ABSTRACT
Mary Callery (1903–1977) was an American sculptor and major collector of modern art. She lived and worked in Paris throughout the 1930s, and when she returned to the US, Callery had “more Picassos than anyone in America,” according to Alfred Barr. She collaborated with Fernand Léger and Georgia O’Keeffe, Alexander Calder made her jewelry, and Mies van der Rohe converted a barn into a studio for her. Callery’s increasingly personal, playful, and disquietingly intense sculptures were shown at the Valentin Gallery and in Vogue magazine.
Callery’s work marked a juncture: her artistic independence grew out of avant-garde practices that merged formal sensibility with an experimental approach to craftsmanship yet without the radicalism of next-generation artists. Although being well connected and despite prominent commissions, this significant woman sculptor received little recognition—MoMA even referred to her as “Mrs. Meric Callery.” Was Callery’s eclipse from public consciousness symptomatic for gendered positions in twentieth-century art?
A critical consideration of Callery’s professional strategies accounts for both her independence as an artist and absence from mid-century mainstream readings. Like other important women in twentieth-century art and design, Callery skirted rather than attracted public attention, an observation that challenges the idea that modernism is indivisible from publicity.
