applznorngz/arts

Hotcha! this is what I love about StumbleUpon...... only I'm getting overloaded again... shall I pursue Duchamp, Mary Reynolds, or her brother Mr. Hubacheks??? Or shall I google "I've got a lump in my throat" to discover what the emotional component is with that??? (I promised myself I would since I've had one all day long.. I know that's not so interesting to you... but, I believe it's something I need to pursue... Feelings... go figure...) Anyway, oops, I've got to stop and send my dear friend an email thanks for serving me that nice white wine on my way home... Then, when I got home, a different friend had left a treat of spring rolls that she had made with sulfur bracket mushrooms and lettuce and cabbage and yummy spices... and I was feeling So alone in the world! pooh, me. F to me... oh no, I'm even feeling generous to me, so I take that back...
Ok, where was I now...wrote my thank yous... and now I'm running out... Will talk more about Mary Reynolds : (cut and paste from page: The Blog of Sheila Lennon):
" Mary Hubachek Reyholds, born in 1891, lived in Greenwich Village with her soulmate husband, enjoying Bohemia. He enlisted in WWI sixteen months into their marriage, and died of the flu somewhere in Europe two years later.

Pressured by her parents to move on, remarry and start a family, she fled to Paris, to Montparnasse. She took up with Marcel Duchamp, who would be, despite rocky early years, her lover for the rest of her life, and eventually took up bookbinding as her own art.

When life became dangerous, Mary refused to leave Paris with Duchamp, and became instead a leader of the Resistance, harboring refugees as "Gentle Mary."

She wrote,

I am trying to profit by the times here....it is a bill in my personal life. I said try--don't laff--to make myself a better character--a little late. It is a curious life of anguish and such luxury as I have not known for a long time--the evenings more or less alone and away from the world like a desert island--and I enjoy that.

She finally fled just ahead of the Gestapo by walking over the Pyrenees to Spain. After being debriefed by the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), forerunner of the CIA, she tried to join them, in the foreign service, but was rejected for "age"; she was 52.

Reunited with Duchamp in Greenwich Village, she sorely missed Paris, and returned six weeks after the war ended. He joined her, but liked the art scene and collectors in New York too much to stay.

She died in 1950 at her Paris home of uterine cancer, with Duchamp at her side.
Her friend, the writer Janet Flanner, wrote of her,

How intimate she was with the artery-stream of Paris, in the pulse of its creators, major and minor. 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.

There is something poignant about the Mary Reynolds presented here, an early Forrest Gump, present at everyone else's creation, while her own efforts remained obscure.

The Vassar girl from Minneapolis took freedom as far as she could. I hope she found that enough."