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New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Book of Marvels' at the Morgan, Oddities From Cannibals to Giant Snails
If the past is a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley wrote, customs make it so. One is the late medieval period's belief in marvels: dragons, unicorns, underwater palaces, wells of water so hot they could melt steel. In reality, it was an age of travel. Europe was meeting Asia and the Middle East on the Silk Road, and Africa through the Mediterranean. Who believed these tales? Unanswerable. But the Morgan Library and Museum has a good go of this question in 'The Book of Marvels: A Medieval Guide to the Globe.' Spanning mainly 1200 to 1550, this exhibition, on view only through May 25, brings together about 20 books, manuscripts and maps (and one globe) that echo the visual language and wanderlust of the show's main attraction: two copies of the 'Livre des Merveilles du Monde,' or 'Book of Marvels of the World,' both from one anonymous author and illuminated in Angers, France. The book reads like an illustrated atlas to the creatures and phenomena rumored to occur worldwide, from neighboring French provinces to China. The 'Marvels' text is at least as old as 1428. Of four known copies, the two on view in this show are thought to have been produced simultaneously, around 1460. One is complete; it lives at the Morgan. The other, a partial copy, was recently acquired by the Getty Center in Los Angeles. (The exhibition premiered there last year with an all-Getty checklist.) Almost identical, both copies are also attributed to the same illuminator, or group: the so-called Master of the Geneva Boccaccio. At the center of the Morgan show, the Getty 'Marvels' lies open to the section on Traponee, or Sri Lanka. At right, hunters chase a giant snail up a hill, their spears tall and sharp. At left, a man and wife make their home in one snail's hollowed-out shell. Displayed beside it, the Morgan's version shows Arabia. There, two hunters slice open an asp to extract the precious stones it keeps in its belly. Other hunters, shimmying up a stand of trees, dismantle nests that birds have built with the coveted cinnamon twig. The 'Marvels' illuminators worked in a soft and fluffy style that the Getty's Larisa Grollemond calls 'colored-grisaille.' What keeps you looking is arrangement. The Arabia scene, in particular, is laid out on a boxed X, with the objects of interest — belly, nest, a phoenix, some dragons — falling at the visual intersection points. 'Menu pictures' are what the show's curators (three from the Getty and one, Joshua O'Driscoll, from the Morgan) call this indexical way of illustrating the text. The original buyer of these luxury 'Marvels' — one is thought to have been Duke René of Anjou (1409-80) — would have enjoyed a scavenger hunt between its dutiful visual paragraphs and its swoopy French bastarda script, uncertain as to which describes which. The Morgan show obeys a similar logic. If you walk the gallery, the maps that have been hung on the wall, and the printed and illuminated manuscripts under glass from the Morgan's collection, amplify the myths and visual strategies enshrined in the 'Marvels.' For instance, the 'Abridged Divine Histories' illuminated in Amiens, France, circa 1300, has a pair of conjoined twins against a background of gold leaf. Hans Rüst's interpretive map of the world, circa 1480, is quite detailed in Africa and Asia, though populated by cannibals and other human oddities rendered large, in a graphic language similar to those tourist maps of the United States where a lobster dominates Maine and an ear of corn Kansas. Marvels seem to have occupied a special compartment of belief: like miracles, except earthly. Scholars upheld the distinction, like Gervase of Tilbury, who in the 13th century deemed 'things marvels which are beyond our comprehension, even though they are natural,' and included fairylike beings in his study of English folklore. In the biblical account of Exodus, God revealed himself to Moses through the burning bush, but the Provençal giants and headless Ethiopians of the 'Book of Marvels'? You can doubt those without fearing damnation. The medieval world was big enough for both kinds of oddity, judging by these books' treatment of Christianity. The conjoined twins appear across the page from an illustration of the baptism of Constantine, the Roman emperor who was probably more responsible than any other monarch for the spread of the Bible. Elsewhere the godly and earthly seem to collide through implication. In an illuminated German 'History of Alexander the Great,' also circa 1460, the Greeks meet a group of Indian Brahmins who are comfortably nude in the presence of newcomers. Their nonchalance recalls nothing so much as Adam and Eve, apple tree and all. Most of these items are illuminated by hand. But several were printed with movable type. The rise of early printed books, or incunables, show an industrial efficiency that happened to dovetail with the European arrival in the Americas and Martin Luther's rebuke of the pope. The timeline had me thinking: Perhaps this intrigue with marvels in a God-given world encouraged a certain anxiety for proof. The Morgan's stellar selection impresses least when it attempts to prove the ways in which medieval marvels explain modern racism. In the catalog and wall text, curators argue that marvels enabled the racial 'othering' of foreign cultures, which in turn stoked a desire to dominate them and the things they treasured. Christopher Columbus brought annotated copies of Marco Polo, the most fantastical and widely read of all marvelists, across the Atlantic to seize the New World. Volumes by both Italians appear in the show. But the appetite for marvels was reciprocal. Of three Middle Eastern books here on display, the secret star of the show is a copy of Nizami's Persian poem 'The Quintet' from around 1550. The illuminator Siyavush Beg depicts a backdrop of stone and plant life that is astonishing in its painterly looseness and control of transparent pigments. Maple leaves explode from the text block like fireworks. Again the scene is from the Alexander the Great myth: the discovery of a fountain of youth. But this time with turbans and a distinctive, almost Mughal flatness. More than cinnamon traveled the Silk Road. By focusing on the potential harm done in part by exotic mythologies, this exhibition leaves us with less answerable but also less explored questions about the past. Such as: How did dominant religions absorb newer legends? And how did these tales shape the medieval reader — or more often, listener — back home? To the scholar Norbert Ohler, for instance, marvels kept people humble by asserting the authority of ancient authors rather than feeble eyewitnesses. However it worked, that past is vanishing the TikTok age, a stack of pressed linen with layers of scenery as vigilant as Siyavush Beg's feels as exotic as the Cinnamologus bird must once have seemed to the courtiers of Burgundy. Both are marvelous. One was real.
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Salon for the Ages, at Least for Now
When Clara Aich, a Hungarian photographer, first stepped inside the old foundry at 218 East 25th Street in Manhattan, the building was a majestic ruin. It was winter 1977, and snow had fallen through the collapsed roof of the four-story, 19th-century brick structure, powdering the ramshackle floor of its main studio space. Most evocatively, the place was filled to the rafters with plaster models of architectural sculptures: gods and gargoyles, cherubs and lions, eagles and nymphs. No other buyer was interested in the wreck, but Ms. Aich was captivated by it, common sense be damned. ''I'm somewhere in Rome,'' she recalled thinking as she stood in the freezing studio. 'It was just hauntingly beautiful for me.' Though light on funds, she scrounged up the $15,000 down payment, plus another $10,000 for the architectural ornaments, undeterred by warnings from friends about the daunting cost of repairing the building. 'It was the dream of youth,' she said. The plaster ornaments, it turned out, were models left behind by Rochette & Parzini, a prolific firm founded by a Frenchman and an Italian that from 1909 to 1972 worked on fine architectural sculpture in that studio for city landmarks like the Morgan Library, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and St. Patrick's Cathedral. 'For me they were very important,' Ms. Aich said of the ornaments. 'They became part of me when I saw them there.' Ever since, Ms. Aich has displayed them on virtually every exposed-brick wall, intermingling them with paintings and 'objets d'art' from far-flung lands. The central space of her building is the double-height, ground-floor studio, which until her retirement a few years ago served her well for commercial photography shoots for clients like Revlon and Estée Lauder. Illuminated by three skylights, it is a place of inviting warmth, where art directors liked to linger and friends dropped by for an espresso, basking in the gracious, Old World ambience. But Ms. Aich has also long operated the building as a sort of sumptuous, speakeasy salon, hosting intimate musical performances, operas and plays whose performers sometimes wind up using the studio as a crash pad. Palazzo Parzini, Ms. Aich calls the place, but others have named it Casa Clara. 'I still vividly remember walking in there for the first time because it does feel like a total portal. You walk in and it's almost like Narnia in the sense that you open that wooden door and all of a sudden you're definitely in a different time in a whole different energy,' said Janine Picard, who co-directed an adaptation of 'Romeo & Juliet' there last year. 'All the art that's in there, I feel like really the space itself is breathing with history and artistic history.' The atmosphere is both bohemian and refined. Antique Kazakh carpets cover the floor, with another draped over a Steinway grand piano. A plaster Bacchus leers across the room at a large-format photograph of street graffiti. Ms. Aich's father, a hussar in an elite Austro-Hungarian cavalry regiment, gazes out impassively from a World War I oil portrait. The events Ms. Aich has hosted are as eclectic as the décor. There was the German Forum, a program that supported talented young German opera and cabaret singers. There was Kansas City Sound, a group of musicians playing 1930s jazz. And the Egyptian shaman who stayed there for a month, leading meditations. There was the projection on a large screen of an avant-garde opera from the Bregenz Festival in Austria, which drew the Hungarian and Swiss ambassadors to the studio. 'I went a little out of hand with champagne and little Wiener schnitzels, taking them around,' she said. But all this may soon come to an end. Burdened by a $2 million mortgage, Ms. Aich is poised to list the building for sale for $7.9 million, complete with four stories of unused air rights above it. 'I expect someone will knock it down,' she said, a prospect she finds particularly sad because it took her decades to renovate the building, bit by bit as money became available. Jonathan Hettinger, who is handling the sale for Sotheby's, said he thought it more likely that the buyer would be a creative professional who would live there and use the main studio space for entertaining or private events. Ms. Aich said that her first three years in the decrepit building were 'like war times: one hot plate, one light hanging down, a long electric heater my assistant and I would warm our hands with.' Since then, she has made the building (mostly) watertight, added new skylights in their historic locations and enlarged the bookend mezzanines on either end of the ground-floor studio. She sleeps luxuriously in the front one, in an antique Indonesian bed surmounted by the plaster maquette of a neoclassical pediment. Creativity is in the very bones of the building. In its early days, it housed the National Fine Art Foundry, established by the sculptor Maurice J. Power in 1868. An Irish native, Power crafted many bronze Civil War memorials around the country. In 1909, Eugene Rochette and Michel Parzini, who also went by the name Michael, bought the foundry and moved their sculpting and modeling workshop there. The pair had met at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Their arrival in the United States in the early 1890s coincided with the City Beautiful movement and the ascendance of the Beaux-Arts architectural style, which meant plenty of ornamental work for those rare artisans this side of the Atlantic Ocean trained in sculptural modeling and stone carving. Thayer Tolles, curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said that Rochette & Parzini were part of 'a phenomenon of immigrant artists who have had relatively ambitious academic, professional fine arts training coming here and realizing that their skills are best put to use working behind the scenes, so to speak, and fulfilling this great demand for architectural sculpture.' In 1904, the two men founded their own business. The firm's handwritten ledgers from 1905 to 1908, shared with a reporter by a Parzini descendant, show that the pair were quick to find work with some of the city's pre-eminent architects, like Warren & Wetmore and McKim, Mead & White, on richly ornamented buildings like Grand Central Terminal and the William K. Vanderbilt château on Fifth Avenue. (A dollhouse-size maquette of that mansion is tucked into a corner of Casa Clara today.) Rochette retired by 1921, and Parzini followed in 1938, leaving the firm in the hands of his son, Archie, and his partner, Willie Decker. 'He was the firstborn, very spoiled, very good-looking Italian son of two immigrants from the north parts of Italy,' Lynne Parzini, Archie's daughter, said of her father. 'And even though he was very proud of the work, and I think of his own abilities, I don't think he ever put his heart into it the way it should have been.' Nonetheless, his studio performed some fine work. In 1942, a new high altar was consecrated at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, above which rose an exquisitely detailed, gothic-style baldacchino, or canopy. Designed by Maginnis & Walsh, the baldacchino was cast in bronze from plaster models created by Rochette & Parzini. Ms. Parzini, who frequented her father's studio as a child in the 1950s, remembers it as a 'magical place' with a 'buoyant atmosphere,' filled with music and the chatter of Italian and German sculptors speaking in their native tongues. But in the ensuing decades, the demand for sculptural work was swept away by the dominance of modernist architecture, for which the elimination of ornament was a central tenet. 'To my mind,' Archie Parzini told Newsday in 1981, 'every damned building now looks like a factory.' Ms. Aich met Mr. Parzini once. Standing in the ornament-filled studio not long ago, as rainwater leaked from a skylight onto her Steinway, she recalled the dazzling impression he made when he visited in 1978. 'He was the most dashing older gentleman out of an Italian film,' she said, 'very, very elegantly dressed' in a dark blue suit with 'a beautiful carnation in his lapel.' Delighted that she planned to keep the studio intact, he proudly showed her around, explaining which building each plaster model had been made for. 'Archie left an absolutely warmhearted feeling in me,' Ms. Aich said. 'He gave me the feeling: 'I trust you with my building.''
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
There's a reason this celebrated librarian's life was not an open book
NEW YORK — In the waning years of the 19th century, Belle Marion Greener, daughter of a prominent African American civil rights advocate, started attending a private school in Massachusetts. Her mother, a fair-skinned Black woman, separated from her father, and by 1900, census records indicate, Belle's mother and all her children were listed as 'White.' Belle dropped the last letter from her surname and added the Portuguese-sounding middle name da Costa, presumably because people of Portuguese descent were assumed to be darker skinned. Belle da Costa Greene now passed as White, and she went on to become a celebrated librarian, building what was then known as the Pierpont Morgan Library into one of the most formidable and rich collections in the world. The Morgan Library & Museum's exhibition 'Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy' is aptly named but undersells what is a fascinating, deeply sad and provocative survey of Greene's complicated life. Her legacy is the work she performed for J.P. Morgan and his son Jack Morgan, searching out and acquiring rare and priceless books, manuscripts, prints, drawings and music. As founding director of the Morgan Library, she helped create an institution that remains vital some 75 years after her death in 1950. But her personal life is what fascinates us today, especially given a new climate of what many see as publicly sanctioned racism and the erasure of African American contributions to public life. Greene destroyed her letters and journals, so much of what we want to know — How deeply did her change of identity affect her emotionally? How did she reconcile herself to the deception? — is unknowable. But throughout this exhibition, there are documents that give substance to our speculation, leading to the almost certain conclusion that it must have been exceptionally difficult and sometimes unbearably painful to live with the strain of perpetual hiding. One of the most poignant artifacts is a handwritten note: 'The contents of this envelope brought a noble boy to his death. It is not fair to brand him suicide; this letter killed him.' The note was written by a friend of Greene's, about Greene's nephew and ward, Robert MacKenzie Leveridge, a Harvard-educated lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces serving in England during World War II. Leveridge had been engaged to marry a young woman whose family discovered that he was African American. He may not have known himself — his mother and his aunt were both passing as White — but once his fiancée's family knew, the marriage was apparently doomed. The envelope probably contained a vicious letter from his betrothed, full of racial animus and deeply wounding to the young man. Although his death was publicly listed as 'killed in action,' he died by suicide. This happened late in Greene's life, and it's unclear how much she knew about the particulars of her nephew's death. But his loss precipitated an emotional and medical crisis that may have been a stroke or heart attack. The whole episode demonstrates the dreadful peril for anyone passing as White, a peril she must have feared if her secret were known within the elite circles where she enjoyed a spectacular, flamboyant and storied existence. Much of this exhibition is devoted to what Greene would have wanted her life's story to be: the hunt for bookish treasure, at auctions and sales across Europe, bringing back for the Morgan etchings by Rembrandt, gloriously illustrated medieval Bibles and religious texts, and the only extant copy of the first English edition of Sir Thomas Malory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur,' purchased for $50,000 in a sale that made newspaper headlines. She dressed well, so well that the newspapers took note of that, too, and when J.P. Morgan died in 1913, he left her a bequest of $50,000, enough to live comfortably, especially when supplemented by her substantial income as director of the Morgan. She went to the opera, collected art and carried on a long affair with Bernard Berenson, the longtime dean of American art historians who helped build substantial collections, including the one amassed by Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston. All of that is documented with letters and books, including many of her major acquisitions for the Morgan. But then there is a 1913 painting by Harry Willson Watrous, 'The Drop Sinister — What Shall We Do With It?,' that shows a domestic scene with a blond child and two parents who may be of mixed race. The title references the anxiety about race pervasive in the United States during the age of Jim Crow and the emerging misuse of science and genetics to enforce rigid segregation. Also on view is a copy of the 1924 'Racial Integrity Act' passed by the Virginia General Assembly, which outlawed interracial marriage and defined White people as those 'with no trace of the blood of another race,' with the only exception one-sixteenth descent from a Native American to accommodate Virginians who claimed Pocahontas as an ancestor. A society that defined race in these terms had no room for someone like Belle Greener but could celebrate Belle Da Costa Greene as a paragon of beauty, style, wit and ambition. Greene clearly relished that attention and appeared often in portraits and photographs, usually seen in profile and always stylishly dressed. The Morgan exhibition makes a fascinating contrast with the National Gallery of Art's recently opened show devoted to the African American artist Elizabeth Catlett. Like Greene, Catlett was fair skinned, and early in her life, while living in Louisiana, she 'passed' as White to access a segregated movie theater. But she did that only once, and she spent the rest of her life passionately devoted to the liberation and dignity of African Americans. The two women belonged to different generations and were pursuing very different careers. But Catlett paid a steep price for her activism, while Greene reaped the rewards of membership in elite cultural circles. Is there a moral or ethical dimension to Greene's decision to pass? It was a decision that neither helped nor hurt other people, except by the subtle calculus of role models and exemplars. And yet she could never have lived the life she did had she opted to embrace what we now call identity. Everyone has the right to invent themselves, especially in a country that celebrates self-invention. And given the pervasiveness of racial violence in 20th-century America, this wasn't just about self-invention. It was about survival. Visitors to the exhibition are implicated in some of this ethical complexity. Greene's story, which was fictionalized in the 2021 novel 'The Personal Librarian,' is interesting to us because of that choice, to become Belle da Costa Greene and leave behind any trace of connection to her father, the first Black man to graduate from Harvard. Thus, we are interested in the one thing that she would not have wanted us to know about her. By retrieving from oblivion something she wished to erase, we may erase other things, especially those things — her passion for books, manuscripts and art — for which she would have wanted to be remembered. We may try to wheedle our way out of this uncomfortable place by saying what is very likely true: Had she been born a century later, she wouldn't have made the choices she did. But that only underscores the darker and sadder truth of this country's paranoia about race, that we will never know the true extent of it, especially how deeply it impacted those who crossed the color line in search of safety, opportunity, even love. I left this exhibition repeating a cliché of sorts: that this could be a movie or a miniseries. Which is shorthand for saying that it's a fascinating story, full of ethical and social complexity, with strange alliances between wealth, status and ambition and no tidy ending or easy moral message. It has the twists and turns of fiction. But it says a lot about race in America that we feel we need the scope and permission of fiction to get at the simple truth, which is always stranger and more incomprehensible. Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy continues through May 4 at the Morgan Library & Museum.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The Black librarian who rewrote the rules of power, gender and passing as white
'Just Because I am a Librarian doesn't mean I have to dress like one.' With this breezy pronouncement, Belle da Costa Greene handily differentiated herself from most librarians. She stood out for other reasons, too. In the early 20th century – a time when men held most positions of authority – Greene was a celebrated book agent, a curator and the first director of the Morgan Library. She also earned US$10,000 a year, about $280,000 today, while other librarians were making roughly $400. She was also a Black woman who passed as white. Born in 1879, Belle was the daughter of two light-skinned Black Americans, Genevieve Fleet and Richard T. Greener, the first Black man to graduate from Harvard. When the two separated in 1897, Fleet changed the family's last name to Greene and, along with her five children, crossed the color line. Belle Marion Greener became Belle da Costa Greene – the 'da Costa' a subtle claim to her Portuguese ancestry. When banking magnate J.P. Morgan sought a librarian in 1905, his nephew Junius Morgan recommended Greene, who had been one of his co-workers at the Princeton Library. Henceforth, Greene's life didn't just kick into a higher gear. It was supercharged. She became a lively fixture at social gatherings among America's wealthiest families. Her world encompassed Gilded Age mansions, country retreats, rare book enclaves, auction houses, museums and art galleries. Bold, vivacious and glamorous, the keenly intelligent Greene attracted attention wherever she went. I found myself drawn to the worlds Greene entered and the people she described in her lively letters to her lover, art scholar Bernard Berenson. In 2024, I published a book, 'Becoming Belle Da Costa Greene,' which explores her voice, her self-invention, her love of art and literature, and her path-breaking work as a librarian. Yet I'm often asked whether Greene mentions her passing as white in her writings. She did not. Greene was one of hundreds of thousands of light-skinned Black Americans who passed as white in the Jim Crow era. While speculation about Greene's background circulated in her lifetime, nothing was confirmed until historian Jean Strouse revealed the identities of Greene's parents in her 1999 biography, 'Morgan: American Financier.' Until that point, only Greene's mother and siblings knew the story of their Black heritage. 'Passing' can often raise more questions than answers. But Greene did not largely define herself through one category, such as her racial identity. Instead, she constructed a self through the things she loved. In my view, any consideration of Greene's attitudes toward her own race must remain an open question. And uncertainty can be acknowledged – even embraced – with judgments suspended. The Morgan Library & Museum currently has an exhibition on Greene that will run until May 4, 2025 – one that's already generated debates about Greene and the significance of her passing. One section of the exhibition, 'Questioning the Color Line,' includes novels on passing, paintings such as Archibald J. Motley Jr.'s 'The Octoroon Girl,' photographs of Greene, and clips from Oscar Micheaux's 1932 film 'Veiled Aristocrats' and John M. Stahl's 1934 film 'Imitation of Life,' which portray painful scenes between white-passing characters and their family members. None of these objects clarifies Greene's particular relationship to passing. Instead, they place the librarian within melodramatic and conventional representations about passing that stress self-division and angst. We don't know – perhaps we will never know – whether Greene had similar moments of self-doubt. Yet some critics have concluded as much. In his review of the exhibition for The New Yorker, critic Hilton Als laments what Greene's passing had cost her. He describes her as a 'girl who loved power,' a woman who 'became a member of another race – not Black or white but alternately grandiose and self-despising.' There's a lot of certainty in such a pronouncement – and scant evidence furnished to support such declarations. New York Times columnist John McWhorter takes issue with Als's depiction of the librarian's passing in a Jan. 23, 2025, article. Citing passages from her letters in which Greene excitedly describes reading the Arabic folktales 'The Thousand and One Nights' and seeing exhibitions of modern art, McWhorter asks readers to reconsider this 'witty, puckish soul who savored books and art' and 'had an active social life.' What if Greene gave her race little thought, McWhorter wonders. What if she simply saw the notion of race and racial categorization as 'a fiction' and instead lived her life to its fullest? Of course, her light skin afforded her the opportunity that other Black people of her era didn't have. But does that necessarily mean that she was self-loathing or conflicted? '[W]e are all wearing trousers and I love them,' Greene writes in one letter to Berenson, adding, 'The Library grows more wonderful every day and I am terribly happy in my work here … I love this life – don't you?' Greene's vitality captivated Berenson, who once described the librarian as 'incredibly and miraculously responsive.' The connoisseur was not the only contemporary who admired Greene's effervescence. In 'The Living Present,' an account of the activities of women before and after World War II, Greene's friend Gertrude Atherton paid tribute to Greene, a 'girl so fond of society, so fashionable in dress and appointments' that she could impress any stranger with her 'overflowing joie de vivre.' Viewed through a more expansive lens, Greene's passing can be seen as part of an exercise in self-fashioning and self-invention. Greene dressed to be noticed – and she was. Meta Harrsen, the librarian Greene hired in 1922, offers a rare eye-witness account. On the day Greene interviewed Harrsen, 'she wore a dress of dark red Italian brocade shot with silver threads, a gold braided girdle, and an emerald necklace.' Greene understood well the power of clothes to project a distinct identity – a highly crafted one in this case, and one befitting a connoisseur of rare books. At that, she excelled. She became known for her stunning acquisition coups: her purchase of 16 rare editions of the works of English printer William Caxton at an auction; her procurement of the highly coveted Crusader's Bible through a private negotiation; and her acquisition of the Spanish Apocalypse Commentary, a medieval text written by a Spanish monk that Greene was able to buy at a steep discount. To me, a 1915 photo captures Greene's confidence and aura more than any other image of the librarian. She posed in her home and wasn't shot in soft focus with a studio backdrop as other photographs tend to portray her. Sitting on the arm of a large chair upholstered in a tapestry weave, she wears an elaborate hat with a large ostrich plume, a high-necked blouse under a long, loosely belted jacket with a ruffled cuff over a long dark skirt. The decor is no less striking: Flemish tapestries decorate the walls behind her, and a liturgical vestment is draped over the bookcase. Looking directly at the viewer, Greene is assured and poised. Greene's stylish flair was not simply decorative. It was a testament to her vibrant personality and the joy she took in her work. Rather than judge her according to contemporary notions of racial identity, I prefer to marvel over her achievements and how she became a model for generations of future librarians. Greene didn't just pass. She surpassed – in spectacular ways. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Deborah W. Parker, University of Virginia Read more: Gen Z and millennials have an unlikely love affair with their local libraries Sellout! How political corruption shaped an American insult The Gilded Age novel that helps explain our fascination with Luigi Mangione Deborah W. Parker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
