Lettre adressée à Frua de Angeli

In March 1938, Picasso and his companion Dora Maar visited the Zervos couple at the farmhouse they had recently acquired in the hamlet of la Goulotte at Vézelay. They were accompanied by Mary Callery, a wealthy American, and by her companion Frua de Angeli, who through contact with Picasso and the Zervoses discovered the world of art.

After the war, Frua de Angeli, who had married Mary Callery, became one of the most remarkable Italian collectors of the twentieth century: “He had more than a hundred Picassos. His study was filled with Cubist Braques and Picassos; the dining room with de Chirico and Carrà; the drawing room, besides a Giuseppe Maria Crespi, was decorated with two large Matisses facing each other. It was quite fantastic,” recalls his granddaughter Francesca Valsecchi (in Monica Preti, “Le Palazzo Butera, de maison-musée à laboratoire ouvert sur la ville: Entretien avec Francesca et Massimo Valsecchi,” Culture & Musées, 34 | 2019, 295–305).

This modern patron is honored here by Georges Mathieu, who does not hesitate to write to him: “[…] you who have replaced for me the Princes of the Early Renaissance and who continue to embody the same ideal in a world that has lost all its gods.” Mathieu informs him of the exhibition of his recent works at the “Il Milione” gallery in Milan, which Frua de Angeli had recommended to him, and invites him to the opening, to be followed by a lecture entitled “Vers une nouvelle Renaissance.”