Listen to co-curators Philip Palmer and Erica Ciallela discuss Belle Greene’s legacy at the Morgan and beyond.
When Belle da Costa Greene retired in 1948, letters came in from around the world congratulating her on the contributions she had made to the Morgan and scholarship at large. She had not only built an inspiring collection but also shaped the careers of women she mentored, including Morgan librarian Meta Harrsen and Walters Art Gallery curator Dorothy Miner. Several years after her retirement, staff members would even continue to say fondly that they were working on projects for “Miss Greene.”
But her legacy has extended far past the lifetimes of those who knew her. Her story has galvanized the work of scholars, biographers, writers, and artists. Awards and fellowships have been named in her honor, including the Medieval Academy of America’s Belle da Costa Greene Award, Belle da Costa Greene Scholarships to support booksellers and librarians attending antiquarian book seminars in Colorado and York, and the Morgan’s own Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellowships, established in 2019 and given to “promising scholars from communities historically underrepresented in the curatorial and special collections fields.” Despite the gaps she left in the narrative, both intentional and not, Greene’s singular devotion to the world of librarianship remains one of her most enduring legacies.
Clarence H. White (1871–1925) Belle da Costa Greene, 1911 Platinum print 9 13/16 × 7 5/16 (24.9 × 18.5 cm) Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; Bernard and Mary Berenson Papers, Personal Photographs, Box 12, Folder 37
The Bernard and Mary Berenson Papers. Biblioteca Berenson I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
PHILIP: To honor her retirement and celebrate an exceptional career, the Morgan mounted an exhibition of Belle Greene’s best acquisitions in 1949. A New York Times review remarked not only on the exhibition’s treasures, but the remarkable legacy of the woman who brought them together in one building. Here is a passage from the beginning of the review.
There are many people who may have contemplated the treasures of the Morgan Library without ever meeting personally its erstwhile director, Belle da Costa Greene. But no one there could have been unaware of her taste, her intelligence, her dynamism. For it was Miss Greene who transformed a rich man’s casually built collection into one which ranks with the greatest in the world.
ERICA: Belle Greene’s life impacted so many people during her lifetime, and her legacy continues to inspire new generations of readers, museum visitors, and library professionals today. When her friends and colleagues published a tribute volume of essays to honor her memory in 1954, Greene’s protégé Dorothy Miner wrote a foreword that imagined what a biography of her former boss might look like. As she wrote,
A biography of Belle Greene would be a fascinating and colorful account with a fabulous array of personalities, settings, and incidents. It would move against a backdrop of princely palaces and international playgrounds, austere libraries and remote cloisters, of academic meetings and the world of society. … It would be full of triumphs and fairy-tale successes, gaiety and humor, irony, sorrow, bravado, and courage. … Above all, it would be a tale crowded with people—people of every kind and station—some known to all the world by reason of power or accomplishment, some the most obscure of students.
It was this very democratizing impulse, to serve the scholar and student alike, that made Greene such a special librarian and the Morgan such a singular place.