Marcel Duchamp
American, born France, 1887-1968
Study for Mary Louise Reynolds Collection Label
INV-3790
Marcel Duchamp
American, born France, 1887-1968c. 1951
Study for Mary Louise Reynolds Collection Label
Marcel Duchamp American, born France, 1887-1968 →pen and ink drawingsdrawings (visual works)
Date
c. 1951
Medium
Pen and black ink, heightened with white gouache, over graphite, on off-white wove paper
Dimensions
35.8 × 27.7 cm (14 1/8 × 10 15/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Frank B. Hubachek
For 30 years, Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds 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.
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, Mary Reynolds with Her Cats, of Reynolds also held in the museum’s collection.
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