Layers of Meaning
Marcel Duchamp
had a gift for
layering meaning
in works like Belle
Haleine, right.
Keeping It Surreal
Duchamp, at left as Rose
Sélavy, loved to play with
words and images.
No other artist is as closely linked to conceptual art as
Marcel Duchamp, who toyed with viewers’ expectations,
creating works that puzzled and infuriated, including
pieces he termed “readymades,” such as Fountain, a
porcelain urinal he boldly submitted for display at a
New York City exhibition in 1917. He also loved to fool
with identity, famously creating his own alter ego, Rose
Sélavy, as a play on the sounds of Eros c’est la Vie (“The pas-
sion of love, that’s life”). Details encoded in Duchamp’s Belle Haleine go
beyond changing the bottle from orange to green. The label shows
Duchamp dressing fashionably, as Belle Greene might. The title—Belle
Haleine—is a play on the French dessert, poire belle Hélène, a choco-
late-dipped pear. Eau de Violette is close to “eau de voile” meaning “veil-
water,” a possible reference to Greene’s adopted middle name, Da Costa.
A more intricate reference appears in a 1921 letter from Duchamp to artist
Francis Picabia that includes a pun about “bitterness shrinking the
Negro.” Paleontologist and Duchamp decoder Stephen Jay Gould linked
“shrinking” to Greene axing the “r” from Greener and the bitterness of
blanching her blackness. All of this is conjectural. Another element to the
puzzle is that Belle Haleine is also the first time Duchamp identified Rose
Sélavy as “Rrose,” a hint that the added “r” might refer to the letter Belle
Greener discarded to become Belle Greene. —Sarah Richardson
visits. She was 71 when she died in 1950. Obituarists alluded
to rumors about her family passing for white, but she seems
never to have been identified publicly as Richard Greener’s
daughter—or privately by her long-time employer, who had
known Greener in the 1880s, when they served together on
the Grant memorial commission. The only record of contact
between Greener and his American family is correspon-
dence from Vladivostok with daughter Louisa. The connec-
tion between the sophisticated, stylish doyenne of the
Morgan Library and the roving intellectual and activist was
obscured until 1999, when J.P. Morgan biographer Jean
Strouse found Belle Greener’s 1879 birth certificate, which
lists Richard Greener as her father. Father and daughter may
have met once after he left the family; her biographer notes a
passage in a letter alluding to a 1914 trip Greene made to Chi-
cago “for important personal business” to meet in secret
someone she had not seen in 20 years. Late in his life
Greener enjoyed a loving correspondence with a daughter
from his family in Siberia, who may never have known of her
father’s heritage and travails.
Parallels between Richard and Belle are unmistakable: love
of books, flamboyance, ebullience. The two also stand in con-
trast to one another. As Belle Da Costa Greene, Belle Greener
never had to straddle boundaries of racial identity and com-
munity that entangled Richard Greener. She mostly eschewed
politics, secure on her glittering perch—a position inconceiv-
able for Belle Greener and her black father, who never con-
cealed his ancestry. She had wealthy patrons; he stood alone,
animosity all about him. Where Greene enjoyed extraordinary
success and prosperity, Greener, unusually well-educated for
his times and circumstance, frequently found himself
excluded and often out of work. His activism on racial injus-
tice threatened whites. His ease with whites aroused envy and
suspicion among blacks. Sheltered by the Morgan fortune’s
aegis of wealth and privilege, Greener’s daughter blossomed,
achieving distinction for herself and the institution she
directed. “But no one there could have been unaware of her
taste, her intelligence, her dynamism,” a New York Times critic
wrote in 1949. “For it was Miss Greene who transformed a rich
man’s casually built collection into one that ranks with the
greatest in the world.”
Her father would have been proud. +
JUNE 2019 57
Decoding
Duchamp