This closet is so organised, it’s a work of art

New York: It’s not uncommon to aspire to a perfectly organised closet. But Sara Berman’s closet, with its starched and ironed clothes and linens, its stack of soft hats, its jar of buttons and its row of Easy Spirit shoes, all lined up and all in shades of white, ivory or the palest ecru, went far beyond that. Her Greenwich Village closet, which served her from 1982 until her death in 2004, became a sort of shrine to her quest for order, beauty and meaning. It was so extraordinary in its simplicity and elegance that it recently earned a place among the far more luxurious period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A recreation of the closet by artists Maira and Alex Kalman, Berman’s daughter and grandson, will remain on view at the Met through September 5. “We knew that my mother’s closet was a work of art. It was similar to the closets of my aunt and my grandmother, but taken to more of an extreme. When my mother died, it was clear that it should be preserved and put in a museum someday, but we never imagined in would be in the Met,” said Maira Kalman. The closet was meticulously saved in bins and, about a decade after Berman’s death, it was installed in a tiny lower Manhattan museum, called Mmuseumm, founded by her grandson. “As children, we would admire Sara’s closet. We could see clearly it has the power of a great piece of art. It was beautiful and spoke volumes,” Alex Kalman explained. “It was clear it should be exhibited.” On a recent morning at the Met, there were more visitors huddled around Berman’s closet than around any of the more luxurious rooms near it.