A Tribute to Women Who Reinvent Themselves, in Two Wardrobes at the Met


© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Before there was Marie Kondo, who taught us the magic of tidiness, or Hillary Clinton, who made a white pantsuit into a mantra, there was Sara Berman, whose frugal all-white wardrobe is the subject of a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You have probably never heard of Berman, who died, peacefully, at the age of eighty-four, thirteen years ago. Born in Belarus, in 1920, she lived the sort of family-oriented life that is celebrated in a paid obituary. Her parents immigrated to Palestine when Sara was twelve, and lived in a beach shack near the Mediterranean. She married a landsman, who became a diamond merchant; in the early nineteen-fifties, the couple resettled in the Bronx, and some fifteen years later, as empty-nesters, they went back to Israel. Berman was sixty when she made an unsparing triage of her possessions and got rid of most of them. More radically, she shed her husband after thirty-eight years of unhappy marriage.

Berman's boldness was inspiring to her daughter, the artist Maira Kalman. It suggested, Kalman said, on a recent morning at the Met, that “nothing in life has an expiration date. You are free to change at any age.” Maira’s son, Alex Kalman, is the co-founder of Mmuseumm, a museum tucked into a freight-elevator shaft in Tribeca that specializes in poetically composed micro installations of prosaic objects. “Sara Berman's Closet”—the Kalmans’ joint tribute to Sara's minimalist elegance, ruthless self-editing, and passion for order—had its début there before graduating to the Met's American Wing, which is typically devoted to domestic arts of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Amelia Peck, a curator of the wing, said of the exhibit, “This is as modern as we get here.” As modern and as modest, she might have added. The exhibit consists of a wooden cabinet the size of a flea-market stall, with two hanging racks of well-worn tops and bottoms, and a few shelves whose sparse contents are reminiscent of the ghostly porcelain assemblages of Edmund de Waal.

It was at the time of her divorce, when Berman moved into a studio in Greenwich Village, that she restricted her wardrobe to shades of white. “I can't tell you why,” Kalman said. “None of us liked to talk about things—a film we saw, a feeling we had, a decision we made—and Mom, in particular, lived in the moment.” White is an emblem of purity and renunciation, but, as the uniform of the suffragists, also of sisterly solidarity. In the Jewish faith, it is the color of the bridal gown that becomes a burial shroud. To Berman, it recalled the sun-bleached laundry flapping on her clothesline by the sea in Tel Aviv, and her tropical wardrobe as a young beauty there. There is nothing like white, at any age, if you aspire to dazzle. A fetching snapshot in the gallery shows the old Berman in a dandyish ensemble of white trousers and a double-breasted jacket under a white trenchcoat, accessorized with a man's tie. “She looks like Marlene Dietrich,” Kalman said fondly.

Berman's studio, pictured in a wall note, was mostly white, too. It was furnished with a bed, a low table, where she did her fastidious ironing of the white clothes, and a few tiny chairs that might have come from a kindergarten. Her floor was strewn with beach-ball globes—thirteen of them, which she tossed around after dinner with the Kalmans and their kids, who lived down the block. One of those globes rests on a shelf in the closet, along with a few essential possessions: a small stack of biographies (Greta Garbo, Oscar Levant), the only books Berman read; some immaculate lingerie and house linen; a packet of handwritten letters from her sister; and a battered piece of faux Louis Vuitton luggage—a jewelry travel case that alludes, perhaps, to her displacements. There is nothing of value in the closet, if you reckon value in material terms. But Berman's greatest luxury was her belated freedom.

Women who reinvent themselves are as varied as their ambitions for distinction. Where Sara Berman divested, Arabella Worsham acquired. Her dressing room is also on display in the American Wing, adjacent to—or, as the curators conceived it, “in conversation” with—Berman's closet. Worsham was an obscure Southern belle who married the railroad magnate Collis Huntington, in 1884, at the age of thirty-three, a promotion from mistress to wife that would make her America's richest woman. The dressing room—from a mansion on West Fifty-fourth Street that Worsham sold to John D. Rockefeller when she became Mrs. Huntington—is “one of the best preserved New York interiors from the nineteenth century,” according to Amelia Peck. It was created exactly a century before Berman's closet, in 1882, and there is nothing not of great luxury in this richly patterned, gorgeously appointed boudoir, with its lavish woodwork and its painted frieze of frolicking putti. A dress from Paris hangs in the armoire, and drawers hold exquisite underthings. Worsham was a connoisseur whose appetite for peerless objects and pictures rivalled J. P. Morgan's, and her estate seeded several museums. But if you read Edith Wharton or Henry James, you know that the grandes dames of New York society weighed a woman's worth on the scale of virtue; they judged Worsham by the lightness of her morals, not the ballast of her splendor.

It is fun to imagine how Berman and Worsham would have sized each other up. One was a courtesan, the other a divorcée; both flouted the conventions of their milieux. They were both humbly born, dependent on men, and, one suspects, frustrated artists. Yet each woman fashioned a sovereign identity with the only materials she had to work with, the same in both cases: clothing and décor. A preacher of almost any faith might extract a sermon from this “conversation,” and a therapist might mine it for a study of interiority. But the real test of character is for the beholder. Whom do you envy? The apostle of worldliness, for all she amassed, or the apostle of simplicity, for all she could do without?



Sara Berman’s Closet
