Listen to co-curator Philip Palmer talk about Belle Greene’s ambivalence toward modern art and hear the actor Andi Bohs read a passage from one of Greene’s letters.
MODERN DRAWINGS
Belle Greene also collected drawings by modern artists, including her friend Everett Shinn (who drew “a dashing Carmen-like portrait” of her, now lost), Arthur B. Davies, Abraham Walkowitz, and Clara Tice. Many of these pieces are conventional nudes, though Walkowitz gave Greene two abstract drawings.
While no correspondence between Greene and Tice survives, they probably met one another and were in many ways kindred spirits. Known as “the Queen of Greenwich Village,” the bold and outspoken Tice first exhibited her watercolor nudes in 1910, and her work was subject to an infamous raid by the anti-obscenity zealot Anthony Comstock in 1915. It was probably at her 1922 exhibition Animals and Nudes that Greene purchased this drawing.
Clara Tice (1888–1973)
Anteater, twentieth century
Opaque watercolor over graphite
The Morgan Library & Museum, gifts of the Estate of Belle da Costa Greene, 1950; 1950.35
Used with permission of the Clara Tice family.
PHILIP: Given Belle Greene’s association with the largely historical collections of the Morgan Library, it may come as a surprise to know that she moved in some of New York’s avant-garde circles. She owned drawings by Henri Matisse, Abraham Walkowitz, and Clara Tice, known as the “Queen of Greenwich Village.” Marius de Zayas caricatured Greene and she contributed an article to Alfred Stiegltiz’s periodical Camera Work. As signaled in that piece, she always had an ambivalent attitude toward modern art, finding it at once attractive and repulsive. A similar perspective is on display in the following passage from one of her letters, in which she describes encountering “a wild bunch” of modernist artists at a restaurant.
ANDI: I rode aimlessly down Lipton Avenue until I saw the Holland House and suddenly decided to go in there and have a bit all by myself – At the door I was greeted by a wild bunch of men that we call the “Secessionists” here – Steiglitz & Marin & de Zayas & Havemeyer & Bliss Carman and they insisted that I have luncheon with them. They are so sincere in their outlandish “futurism” and other ism’s that one cannot help liking them – even though not one in the crowd had a clean collar or a shaven face – They took me over to their little attic room, later to see the latest outpourings of Picabia, Picasso and this little Marin …