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MARY ALLODI (1929–2021) ary Macaulay Allodi was a senior M art historian and a pioneer of the study of early Canadian art who retired as Curator Emeritus (Early Canadian Painting & Prints) of the Royal Ontario Museum. Her “intellectual rigour was accompanied by a distinct warmth, generosity of spirit, and beautifully dry wit” (in the words of The Globe and Mail) that left a lasting impression on Canadian art history and on everyone who knew her. She died on May 31. Mary grew up in Ottawa, earned an MA in Art History from New York University and began her career at the National Gallery of Canada under Donald Buchanan. One of the first Canada Council grants sent her to Europe for a year to visit the great museums of the Continent. Eventually broke and working at a travel agency in Madrid (she was fluent in Spanish), she met – through a mutual friend, the artist Jack Chambers – Federico Allodi. In due course they married and moved to Toronto, where Mary began her work at the ROM. 20 The Fife and Drum April 2021
M.C., F.R.S.C. The death of a 15-year-old son in a canoeing accident left grief that did not ever lift but was only mitigated by a renewed passion for her work at the museum. The culmination of her curatorial work was the beautiful two volumes of Canadian Watercolours and Drawings in the Royal Ontario Museum, published in 1974. “It is unfortunate that the liveliest aspect of cataloguing, the process of tracking down authorship, date and place for each watercolour and drawing,” she wrote in the Introduction, “cannot be incorporated into the final product.” It’s the work she excelled at. “Her curatorial files are a goldmine of information and insights,” said her successor at the ROM, Arlene Gehmacher. The artworks in the book, Mary wrote, were nothing less than “a painted history of Canada.”
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