Holiday Grab Bag

A few images to end the year

Last week I wrote about my hang ups (ha). Afterwards I did hang some art—owned or made by my father and other family members. So I’ll report on that now, as well as on an exhibit I saw this week. Since you asked.

At home

First, my husband and I collected the images we thought we wanted to hang and laid them out all over the house. Some are still leaning against walls. Others, we realized, needed reframing or at least re-matting. Like this one, which had a dingy stained mat underneath the plexi surface.

Earle Olsen, abstract on plexiglas, late 1960s.

We chose a new, brighter mat, had the work reassembled, and hung it at the end of a short wall, facing the front door. (We realized when we were done that we had no idea which way was up. Shrug!)

On the wall in its original Kulicke clip frame. To the side you can see three of the many Winslow Homer prints my father hung in his home. He collected them from old Harper’s Magazines he found in antique stores.

The sunflower painting I wrote about last week turned out to be too small for the dining room so we subbed in another of my father’s bright, late abstracts, which you can see on the left in this image. We moved his large abstract on plexi from the hallway to the dividing wall.

Dining room with flanking works by my father.

On the other wall of the dining room, across from the fireball, we hung two photographs by my sister Margrit. I love how these look like windows into a lush garden, though the room itself is windowless. We intend to hang some of my husband’s photographs in this room as well, so we’ll be flanked by family.

Margrit Olsen, “Traces,” landscapes of rural France, 2008-2011.

All in all, we made a lot of progress— and my husband and I are still married, despite the inevitable strains of leveling and aligning.

In the library

Entry to Belle Da Costa Greene exhibit at the Morgan Library

This week I went with a friend to see an exhibit on Belle Da Costa Greene, the first director of the Morgan Library. I had been intrigued since I heard one of its curators, Erica Cialella, give a wonderful talk about Greene’s life and the challenges of assembling a show about a librarian, using artifacts from her life and career. Greene’s life was especially interesting because the field of librarianship was just being professionalized (her official training was a summer course at Amherst College) and because she wielded so much power and influence as a woman in the new field for decades. It also turns out that Greene had hidden her upbringing as a Black woman in D.C., and distanced herself from her father’s career as a prominent Black lawyer, in order to pass as White in New York City. She left no record of how she came to make that choice or how she felt about that personal sacrifice. There were other Black women working as librarians in New York City but none came close to having her resources at the Morgan Library.

The exhibit is modeled on a library in the very rooms that Greene worked in, including her desk and personal card catalog. It includes many portraits of Greene by photographers like Clarence White and newspaper clippings that show her celebrity status.

Newspaper clipping about a Greene purchase, 1911.

Then, of course, there are the manuscripts and incunabula she acquired, from fat gold-and-jewel-encrusted gospels purchased from aristocratic estates to handwritten manuscripts by John Keats or the printer’s proofs for Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, overrun with marginalia and the nineteenth-century version of Post-Its. She bought Islamic manuscripts and cylindrical seals from Mesopotamia. We see her own art and her own books, though little of her own writing because she destroyed her letters and journals.

Balzac’s proofs for Eugenie Grandet. Pity the printer.

It’s a wonderful show, and on until May 4th for those of you who have a chance to see it in New York. The website has excellent online resources for those of you who can’t get there. My friend and I capped it off by sharing a delicious, three-tiered afternoon tea in the Morgan’s cafe, which felt appropriate and well-earned.

That’s it! If you’ve seen or read or heard something especially memorable or wonder-full recently please share in the comments. In the meantime, I wish you all happy, restful, and celebratory holidays of all sorts, as we close this tumultuous year. I will spend next week looking back at my year in books for any interesting takeaways and looking forward to sharing more on memoir and art. Thank you, most sincerely, for joining me here! I couldn’t do it without you.