Who Was Mary Reynolds and Why Was She So Important?

The enterprise playing cards that Mary Reynolds had made have been in all capital letters and easily learn: MARY REYNOLDS / RELIURE / 24 R. HALLÉ / PARIS XIV. It’s unclear why she wished them, since her reliure (French for “bookbinding”) was largely for herself. The tackle was semi-accurate. Reynolds had a spot there but in addition lived down the road, in a two-story home at 14 rue Hallé with a large enough yard to accommodate Brancusi sculptures, a gang of cats, and nightly gatherings of Surrealists.

Oh, and on most days her companion, Marcel Duchamp, was there too. They embellished 14 rue Hallé along with an odd assortment of street maps, dangly earrings, items of glass, and string. She was “a terrific determine in her modest methods,” Duchamp would later say in regards to the girl he was concerned with for greater than 20 years, on and off, and who witnessed the blossoming of the humanities through the interwar interval in Paris and adopted her personal artistic path.

From the second Reynolds (1891–1950) moved from New York to Paris in 1921, the eccentric Américaine surrounded herself with artists and writers. This wasn’t the kind of firm she’d saved as a straitlaced child rising up in Minneapolis. Reynolds will need to have all the time craved one thing else, although, since she went to school at Vassar after which moved to Greenwich Village together with her husband to be a part of the scene. Their bohemian way of life was reduce quick when he enlisted within the U.S. Military throughout World Conflict I and died of pneumonia whereas stationed in France. Her husband’s physique by no means returned residence for burial; as an alternative, Reynolds crossed the Atlantic to be nearer to his spirit—after which by no means left.

Mild and beneficiant, and evidently not shy, Reynolds made buddies shortly. One in all them was a fellow expat who landed in Paris just some months earlier than she did, photographer Man Ray. “She was a type of fairy godmother, receiving all who got here to her,” he wrote in his autobiography. Not all of her new friends had the purest of intentions, although. “She was imposed on an excellent deal and solicited for assist.” Possibly as a result of she might afford to not work, folks thought Reynolds was a deep-pocketed socialite; in actual fact, she made do with a conflict widow pension and a small belief arrange by her dad and mom.

“She was the one particular person in Bohemia with any cash, and but she was all the time broke as a result of she lent it or gave all of it away the minute it arrived from America,” wrote one other shut good friend, artwork collector Peggy Guggenheim. Guggenheim and Reynolds met in Paris within the early Nineteen Twenties and traveled collectively to locations like Egypt (the place they each collected uncommon earrings).

Reynolds’s buddies have been ever current in her residence, and her partitions have been lined with their artworks. Amongst different issues, the home at 14 rue Hallé held a Jean Arp aid, an Alexander Calder cellular, and scenes by Yves Tanguy.

One of many many artists Reynolds hosted, and shortly the topic of a two-artist exhibition with her at the Art Institute of Chicago, was Frida Kahlo. When Kahlo made her first and solely journey to Paris, in 1939, she and Reynolds hit it off instantly—a lot so, that when Kahlo contracted a debilitating kidney an infection, Reynolds provided her a room at her home and helped nurse her again to well being (Kahlo stayed for an entire month).

“She is a very nice particular person and doesn’t have something to do with the stinking ‘artists’ of the group of [André] Breton,” Kahlo mentioned of Reynolds in a letter to her lover, photographer Nickolas Muray. “She could be very variety to me and takes care of me splendidly.” The fondness was mutual. In a letter that Reynolds despatched Kahlo simply after she left, she wrote, “The home remains to be and doesn’t know itself. Each single factor misses you tremendously.”

Reynolds had a present for cultivating a cultural group, however by the late Nineteen Twenties she wished a artistic outlet of her personal. She determined to be taught the artwork of bookbinding, a modern craft for ladies on the time. In 1929 Reynolds spent a yr learning on the atelier of bookbinder Pierre Legrain, who taught her primary expertise and methods to incorporate patterns, animal skins, and prints.

By the point she left Legrain’s atelier, Reynolds might make avant-garde reliures of her personal. “She produced a lot of very authentic bindings, utterly divorced from the classical teachings and marked by a decidedly surrealistic strategy and an unpredictable fantasy,” Duchamp later wrote. She targeted on Dada and Surrealist publications written by her buddies, preserving supplies akin to mechanical presses and particular leathers at residence.

She used weird supplies that related to the texts themselves, remodeling books into singular objects. Among the connections have been apparent. For a set of poems written by Paul Éluard and illustrated with Man Ray drawings, Les mains libres (Free Fingers, 1937), Reynolds created a visible pun by attaching gloves on the back and front covers (thereby “releasing” the reader’s fingers). Others have been tougher to decipher, their meanings clear solely after studying the texts.

Almost 1 / 4 of the texts that Reynolds certain have been by Jean Cocteau, an excellent good friend, and he or she branded them along with his signature star on e-book spines, covers, and endpapers. Reynolds additionally certain 12 works by her good friend the experimental author Raymond Queneau. She connected a damaged thermometer caught on the freezing level to the backbone of Queneau’s Un impolite hiver (A Laborious Winter, 1939). One in all her closing bookbinding tasks was for Queneau’s Saint Glinglin (1948), the place she secured a porcelain teacup deal with to the backbone in reference to a scene by which dishes have been smashed at a pageant.

Reynolds and Duchamp additionally collaborated in these years, making packing containers and bindings collectively. The primary venture they joined forces on was a binding that Duchamp designed and Reynolds executed for Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896)—the back and front covers have been reduce to kind U’s, and a B is printed on the backbone in order that the duvet reads “Ubu” when open. In flip, Reynolds’s data of bookbinding and leatherwork in all probability impacted Duchamp’s Boîtes-en-valise, boxed units of mini reproductions of his works.

This decade-long interval of collaboration and bookbinding was reduce quick by World Conflict II and the German invasion of Paris. In 1941 Duchamp obtained a allow to go away the town, however Reynolds insisted on staying and joined the French Resistance with buddies akin to Samuel Beckett (her code identify was Douce Mary, that means “Mild Mary”). “The truth that a lot distress exists is usually overwhelming,” Reynolds wrote that yr in a letter to her brother in Chicago, who was apprehensive about her security.

Reynolds remained in Paris effectively into the conflict, at private danger, rising her personal greens and offering refuge to folks fleeing Nazi persecution. “She hid me in her home in Paris for 10 days, after I had escaped from a German prisoners’ camp,” wrote one of many artists she helped, Jean Hélion. “She herself was underneath police supervision, and he or she was then working a critical danger. So charming, beautiful, and alive, and courageous.”

By the spring of 1942 Reynolds realized that 14 rue Hallé was being watched by the Gestapo, and in September she illegally crossed the Line of Occupation and escaped to New York through a protracted, harmful route that included strolling throughout the Pyrenees mountains. The Parisian correspondent of the New Yorker, Janet Flanner, wrote about Reynolds’s escape (with some fictionalization) in a three-part story referred to as “The Escape of Mrs. Jefferies.”

Reynolds stayed in New York however returned to Paris as quickly as she might, simply six weeks after hostilities led to 1945. Duchamp didn’t (though he bounced between Paris and New York a bit), having entered into an affair two years earlier with Brazilian sculptor Maria Martens.

A number of years later Reynold’s well being began to say no, and by 1950 she found that she had superior most cancers. Her brother, Frank Brookes Hubachek, funded Duchamp’s journey to Paris so he might be together with her. Reynolds slipped right into a coma simply days after Duchamp arrived and died at residence at 14 rue Hallé with Duchamp by her aspect.

After her demise, Duchamp helped discover a residence for her library. Particular books that Reynolds had certain got to their authors in remembrance of her, however all the things else stayed collectively because the Mary Reynolds Collection and was gifted to the Artwork Institute of Chicago (the place her brother was a trustee). This trove of Surrealist supplies holds round 500 books, albums, magazines, exhibition catalogues, pamphlets (together with ephemera that might have in any other case simply have been misplaced), and roughly 70 of the books she certain. When Duchamp revealed a e-book about her assortment in 1956, he famous that it wasn’t a proper library. “It’s extra like a diary: the artwork and letters diary of Mary Louise Reynolds’ thirty yr life in Paris.”

Although she was entrenched within the lives of celebrated artists of interwar Paris, Reynolds stays one thing of an obscure determine. Her assortment, partly exhibited on the Artwork Institute of Chicago alongside Kahlo’s work, preserves her position and her artistry.

“How intimate she was with the artery-stream of Paris, within the pulse of its creators, main and minor,” Flanner wrote to Reynolds’s brother. “There was one thing speedy in her sense of appreciation, she appeared to be proper along with writers and artists as they turned themselves, so she was a steady witness. I liked Mary dearly; her gayety, the particular timbre of her voice, her laughter, her smile which was typically so contemplative. Oh, she was a charming girl.”

“Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds,” is on view on the Artwork Institute of Chicago from March 29 to July 13, 2025