Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mary Reynolds fled her provincial bourgeois upbringing for Paris, where, by the 1930s, she gained attention as an avant-garde bookbinder. Celebrated for her conviviality and generosity within the artistic enclave of Montparnasse, Reynolds’s most enduring artistic encounter was that with Marcel Duchamp, who became her life partner and occasional collaborator for over 25 years. Their creative exchanges often unfolded in Reynolds’s home at 14 Rue Hallé, which housed her bookbinding studio and served as a meeting place for cultural luminaries during the heyday of Surrealism.
In this talk, art historian Paul B. Franklin explores how love, as much as aesthetics, nourished the art of these two inimitable artists.
Programming for Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds is made possible by the Frank J. Mooney Memorial Fund.
About the Speaker
Paul B. Franklin, based in Paris and Céret, is an American art historian and a leading expert on the life and work of Marcel Duchamp. From 2000 to 2016, he was editor in chief of the scholarly journal Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, one of the most highly regarded publications devoted to the artist and his oeuvre. In addition to lecturing and publishing widely on Duchamp, he worked for numerous years with the artist’s heirs assisting with the management of his estate.
More recently, Franklin has devoted his time to curating exhibitions, including Brancusi & Duchamp: The Art of Dialogue (2018) at Kasmin in New York, Matisse in Black and White (2020), also at Kasmin, and Please Touch: Marcel Duchamp and the Fetish (2021–22), which opened at Thaddaeus Ropac in London and subsequently traveled to its Paris location. His most recent curatorial project, Marcel Duchamp and the Lure of the Copy, took place in 2023–24 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In 2019, Franklin was elected to the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
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Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions related to accessibility accommodations, please email access@artic.edu.
