Biographical Note
Cesari Foni Kellinger was born April 5, 1922, in Sansepolcro, Italy. She attended the Regina Elena School for women, and later earned her doctorate in German languages and literature at the University of Florence. In 1944, she attended Verdi’s Aida in Florence and met Josef Kellinger, a soldier stationed abroad with the United States Army. They married in 1947 in Austria and moved to New York.
During the 1970s, Kellinger began her career as a bookseller and vendor of antiquarian papers. Her business specialized in books about historical women and sculptors from 1600 to the present. She also offered monographs and catalogs about artists from Portugal, Spain, France, England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Scandinavia, and the United States. In addition to her work as a bookseller, Kellinger created educational recordings for foreign-language learning. She also published two articles: “Rosa Luxembourg and Leo Jogisches” (Monthly Review 25.6, 1973) and “Collecting Books in Modern Dance” (AB Bookman’s Yearbook, 1982). She died in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on October 10, 2014.
The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution purchased the Thomas Crawford papers (1941–1856) from her in 1985. In 2004, Kellinger donated more than 500 books to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and in 2011 donated about 220 dance items to the Library of Congress.