Study for Mary Louise Reynolds Collection Label

<p>For 30 years, Marcel Duchamp and <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artists/21655">Mary Reynolds</a> enjoyed a close relationship as artistic collaborators, lovers, and friends. After Reynolds died in 1950, Duchamp planned the relocation of her Paris-based library and bookbindings with her brother Frank B. Hubachek, an Art Institute of Chicago trustee. The two memorialized the gift with great care. Duchamp designed a bookplate (a decorative label designating ownership) featuring an elegant line drawing of Reynolds’s face in profile to label the books that came from her library. Letters between Duchamp and Hubachek held in the museum’s archives reveal a touching level of attention given to every decision. Duchamp even insisted on revising a proof of the bookplate, dissatisfied with the way the engraving distorted the profile of her nose.</p> <p>The drawing features Reynolds’s initials MR stylized as a dangling earring and designed by artist Alexander Calder, also a close friend of Reynolds. The earring expresses Calder’s playful and spare drawing style, which he employed in a sketch, <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artworks/5388"><em>Mary Reynolds with Her Cats,</em></a> of Reynolds also held in the museum’s collection.</p>