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Boston Globe
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
It is a truth universally acknowledged that this year marks Jane Austen's 250th birthday
Advertisement Jane Austen, letter to her sister, Cassandra, 1808. The Morgan Library & Museum/The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 'A Lively Mind' is a show of considerable charm and no less considerable substance. It's like its subject that way. The Morgan has a special place in the world of Austeniana. It owns nearly a third of her surviving letters, the largest collection extant. Fifteen of those letters are in the show. In the most delightful one, she writes to her niece with every word spelled backward. Imagine doing that in an email; good luck with trying to get around spell check. There are almost 140 other items. They include silhouette portraits of Austen's parents and several portraits of her. None of those, alas, was drawn from life. (The only one that is, Advertisement Jane Austen, "Opinions of Emma," circa 1816. Images British Library archive/Bridgeman Images Part of what makes Austen's novels so satisfying is the fullness of the world she presents. There's a comparable fullness here: of a life led in literature, of course, but also actual life. It's hard to get more actual than a lock of Austen's hair or a gold-and-turquoise ring that belonged to her. Wallpaper from two rooms in the Austen family home, in Chawton, have been reproduced for the show: Amy Sherald, "A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune," 2019 © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joseph Hyde It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most famous words Austen wrote are the opening sentence of 'Pride and Prejudice': 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.' In a nifty bit of updating, 'A Lively Mind' concludes with an Advertisement Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, "Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron," 1870. © The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A/© Victoria and Albert Museum, L Julia Margaret Cameron was born in what is now Kolkata, in 1815, two years before Austen's death. Austen's Bath and Southampton and Chawton were very far away, and geography is the least of it. Lest we forget, though, an Antiguan sugar plantation is the source of Sir Thomas Bertram's wealth in Austen's 'Mansfield Park.' Julia Margaret Cameron, "The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty," 1866. © The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A In 1848, Cameron, her husband, and their children moved to England. She was 48 when she got her first camera. Over the next 11 years she would become one of the foremost photographers of the 19th century. 'Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron' takes its title from her saying of her new-found art, 'I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.' Organized by London's Victoria & Albert Museum, the show runs at the Morgan through Sept. 14. It includes 80 photographs, usefully organized by theme; three pages from a brief autobiographical manuscript (a QR code lets viewers call up on their phone the remaining 18 pages); and a mighty object befitting the Victorian confidence evident in Cameron's images: her first camera lens, a gift from her husband. Julia Margaret Cameron, "The Whisper of the Muse," 1865. © The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A An unusual, sometimes bewildering tension defines the work. There's the ravishing specificity of this still-new medium, photography. So many of the faces in Cameron's images have an immediacy that can make them seem almost like our contemporaries. Consider the way the young woman in 'The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty' stares at the viewer. The there and then of that moment when Cameron photographed her becomes our here and our now. Yet consider how earnestly bogus the title is. That title is indicative of Cameron's general fondness for staged tableaux and how she took inspiration from Renaissance painting and literature, including Shakespeare, the Bible, Browning, and Tennyson. 'Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effect' she once called such photographs. She was being more candid than she perhaps realized. Advertisement Julia Margaret Cameron, "Julia Jackson," 1867. © The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A/© Victoria and Albert Museum, L Tennyson was a neighbor. He was among the cultural luminaries Cameron photographed. The man posed in the middle of one of those fancy subjects, 'The Whisper of the Muse,' is the painter G.F. Watts. Charles Darwin said of the portrait Cameron took of him: ''I like this photograph very much better than any other which has been taken of me.' As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was about to sit for her, Tennyson warned, 'you will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you.' The most striking instance of how Cameron's work could both be of its time and look ahead was also literary, if not in any way she could have intended. It's a portrait of her niece Julia Jackson. If Jackson's beauty looks so familiar it's because of how much the older of her two daughters, Virginia Woolf, resembles her. Last year was the centenary of the Morgan's becoming a public institution. In observance of the anniversary, various gifts were made to the collection. 'A Celebration: Acquisitions in Honor of the Morgan's Centennial,' a ponderously straightforward name for a wholly engaging show, consists of a selection of those items. John Coltrane, fragments and drafts for incomplete compositions, circa 1945-55. © Jowcol Music, LLC. Used By Permission/All Rights Reserved. Photography by Janny Chiu Among the 110 works — drawings, photographs, prints, manuscripts, books, and book bindings — many are associated with names that would have been familiar to the banker J.P. Morgan, who founded the library, and his namesake son, who expanded it: Leonardo, Parmigianino, Watteau. There are also names that definitely would not have been: John Coltrane, Jasper Johns, Rosamond Purcell (the first member of Somerville's Brickbottom Artists Association to enter the Morgan collection?), and the late John O'Reilly, from Worcester. Advertisement You can well imagine the first group of names moving the Morgans to reach for a checkbook. That that's in no way true of the second group speaks to how the institution has grown and evolved over the last century. Rich as 'A Celebration' is, and it is very rich, its range attests even more to what makes the Morgan so worth celebrating. A LIVELY MIND: JANE AUSTEN AT 250 ARRESTING BEAUTY: JULIA MARGARET CAMERON A CELEBRATION: Acquisitions in Honor of the Morgan's Centennial At Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., New York, through Sept. 14 (Austen and Cameron) and Aug. 17. 212-685-0008, Mark Feeney can be reached at
Epoch Times
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
‘A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250'
The story of a woman who was born in 1775 in a country village in Hampshire, England, who had less than two years of formal education, who died at just 41, and who wrote some of the greatest novels in the English language that have endured in popularity across centuries, could be the plot of a fantasy novel. It is not, but rather the biography of literary icon Jane Austen (1775–1817). This year is the semiquincentennial of her birth, and the occasion is being commemorated by special exhibitions, events, and festivals worldwide. At the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, the exhibit 'A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250' is on view through Sept. 14, 2025. This museum is an ideal venue for the display, since its permanent collection includes 51 of Austen's own letters, which accounts for nearly a third of her surviving correspondence.
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.
