134: MARY CALLERY, Song of the Desert < Post War & Contemporary Art, 13 November 2024 < Auctions

A Woman of Influence

The Life & Times of Mary Callery

Mary Callery in her studio. Image courtesy of the seller

A member of the mid-century New York School movement, Mary Callery became celebrated for her Modern and Abstract Expressionist sculpture, as well as for her role in bringing Modernism to the U.S. at the advent of World War II. Callery studied at the Art Students League of New York in the 1920s and moved to Paris in 1930. There, she practiced sculpture under the private tutelage of Jacques Loutchansky and befriended artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, and Alexander Calder. Callery returned to the U.S. in 1940, toting “more Picassos than anyone in America,” according to the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr.

Mary Callery, Song of the Desert, 1945. Image courtesy of the seller

Callery’s own works are marked by a sense of playfulness, and her best-known sculpture may be her commission for the top of the Metropolitan Opera House’s proscenium arch. Upon returning to the U.S., Callery would be represented by M. Knoedler & Co. and the Curt Valentin Gallery, and her works were shown widely. In 1945, Callery was a resident teacher at Black Mountain College alongside Robert Motherwell, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, and others. “What should a sculpture be? …To be a work of art, to me, it must have its emotional life,” Callery once mused. “One must like the thing, be attracted to it, or even be repulsed. It must work on you. Only then does it become living. That for me was the hardest thing to learn.”

Mary Callery. Image courtesy of the seller

In addition to her career as an artist, Callery acted as a significant link between artists, architects, and collectors in the postwar era, both in the U.S. and abroad. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the National Gallery of Art, and many others.

The present lot originally belonged to Callery's son-in-law, Donald W. Porter who was married to the artist's daughter, Caroline. Tragically, Caroline passed away at a young age, but Porter and Callery remained close and Song of the Desert remained in his family's collection until now.