Making striking off-Broadway debuts, writer Nia Akilah Robinson and director Evren Odcikin excavate the mistreatment of Black bodies through American history in the haunting yet exhilarating The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar), the inaugural production of Soho Rep’s residency at Playwrights Horizons after the company had to leave its longtime Walker St. home.

The hundred-minute play takes on even greater meaning given the recent elimination of government internet links to the gravesites of Black, brown, and women veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Great Privation switches between 1832 and the present. In the past, thirty-four-year-old Missy Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Charity (Clarissa Vickerie), have just buried Moses, their respective husband and father, in the African Baptist Church graveyard in Philadelphia. He died of cholera, which is sweeping through poor communities. A white man named John (Holiday) shows up with tools and a large sack; Missy surmises that he is a student at the college who has come to dig up Moses and use his body for medical experimentation. But Missy knows that after seventy-two hours, the body will have decayed enough to be worthless to the institution, so she plans to watch over the grave for three days while praying for Moses’s safe spiritual journey back to Sierra Leone. Throughout the play, a countdown clock keeps track of the time, beginning at 72:00:00 and moving swiftly between scenes.

“You told me white people take bodies to torture us further. Like what they did to Nat Turner last year. But students are the ones who take our bodies? . . . Why didn’t you tell me this before?!” Charity asks her mother, who replies, “I didn’t want it to be true. Not for US. It couldn’t be.” But it is.

Missy Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) makes a deal with John (Holiday) as Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) looks on (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Later, a Black janitor named Cuffee (Miles G. Jackson) arrives, also carrying tools and a sack, ready to do what John didn’t. “How can you, a Black man, how can you live with yourself?” Missy asks him.

In the modern day, Missy and Charity, who live in Harlem, are working at a sleepaway camp on the grounds of the Philly graveyard. They’re on a break, discussing with John, a gay white counselor, how they are being unfairly disciplined by their boss, Cuffee. The women also discover that they are being paid less than John even though they have the same job and Missy has more experience than John. Meanwhile, Charity has gotten in trouble for vandalizing her school with her friends and posting it on social media. She tells her mother that she can’t delete it because “it’s already viral,” like it was a disease that can’t be cured (not unlike cholera once upon a time). “TikTok is the bane of my existence,” Missy says.

John then offers to show them the graveyard at night, and time and memory collapse into each other.

In researching the play, Robinson, who was born and raised in Harlem, read works by such authors, professors, and historians as Daina Ramey Berry, Lesley M. Rankin-Hill, and Gary B. Nash and scoured through the library at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with the help of associate chief librarian Maira Liriano. Harriet A. Washington’s 2008 book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, served as a major source. “Enslavement could not have existed and certainly could not have persisted without medical science,” Washington writes. “However, physicians were also dependent upon slavery, both for economic security and for the enslaved ‘clinical material’ that fed the American medical research and medical training that bolstered physicians’ professional advancement.”

A digital clock counts down from seventy-two hours to zero in Soho Rep production at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The word “privation” in the title is short for “deprivation,” something the Black people in the show experience over and over in both time periods as they deal with generational trauma, grief, and stolen land and labor. It’s no coincidence that Missy’s husband’s name was Moses, the same as the leader of the Israelites who escaped slavery in Egypt but who was not allowed to enter the Promised Land, much like Moses Freeman’s spirit may not return to Sierra Leone. The second part of the title, the parenthetical How to flip ten cents into a dollar, is a phrase Robinson learned from her parents, referring to making something great with very little.

Mariana Sanchez’s set features a soft-sculpture tree near the middle of the stage, next to where Moses is buried. It is a place where Charity finds comfort, resting on the extensive roots that reach into the past and stretch out toward the future, enveloping her (and at several points seemingly coming to life with flashing LED colors). The two women wear the same long skirts throughout most of the play, adding coats to differentiate between 1832 and now; at camp they also wear more summery casual clothing. The costumes are by Kara Harmon; Marika Kent’s lighting and Tosin Olufolabi’s sound build a mysterious atmosphere, while Maxwell Bowman’s video and programming contribute an eerie surprise.

Missy Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) enjoy a fun moment with John (Holiday) during a break at camp (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The four-person cast is exemplary, led by Tony nominee Lucas-Perry (A Sign of the Times, A Bright Room Called Day), who imbues Missy with an earth-mother devotion and dedication, and Juilliard MFA student Vickerie, who already has the chops of a pro. Holiday, in his off-Broadway debut, and Jackson (Pay the Writer, Endlings) offer fine support as the women’s allies and enemies.

Despite its potent subject matter, The Great Privation is extremely funny, complete with a rousing fourth-wall-breaking finale that will have you moving and grooving. But it won’t make you forget the hard-hitting story you just experienced, especially as Black bodies both alive and dead continue to be disrespected in America, long past the time the clock hits zero.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MADNESS AND MELODRAMA: FIVE EVENINGS AT THE CHAIN

Tamara (Snezhana Chernova) and Ilyin (Roman Freud) reunite after being apart for seventeen years in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vaynshtein)

FIVE EVENINGS
Chain Theatre
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
March 20-30, $49.87 – $71.21
www.fiveevenings.com

“No, this is madness,” Zoya says to Ilyin at the start of Jewish-Soviet playwright Aleksandr Volodin’s Five Evenings, a five-act multigenerational melodrama that is as relevant today as it was when it was first presented in 1959 at the Leningrad State Academic Bolshoi Drama Theater and later adapted into an award-winning 1978 film by Nikita Mikhalkov.

The work is now being revived by director Eduard Tolokonnikov and producer Polina Belkina for a thirteen-show run at the Chain Theatre, with Lana Shypitsyna or Snezhana Chernova as Tamara, Roman Freud as Ilyin, Ekaterina Cherepanova as Katya, Aleksei Furmanov as Slava, Inna Yesilevskaya as Zoya, and Dima Koan as Timofeev. The ninety-minute play (with intermission) will be performed in Russian with English surtitles; the set design is by Jenya Shekhter, with lighting by Ken Coughlin, sound by Denis Zabiyaka, and costumes by Natasha Danilova.

The story looks at two relationships, between the older Tamara and Ilyin and the younger Katya and Slava. In the second evening, they’re together at Tamara’s, and the two men have a chat while Slava sets the table, a scene that is representative of Volodin’s character development and dialogue:

Ilyin: See how nice it is? When there’s a white tablecloth and flowers on the table; it’s awkward to be petty, rude, or mean. The tablecloth should have creases from the iron — they bring back childhood memories.
Slava: How poetic.
Ilyin: One must live wisely, without haste. Remember, life’s book is full of unnecessary details. But here’s the trick: You can skip those pages.
Slava: Well, this is one page I don’t feel like reading. Aunt Toma can clean up when she gets here. After all, isn’t there a division of labor?
Ilyin: Don’t make me angry — get to work.

Katya walks in as Ilyin is teaching Slava how to box, declaring, “What are you doing, you slimy snake? What are you doing?!” A moment later, Ilyin says to Katya, “A demonic woman. Is that a manicure you’ve got there?”

Katya (Ekaterina Cherepanova) and Slava (Aleksei Furmanov) seek freedom and love in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vaynshtein)

Born in Minsk and raised in Moscow after his mother’s death when he was five, Aleksandr Lifshitz — he changed his last name to Volodin because Lifshitz was too Jewish and was impacting his ability to get published — was drafted into the Red Army during WWII and was injured twice before earning a medal for courage. His first play, The Factory Girl, debuted in 1955 and traveled throughout the USSR. Five Evenings, which deals with time, suffering, resilience, and rebuilding, was followed by such plays as My Elder Sister and Do Not Part with Your Beloved in addition to several screenplays.

A champion of the individual who subtly rejected Stalinism in his works, Volodin died in 2001 in St. Petersburg at the age of eighty-two; his son Vladimir Lifschitz, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, revoked the copyright of his father’s plays in Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine. Lifschitz will be at the Chain Theatre to participate in a postshow discussion on March 20.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LILLIE P. BLISS AND BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: MAKING MoMA AND THE MORGAN

Lillie P. Bliss, seen here in a photo circa 1924, is subject of new MoMA exhibit (the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York)

LILLIE P. BLISS AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN
MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through March 29, $17-$30
www.moma.org

“Dear Miss Bliss,” Bryson Burroughs, curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, began in a letter to Lillie Plummer Bliss upon her crucial support of the 1921 “Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art,” “I salute you as a benefactress of the human race!”

Born in Boston in 1864, Bliss cofounded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan. She died in New York two years later, leaving her collection of approximately 120 works by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French artists to the institution, including paintings by Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon. She also encouraged the museum to sell pieces of her bequest as necessary to acquire other works, which led the museum to expand its collection with such masterpieces as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

Bliss is celebrated in the lovely MoMA exhibit “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” continuing through March 29. Organized by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, the show features such works as Cezanne’s The Bather, Seurat’s At the Concert Européen (Au Concert Européen), Marie Laurencin’s Girl’s Head, Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska, Picasso’s Woman in White, and Henri Matisse’s Interior with a Violin Case.

The centerpiece is The Starry Night, which, if you’re lucky, you will get to experience on your own, as it’s hanging in a different spot from its usual place, free of the usual mass of people in front of it, taking photos and videos, obstructing one another’s clear views and peaceful contemplation of one of the most famous canvases in the world.

Installation view, “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern” (photo by Emile Askey)

The show is supplemented with such ephemera as old catalogs, acquisition notices, pages from scrapbooks, photos of Bliss as a child, and a few rare letters, as Bliss requested that all her personal papers be destroyed shortly before her death in 1931 at the age of sixty-six. One key letter she sent to a National Academician is quoted in the MoMA book Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art, in which Bliss writes: “We are not so far apart as you seem to think in our ideas on art, for I yield to no one in my love, reverence, and admiration for the beautiful things which have already been created in painting, sculpture, and music. But you are an artist, absorbed in your own production, with scant leisure and inclination to examine patiently and judge fairly the work of the hosts of revolutionists, innovators, and modernists in this widespread movement through the whole domain of art or to discriminate between what is false and bad and what is sometimes crude, perhaps, but full of power and promise for the enrichment of the art which the majority of them serve with a devotion as pure and honest as your own. There are not yet many great men among them, but great men are scarce — even among academicians. The truth is you older men seem intolerant and supercilious, a state of mind incomprehensible to a philosopher who looks on and enjoys watching for and finding the new men in music, painting, and literature who have something to say worth saying and claim for themselves only the freedom to express it in their own way.”

Bliss did it her own way as well.

Clarence H. White, Belle da Costa Greene, platinum print, 1911 (courtesy the Clarence H. White Collection)

BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: A LIBRARIAN’S LEGACY
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 4, $13-$25
www.themorgan.org

“My friends in England suggest that I be called ‘Keeper of Printed Books and Manuscripts,’” Belle da Costa Greene told the New York Times in 1912. “But you know they have such long titles in London. I’m simply a librarian.”

Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879 in Washington, DC, Greene became the first director of the Morgan Library, specializing in the acquisition of rare books and manuscripts, a Black woman passing for white in a field dominated by men. Prior to her death in New York City in 1950 at the age of seventy, she destroyed all her diaries and private papers, but her correspondence with others paints a picture of an extraordinary woman breaking barriers personally and professionally as she came to be known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.”

Curated by Philip S. Palmer and Erica Ciallela, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy” consists of nearly two hundred items, from letters, photographs, yearbooks, and board minutes to illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, furniture, and books by Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Butler Yeats, and Dante Alighieri in addition to canvases by Archibald J. Motley Jr., Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Ḥabīb-Allāh Mashhadī, Albrecht Dürer, Henri Matisse, Jacques Louis David, and Thomas Gainsborough. Greene’s early holy grail was Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; she was prepared to pay up to $100,000 for the work, printed by William Caxton in 1485, but won it for $42,000 at a 1911 auction.

Re-creation of Belle da Costa Greene’s office is centerpiece of Morgan exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Just as MoMA would not be what it is today without Lillie P. Bliss, the Morgan would not be the same without Greene. While at Princeton, she became friends with Morgan’s nephew Junius Spencer Morgan, who collected rare books and who recommended Greene to his uncle; J. P. Morgan hired her as a librarian in 1905, and she was appointed director in 1924. Her starting salary was $75 a month, but she was earning $10,000 a year by 1911.

The show is divided into sixteen sections, from “A Family Identity,” “An Empowering Education,” and “Questioning the Color Line” to “A Life of Her Own: Collector and Socialite,” “A Life of Her Own: Philanthropy and Politics,” and “Black Librarianship.” It details Greene’s childhood, her successful parents, her education, and her friendship with art historians Bernard and Mary Berenson; Greene had a long-term affair with Bernard, who had an open marriage with his wife. Following Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene worked closely with J.P.’s son, Jack, to expand the institution’s holdings. The centerpiece is a re-creation of Greene’s office, with her desk, swivel chair, and card catalog cabinet, all made by Cowtan & Sons, accompanied by a quote from a letter she wrote to Bernard in 1909: “I was busily engaged hunting up particulars of a certain book & half the Library was on my desk.”

One of the most heart-wrenching parts of the exhibit explores her relationship with her nephew and adopted son, Robert MacKenzie Leveridge, who died tragically in WWII.

The Morgan show is supplemented by three online sites that offer further information about Greene’s life and career: “Telling the Story of Belle da Costa Greene,” “Belle da Costa Greene and the Women of the Morgan,” and “Belle da Costa Greene’s Letters to Bernard Berenson.”

At the heart of it all is Greene’s dedication to her work. As she also told the Times in 1912, “I just have to accomplish what I set out to do, regardless of who or what is in my way.”

Like Bliss, Greene accomplished all that and more, in her own way.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]