My interest in Mary Callery began one day in the so-called “foreigners” cemetery in Cadaqués, when I saw a tomb with a wooden cross, badly damaged by time and rain, where it only said “Mary” and on her tombstone Mary Callery, 1903-1977.
She had to be English or American and I wondered why she would have been buried there.
I found out she was a sculptor and for a while I forgot about her.
Until this summer, at Dora Maar's auction of unpublished photographs, one of the women in the group of Picasso, Dora Maar and Jacqueline Lamba (André Breton's wife) was identified as Mary Callery.
They were in Antibes, in August 1939, playing at photographing each other.
Mary was simply but elegantly dressed, Jacqueline Lamba was nude, and Picasso was wearing a tank top.
A few months earlier, in January,
Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, had asked Mary to spy on Picasso for him;
he said in another way, that he informed him about the artist's mood swings and the intrigues that surrounded him.
Callery was a close friend of Picasso and, according to Alfred Barr, she owned the most paintings by the artist from Malaga in the entire United States, something she could afford as the daughter of James Dawson Callery, president of the Pittsburg Railway Company and of the Diamond National Bank.
She had studied sculpture at the Arts Students League with Edward McCartan and in 1923 married Frederic R. Coudert Jr., a member of the United States Congress, with whom she had a daughter, Caroline.
This, who never got along with her mother, she committed suicide in 1966 by jumping into the void.
Divorced from her first husband, Mary remarried in 1931 Carlo Frua de Angeli, a textile industrialist and great art collector from Milan, whom she also divorced, although she always maintained a friendly relationship with him.
In the 1930s, Mary lived in Paris, worked in her studio on
rue
d'Alesia and met not only Picasso but also Matisse, Léger, Man Ray and Calder, sometimes collaborating with them and being photographed or drawn by them. .
De Léger was her lover for many years, even when he went into exile in New York during World War II.
When the war broke out, Callery worked as an ambulance driver for the American Hospital in Neuilly.
But with the Germans entering Paris, alone and depressed, she decided to return to New York.
She had another romantic relationship there, this time with the architect Mies van der Rohe, who renovated an existing barn on Long Island, completed in 1950.
As a sculptor, Mary Callery's work shows threadlike figures that express movement, lightness, like dancing and more schematic versions of Giacometti's extremely thin figures.
Much more interesting are her abstract works, especially the sculpture for the proscenium arch of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, which was commissioned from her by the architect Wallace Harrison and was described as "a bouquet of sculpted arabesques".
Callery's work—sometimes signed by Meric Callery to disguise her feminine gender—was represented by the prestigious Curt Valentin and Knoedler galleries in New York;
she was also invited by Joseph Albers to teach at the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
In 1958 he met the architects Peter Harnden and Franco Bombelli, who were working together organizing exhibitions of North American artists in Europe within the Marshall Plan.
They convinced her to build a house in Cadaqués, the beautiful white town on the Costa Brava, also frequented by Marcel and Teeny Duchamp, very close friends of Mary.
Callery actually bought not one, but two nearby houses, one for living and one for a studio.
There he would receive friends and show off his splendid collection of works of art.
He did not mingle with the locals, but he would go sailing with Alejandro Kontos, who also acted as his driver.
The house, a dilapidated construction located on the narrowest street in the area (
carrer
Embut, Embudo, 8) was completely remodeled by the architects, who opened 10 square windows on the façade, thereby creating a composition that resembles a neoplastic work.
The house has a patio and an upper terrace from where the view is magnificent.
Not far from there is the studio, which I had the opportunity to visit, today converted into a home and whose owners have preserved its original layout almost identically.
Devastated by her daughter's suicide, Mary lived longer and longer in Cadaqués, accompanied by her dogs Mona and Lisa and her many friends.
She died in 1977 at the American Hospital in Paris, but her simple grave, whose cross has been set in stone, can be visited in this small cemetery overlooking the blue waters of Port Lligat.
Victoria Combalía
is a writer and art critic.
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