Carl Morse Handmade Holiday Card Collection

Ephemera. Near Fine. A joyous collection of 37 hand-drawn holiday and greeting cards of good cheer from artist Irwin “Greeny” Greenberg (1922-2009) and his wife Caroline, all created for their good friend, poet and New York playwright and Gay activist Carl Morse (1935-2008). The cards, of various sizes, feature a red-headed and bearded Morse reading, writing, cooking, and humorously dealing with the reality of another year gone by. Several of the cards are written to Morse’s partner(s); the vast majority though are written to Morse himself and all of them show an abundance of skill and a wonderful light touch. The collection also includes an inscribed watercolor of a coastal landscape, perhaps Maine, Morse’s birthplace. Artist Irwin Greenberg (1922-2009) was an American painter known for his watercolors. A beloved teacher at the High School of Art and Design and the Art Students League, “Greeny” would advise his students to “paint every day” and reminded them that “an artist is a sketchbook with a person attached.” And Carl Morse, living for years at the famed London Terrace Towers in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, was for decades one of New York's larger-than-life hosts and a political firebrand, viewed widely as a highly-literate and ferocious advocate of the Gay community of the 1970s through the early 2000s.