Who Was Mary Reynolds and Why Was She So Important?

The business cards that Mary Reynolds had made were in all capital letters and simply read: MARY REYNOLDS / RELIURE / 24 R. HALLÉ / PARIS XIV. It’s unclear why she wanted them, since her reliure (French for “bookbinding”) was mostly for herself. The address was semi-accurate. Reynolds had a place there but also lived down the street, in a two-story house at 14 rue Hallé with a big enough backyard to accommodate Brancusi sculptures, a gang of cats, and nightly gatherings of Surrealists.

Oh, and on most days her partner, Marcel Duchamp, was there too. They decorated 14 rue Hallé together with an odd collection of road maps, dangly earrings, pieces of glass, and string. She was “a great figure in her modest ways,” Duchamp would later say about the woman he was involved with for more than 20 years, on and off, and who witnessed the blossoming of the arts during the interwar period in Paris and followed her own creative path.

From the moment Reynolds (1891–1950) moved from New York to Paris in 1921, the eccentric Américaine surrounded herself with artists and writers. This wasn’t the type of company she’d kept as a straitlaced kid growing up in Minneapolis. Reynolds must have always craved something else, though, since she went to college at Vassar and then moved to Greenwich Village with her husband to be part of the scene. Their bohemian lifestyle was cut short when he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I and died of pneumonia while stationed in France. Her husband’s body never returned home for burial; instead, Reynolds crossed the Atlantic to be nearer to his spirit—and then never left.

Gentle and generous, and evidently not shy, Reynolds made friends quickly. One of them was a fellow expat who landed in Paris just a few months before she did, photographer Man Ray. “She was a sort of fairy godmother, receiving all who came to her,” he wrote in his autobiography. Not all of her new pals had the purest of intentions, though. “She was imposed on a good deal and solicited for aid.” Maybe because she could afford not to work, people thought Reynolds was a deep-pocketed socialite; in fact, she made do with a war widow pension and a small trust set up by her parents.

“She was the only person in Bohemia with any money, and yet she was always broke because she lent it or gave it all away the minute it arrived from America,” wrote another close friend, art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Guggenheim and Reynolds met in Paris in the early 1920s and traveled together to places like Egypt (where they both collected unusual earrings).

Reynolds’s friends were ever present in her home, and her walls were covered with their artworks. Among other things, the house at 14 rue Hallé held a Jean Arp relief, an Alexander Calder mobile, and scenes by Yves Tanguy.

One of the many artists Reynolds hosted, and soon the subject of a two-artist exhibition with her at the Art Institute of Chicago, was Frida Kahlo. When Kahlo made her first and only trip to Paris, in 1939, she and Reynolds hit it off immediately—so much so, that when Kahlo contracted a debilitating kidney infection, Reynolds offered her a room at her house and helped nurse her back to health (Kahlo stayed for a whole month).

“She is a really nice person and doesn’t have anything to do with the stinking ‘artists’ of the group of [André] Breton,” Kahlo said of Reynolds in a letter to her lover, photographer Nickolas Muray. “She is very kind to me and takes care of me wonderfully.” The fondness was mutual. In a letter that Reynolds sent Kahlo just after she left, she wrote, “The house is still and doesn’t know itself. Every single thing misses you tremendously.”

Reynolds had a gift for cultivating a cultural community, but by the late 1920s she wanted a creative outlet of her own. She decided to learn the art of bookbinding, a fashionable craft for women at the time. In 1929 Reynolds spent a year studying at the atelier of bookbinder Pierre Legrain, who taught her basic skills and how to incorporate patterns, animal skins, and prints.

By the time she left Legrain’s atelier, Reynolds could make avant-garde reliures of her own. “She produced a number of very original bindings, completely divorced from the classical teachings and marked by a decidedly surrealistic approach and an unpredictable fantasy,” Duchamp later wrote. She focused on Dada and Surrealist publications written by her friends, keeping materials such as mechanical presses and special leathers at home.

She used bizarre materials that connected to the texts themselves, transforming books into singular objects. Some of the connections were obvious. For a collection of poems written by Paul Éluard and illustrated with Man Ray drawings, Les mains libres (Free Hands, 1937), Reynolds created a visual pun by attaching gloves on the front and back covers (thereby “freeing” the reader’s hands). Others were harder to decipher, their meanings clear only after reading the texts.

Nearly a quarter of the texts that Reynolds bound were by Jean Cocteau, a good friend, and she branded them with his signature star on book spines, covers, and endpapers. Reynolds also bound 12 works by her friend the experimental writer Raymond Queneau. She attached a broken thermometer stuck at the freezing point to the spine of Queneau’s Un rude hiver (A Hard Winter, 1939). One of her final bookbinding projects was for Queneau’s Saint Glinglin (1948), where she secured a porcelain teacup handle to the spine in reference to a scene in which dishes were smashed at a festival.

Reynolds and Duchamp also collaborated in these years, making boxes and bindings together. The first project they joined forces on was a binding that Duchamp designed and Reynolds executed for Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896)—the front and back covers were cut to form U’s, and a B is imprinted on the spine so that the cover reads “Ubu” when open. In turn, Reynolds’s knowledge of bookbinding and leatherwork probably impacted Duchamp’s Boîtes-en-valise, boxed sets of mini reproductions of his works.

This decade-long period of collaboration and bookbinding was cut short by World War II and the German invasion of Paris. In 1941 Duchamp got a permit to leave the city, but Reynolds insisted on staying and joined the French Resistance with friends such as Samuel Beckett (her code name was Douce Mary, meaning “Gentle Mary”). “The fact that so much misery exists is sometimes overwhelming,” Reynolds wrote that year in a letter to her brother in Chicago, who was worried about her safety.

Reynolds remained in Paris well into the war, at personal risk, growing her own vegetables and providing refuge to people fleeing Nazi persecution. “She hid me in her house in Paris for 10 days, after I had escaped from a German prisoners’ camp,” wrote one of the artists she helped, Jean Hélion. “She herself was under police supervision, and she was then running a serious risk. So charming, lovely, and alive, and brave.”

By the spring of 1942 Reynolds learned 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 via a long, dangerous route that included walking across 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 called “The Escape of Mrs. Jefferies.”

Reynolds stayed in New York but returned to Paris as soon as she could, just six weeks after hostilities ended in 1945. Duchamp did not (although he bounced between Paris and New York a bit), having entered into an affair two years earlier with Brazilian sculptor Maria Martens.

A few years later Reynold’s health started to decline, and by 1950 she discovered that she had advanced cancer. Her brother, Frank Brookes Hubachek, funded Duchamp’s travel to Paris so he could be with her. Reynolds slipped into a coma just days after Duchamp arrived and died at home at 14 rue Hallé with Duchamp by her side.

After her death, Duchamp helped find a home for her library. Special books that Reynolds had bound were given to their authors in remembrance of her, but everything else stayed together as the Mary Reynolds Collection and was gifted to the Art Institute of Chicago (where her brother was a trustee). This trove of Surrealist materials holds around 500 books, albums, magazines, exhibition catalogues, pamphlets (including ephemera that could have otherwise easily have been lost), and roughly 70 of the books she bound. When Duchamp published a book about her collection in 1956, he noted that it wasn’t a formal library. “It is more like a diary: the art and letters diary of Mary Louise Reynolds’ thirty year life in Paris.”

Though she was entrenched in the lives of celebrated artists of interwar Paris, Reynolds remains something of an obscure figure. Her collection, partly exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago alongside Kahlo’s work, preserves her role and her artistry.

“How intimate she was with the artery-stream of Paris, in the pulse of its creators, major and minor,” Flanner wrote to Reynolds’s brother. “There was something immediate in her sense of appreciation, she seemed to be right at the side of writers and artists as they became themselves, so she was a continuous witness. I loved Mary dearly; her gayety, the special timbre of her voice, her laughter, her smile which was often so contemplative. Oh, she was a captivating woman.”

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