Material is unprocessed. Please contact rbml@columbia.edu for more information.
Collection includes correspondence, personal family documents, photographs, and artworks that predate Hetty's time in New York and San Francisco, where she established her reputation as a dynamic member of the psychedelia- tinged counterculture. Before she worked as an illustrator and designer for The Oracle, an influential and cutting- edge San Francisco magazine, and before she met her future husband, experimental musician Angus MacLise, she was sketching cities in Europe, honing her signature graphic style, jotting down marijuana recipes in notebooks, raising her first son, Jason Paul McGee, and corresponding prolifically with individuals like Gerald Brenan, a noted writer and Hispanic scholar who was friends with Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group. This archive attests to all these activities, and the depth with which she pursued them. Hetty brought these materials to the United States with her when she moved to San Francisco in the mid-1960s. She stowed them with her friend, photographer Lisa Law where they remained for several decades. Hetty had discussed these materials with her friend Rachel Marco-Havens, and several years after Hetty's passing in 2011, Law transferred the materials to Marco- Havens as their owner.
Approx. 200 letters, 635 photographs of Hetty MacLise and her expatriate friends and family, 5 journals, and 120 original artworks, many oversize.
You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.
Material is unprocessed. Please contact rbml@columbia.edu for more information.
Single reproductions may be made for research purposes. It is the responsibility of the user to secure permission for publication or use from the appropriate copyright holder.
Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Hetty MacLise Papers; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.
Angus MacLise Papers. Columbia University Libraries.
Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Hetty MacLise's life during which she was known as Mary (or Hetty) McGee, Mary Catherine Burton, and Mary Scholten, and consists of materials she created during her time abroad in the 1950s and 1960s. In this transformative period, Hetty had already been married, divorced, and traveled to several different countries beyond her native United Kingdom. Her passport (stamped nearly 100 times in the span of a few years) and large caches of correspondence reflect this formative period in her life that would lay the groundwork for her later years.