---- In 1772, Denis Diderot (1713-84) and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717-83) completed their Encyclopaedia or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts - an enormous undertaking of twenty-eight volumes comprising over 70,000 entries - and in so doing altered the perception of how knowledge might be explored, structured and categorized. In time, artists and writers began to recognize that the dictionary format offered exciting possibilities not just for the gathering of knowledge but also for its subversion. A century after Diderot, the writer Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) dreamed of writing a dictionary that would expose the general folly and fatuousness of his society. In his Dictionary of Received Ideas, he strives to expose the futility of human intelligence, the vanity involved in our eternal quest for wisdom, as well as the nonsense and disappointment that come with humankind’s attempts to ultimately make sense of it all. In Flaubert’s dictionary, under the heading ‘Artist’ we find observations such as ‘One has to laugh about everything that they say’, ‘Make loads of money but throw it out of the window’, ‘What they do cannot be considered “work”’, ‘Are often invited to dinner’ and ‘All of them are pranksters’.[1]
---- Fellow Frenchman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), another Norman native, might have found Flaubert’s quotes about artists amusing. After all, he himself had a highly developed sense of the absurd and a taste for provocation of all sorts, so much so that his particular brand of modernist art became renowned in his own time - and far beyond it - for its ironic subversions and sophisticated wit. Most famously, perhaps, Duchamp abandoned painting in favour of signing mass produced objects that became known as ‘readymades’ - everyday objects that even today continue to elicit controversy and debate. Their essential iconoclasm, and the permission they seemed to grant to both artists and viewers in terms of what art could be, point to Duchamp’s most powerful legacy for later generations. American painter Robert Motherwell (1915-91), for example, saw Duchamp’s manifold forays into experimental artistic practice as an awe-inspiring force of sabotage.[2]
---- Duchamp’s works and thought processes are so complex, refined and multifarious that his influence has extended well beyond the art world to disciplines as varied as literature, dance, film, music, philosophy and graphic design. His renunciation of aesthetics, of mere visual pleasure, and of personal taste, and his embracing of eroticism, doubt, indifference, chance and modern machinery, put him at the crossroads of many movements and opposing forces - today almost more than ever, it seems, and not only within Western culture.
---- Duchamp had a profound mistrust of what he considered to be a general agreement on the meaning of words, and would no doubt have delighted in the fact that his artworks still elicit diverse responses and interpretations, questioning our very ideas about the nature of art itself. For him, art was not in need of verbal translation. He did not believe in language as such, which he saw at best as ‘an error of humanity’,[3] if not ‘a great enemy’.[4] An exception to this, however, was the dictionary format, in which Duchamp took a lifelong pleasure and for which he nurtured his own, unrealized, ideas. His close friend Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (1881-1985), with the readymades clearly in her mind, once commented that to Duchamp ‘the visual world becomes a dictionary of subjects which he isolates by the mere act of choosing them.’[5] The photographer Denise Browne Hare (1924-97) remembered that when Duchamp and his wife Teeny visited ‘there was a lot of looking up words in the dictionary. I had an old, classic Larousse, and at some point Marcel would nearly always get it out. He loved the format, the little illustrations on every page.’[6]
---- In 1967, a year before the artist’s death, a New York gallery published À l’infinitif, Duchamp’s limited edition box containing facsimile reproductions of seventy-nine scattered notes and jottings, a number of which were collected in a folder under the heading ‘Dictionaries and Atlases’. Here, Duchamp added his own twist to the idea of the dictionary, challenging the widely held belief that this particular literary form might be able to convey axiomatic truths. Among his notes, he advised his reader to ‘Look through a dictionary and scratch out all the “undesirable” words. Perhaps add a few - Sometimes replace the scratched out words with another.[7] In 1934, he had published another note in an earlier box, proposing a wonderfully absurd ‘search for “prime words” (“divisible” only by themselves and by unity).’ He also reminded himself to ‘take a Larousse dictionary and copy all the so-called “abstract” words, i.e, those which have no concrete reference.’ Thus, Duchamp arrived at an entirely new ‘sort of grammar’ by ‘composing a schematic sign designating each of these words’, while a ‘grouping of several signs’ would in turn ‘determine’ a ‘new alphabet’.[8]
---- The idea of the dictionary clearly appealed to Duchamp, as it did to the Surrealists, many of whom were his close friends. Georges Bataille (1897- 1962) included entries for his Critical Dictionary within the pages of his Surrealist magazine Documents between 1929 and 1930. In 1938, Paul Éluard (1895-1952) and André Breton (1896-1966) published the Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme on the occasion of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. With regard to writings about Duchamp, the multi-volume catalogue of his first retrospective in Paris in 1977 - the inaugural exhibition of the Centre Georges Pompidou - brought together twenty alphabetical entries from ‘Alchemy’ to ‘Villon’ in its third volume, titled Abécédaire. In art historical reference books and encyclopaedias, the importance of an artist is often measured by the number of lines they are granted, which is why those writing on Duchamp are often so eager to maximize the space allotted to him. When the scholar and art dealer Francis M. Naumann (b. 1948) was asked to write the entry on Duchamp for Macmillan’s Dictionary of Art in the mid-1990s, for example, he insisted on an unrestricted word count, successfully arguing that, whatever he wrote, it should have the right to be as long as the entry for Picasso. Nowadays, with the multilingual, free internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia often the first research website of choice, it seems appropriate that Duchamp should finally get his own dictionary in the form of a digital, as well as a printed, book.
---- This publication introduces new research on Duchamp and broadens our knowledge and understanding of him, in entries that are presented in a concise and entertaining way. For too long, art historical discourse has kept a broader public from enjoying the life and work of one of the most intellectually stimulating individuals of modern times. When he was only twenty-five years old, his avant-garde friend Guillaume Apollinaire (1880- 1918) predicted that, above all, Duchamp would manage to ‘reconcile art and the people’.[9] Since then, almost no other artist has been scrutinized as much as Duchamp. From Hindu rituals to incest, from psychoanalysis to poststructuralism, no theory or idea has been overlooked in attempting to explain the inner workings of his mind. True to Apollinaire’s pronouncement, The Duchamp Dictionary aspires to do away with these theories, to break through the impenetrable vocabulary of much of the writing on Duchamp, and to make him and his work as accessible as they deserve to be - without ever straying from the facts. Indeed, the greatest liberty taken within these pages is in calling Duchamp an artist: he much preferred his own term, ‘an-artist’, itself an entry included here, ‘meaning no artist at all’.[10] From his dislike of body hair to his unrequited love for his best friend’s wife, from his fascination with scientists and philosophers such as Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) and Max Stirner (1806-56) to eroticism as an integral part of his oeuvre - love, life and work, so often inextricably intertwined - all are to be found within this dictionary.
---- Research for the publication was mainly conducted at leading Duchamp scholar Serge Stauffer’s (1929-89) archives at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and at the collection and library of Rhonda Roland Shearer’s (b. 1954) Art Science Research Laboratory, New York. In addition, many treasure troves of information have become available online in recent years. The historic newspapers digitized by the Library of Congress in Washington DC and the documents made public by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library are just two examples of invaluable sources tapped into while writing this book. Further studies at the New York Public Library and New York University were helpful for yielding new research, fact-checking and tracking down information from almost a century ago. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Association Marcel Duchamp provided important details, and my continuous, almost two-decades-long, exchange with many international Duchamp scholars has greatly benefited The Duchamp Dictionary.
---- The deeper one delves into the complexities of an artist’s work, the more thought-provoking, surprising and playful it may turn out to be. The more one knows, however, the more one also realizes what one does not know. Exploring Duchamp’s own writings, notes and interviews is often demanding and yields many contradictory findings, but it is incomparably more beneficial than getting to know the artist through secondary literature alone. It was Duchamp who challenged our understanding of art and thus forever changed the course of art history. Scholarship on Duchamp should remain subversive enough to transform art historical writing as well. Indeed, it may also be fun.
---- When Marcel Duchamp was born on 28 July 1887, the son of a notary, in the tiny farming village of Blainville-Crevon north-east of Rouen, no one could have foreseen that less than a century later he would be regarded as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. There is a great divide, however, between the frequency with which his name appears as a placeholder, or shorthand - whether for iconoclasm, the avant-garde, or radical notions of what constitutes art - and even a peripheral knowledge of his actual life, art and thought. The Duchamp Dictionary hopes to finally bridge this gap for all those interested in the work, ideas and attitudes of this extraordinary artist, as well as in his legacy for the art of today. Duchamp was nothing if not contradictory: a highly sought-after artist who cherished silence and solitude; a prankster who could nonetheless be serious in his intellectual intent; a man for whom art was central yet who spent at least a decade almost solely dedicated to the game of chess. This book, while navigating a clear, jargon free path through these contradictions, also delights in celebrating them.
NOTES: INTRODUCTION: A B C DUCHAMP
[1] Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues; Album de la Marquise; Catalogue des idées chic, vols V, VI (Oeuvres complètes), Paris: Société des Études Littéraires, 1972. [2] Motherwell, ‘Introduction by Robert Motherwell’, in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1987, p. 12. [3] Ibid. [4] Quoted in an interview with William Seitz, in Gough-Cooper and Caumont, in Pontus Hultén (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993 (including Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, ‘Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy, 1887-1968'), within the entry for 15 February 1963, n.p. [5] Buffet-Picabia, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Fluttering Hearts’ (1936), in Anthony Hill (ed.), Duchamp: Passim, Langhorne, PA: G+B Arts International, 1994, pp. 15-18, p. 16. [6] Hare, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp. A Biography, New York: Holt, 1996, p. 430. [7] Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1989, p. 77-179. [8] Ibid., pp. 31-32. [9] Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, New York: Wittenborn, 1970, p. 48. [10] George Heard Hamilton and Richard Hamilton in conversation with Duchamp, ‘Marcel Duchamp Speaks’, BBC Third Program (October 1959); published as a tape by William Furlong (ed.), Audio Arts Magazine, vol. 2, no. 4, 1976.
— A —
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
While Duchamp had stopped painting by 1918, he continued to follow developments within the genre closely. He appreciated Pop Art, but dismissed Abstract Expressionism, another post-war American art movement, as ‘acrobatics, just splashes on canvas’[1-A] Although he championed Jackson Pollock (1912-56), in Abstract Expressionism as a whole he saw ‘academicism, the adoption of new canons, especially with the addition now of money transactions’ as well as a serious ‘danger of any new movement’.[2-A] To Duchamp, ‘the proof of good painting comes when intelligence is part of it. Abstract Expressionism was not intellectual at all for me. It is under the yoke of the retinal. I see no gray matter there ... A technique can be learned but you can't learn to have an original imagination.’[3-A] (grey matter). The feeling was certainly mutual. In the early 1950s, Barnett Newman (1905-70), one of the greatest proponents of Abstract Expressionism, referred to the readymades as mere 'gadgets’ guilty of the ‘popularizing role of entertainment’ within a museum setting. In a feud with the painter Robert Motherwell (1915-91), Newman went further: ‘I want particularly to make clear that if Motherwell wishes to make Marcel Duchamp a father, Duchamp is his father and not mine nor that of any American painter that I respect.’[4-A]
ABSTRACTION
Although Duchamp dismissed abstract art as mere retinal painting created to please the eye instead of engaging the mind, recent scholarship has suggested that he should nevertheless be regarded as a key player in the history of non-figurative artistic expression. By establishing the ‘artwork as idea’ with his readymades, and by producing text in his notes and boxes ‘integrally linked yet held apart’ from his work, it is Duchamp’s oeuvre more than anybody else’s that ‘makes clear that the fact of abstraction would change the terms of artistic practice for the century to come.’[5-A] While in Munich in 1912, Duchamp at least partly read and annotated On the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky's (1866-1944) groundbreaking treatise on abstraction, which had been published earlier that year. Duchamp’s view was that perception is not a solid entity but one that perpetually changes and evolves: what is considered abstract today may no longer be seen that way fifty years hence.[6-A] Whether in his readymades, optical devices or his semi-abstract film Anémic Cinéma (1926), Duchamp frequently embedded highly personal humour and eroticism in his works, but never participated in the ambitious quest for purity, emotion and transcendence of his fellow abstract artists.
ALCHEMY
What the fourth dimension is to mathematics, alchemy is to science: a hotchpotch of ideas and ideologies for the uninitiated, an invaluable testing ground for experiments or an entire belief system for the obsessed both inside and outside the field. Alchemy as the key to understanding Duchamp’s life and work was first introduced by Arturo Schwarz (b. 1924) in the late 1960s. While the assumption that Duchamp’s work is a riddle, rebus or secret in need of monocausal decoding is a dead end, presumably finding that alchemical signs and symbols abound throughout his oeuvre does not add much of value to Duchamp scholarship either. ‘If I have practiced alchemy, it was in the only way it can be done now, that is to say without knowing it',[7-A] is how Duchamp phrased it. The warring factions that gather around the pros and cons for the claim of an alchemistic thread connecting Duchamp's works may be reconciled by the ancient Greek myth about a certain Phrygian king. ‘The Midas touch was his’, as Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) light-heartedly wrote about the readymades, as all Duchamp needed to do was ‘simply to point a god-like finger, to bestow on any object the nearest thing to immortality we know.’[8-A]
AMERICAN WOMEN
When he arrived in New York in 1915, Duchamp was more widely known in the United States than almost any other European contemporary artist, which is why the media was eager to convey his thoughts on everything from Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) to Cubism and from America to the size of skyscrapers. After only three months in the city, the artist had the following to say about American women: ‘The American woman is the most intelligent woman in the world today - the only one that always knows what she wants, and therefore always gets it. Hasn't she proved it by making her husband in his role of slave-banker look almost ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world? Not only has she intelligence but a wonderful beauty of line is hers, possessed by no other woman of any race at the present time. And this wonderful intelligence, which makes the society of her equally brilliant sisters of sufficient interest to her without necessarily insisting on the male element protruding in her life, is helping the tendency of the world today to completely equalize the sexes, and the constant battle between them in which we have wasted our best energies in the past will cease.'[9-A] In subsequent decades, Duchamp got to know many American women as friends, patrons and lovers (or all three things combined). In 1954, he married Alexina Sattler (Teeny; 1906-95), the former wife of art dealer Pierre Matisse (1900-89), who was the son of the painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954).
AN-ARTIST ‘I am against the word “anti” because it's a bit like atheist, as compared to believer. And the atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is, and an anti-artist is just as much of an artist as the other artist. An-artist would be much better, if I could change it, instead of anti-artist. An-artist, meaning no artist at all. That would be my conception. I don’t mind being an an-artist.’[10-A] Duchamp certainly did not mind the homophonic resemblance between ‘an-artist’ and ‘anarchist’ either.
ANATOMY
Duchamp spoke of the ‘visceral forms’[11-A] that he depicted in his painting Bride (1912), and referred to the bride within the Large Glass (1915-23) as a ‘skeleton’[12-A] His heightened interest in human anatomy came when he began juxtaposing it with mechanical operations. At that time, anatomical museums with mechanical models and wax figures with dozens of removable pieces were a major tourist attraction, entertaining both the educated visitor and the voyeur. Duchamp also explored anatomy in the painting The Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912). It is unlikely to have escaped his attention that female genitals in the ‘virginal' as well as the ‘de-virginized state’[13-A] were part of the standard repertoire of every ‘adults-only’ anatomical display since the late 19th century.
From the early 20th-century works to his erotic objects and his final major piece, Étant donnés (1946-66), Duchamp seems to have been preoccupied with the presentation of the most intimate parts of the female body. It is therefore highly unlikely that a problem with the casting process for the torso at the centre of Étant donnés, which Duchamp modelled on three women (Alexina Sattler (Teeny), Maria Martins, Mary Reynolds), ‘accounts for the anatomical inaccuracies and gender ambiguity of the mannequin’.[14-A] Instead, it is the way Duchamp plays with the sexes (Rrose Sélavy) in much of his oeuvre as well as his interest in elaborate forms of representation far exceeding the merely visual (grey matter, fourth dimension) that make this depiction of the female body consciously transcend a precise anatomical rendering. To Duchamp, ‘distorting the object’[15-A] or ‘systematic distortion’[16-A] had been ‘my way since 1900 and probably before that even’.[17-A] For the artist, this meant to ‘take any liberty with anatomy’.[18-A]
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1880-1918) criticism of Duchamp’s works turned from bashing his ‘very ugly nudes’ in early 1910 to acknowledging his ‘interesting exhibits’[19-A] in late 1911. From then on, Apollinaire was hooked; so was Duchamp. Seven years younger than the avant-garde poet, playwright, promoter, pornographer and patron saint of Surrealism, the artist appreciated the attention, but he also mistrusted Apollinaire's literary wordiness - to Duchamp, painting was a language in itself that did not need to be translated into letters and syllables. Apollinaire included Duchamp as one of only ten painters in his book on Les Peintres Cubistes (1913), in which he predicted that ‘it will be the task of the artist as detached from aesthetic preoccupations and as intent on the energetic as Marcel Duchamp, to reconcile art and the people.’[20-A] It was with Apollinaire and Francis Picabia (1879-1953) that Duchamp saw Raymond Roussel's (1877-1933) stage adaptation of his novel Impressions d’Afrique (1910), and it was with them that he went on an infamous road trip (automobiles). Both events were key experiences in Duchamp's life. His enigmatic semi readymade Apolinére Enameled (1916-17), an altered advertising sign for the industrial paint brand Sapolin Enamel that depicts a young girl painting the vertical bars of an empty bed frame, was an homage to the poet that the latter never had the chance to appreciate. Apollinaire died in 1918 from the Spanish flu and complications from serious war wounds.
ARCHITECTURE
‘Does architecture interest you?'
‘Not at all.’[21-A]
WALTER AND LOUISE ARENSBERG
The poet, patron and cryptographer Walter Arensberg (1878-1954) and his wife Louise (1879-1953) became Duchamp’s most important collectors after they met him in 1915, Throughout his life, the Harvard-educated Walter Arensberg would dwell over Dante and try to prove that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon, a detail-obsessed pastime of meticulous rigour that certainly appealed to Duchamp. The first encounter of the two kindred spirits proved ‘a kind of magical spell’, with Duchamp as ‘the spark plug that ignited Arensberg’.[22-A] The artist became the centre of the Arensbergs’ avant-garde poets’ and artists’ circle that frequently convened at their two-floor Upper West Side apartment. However, with prohibition setting in and with the return home of many European artists after the end of the First World war, the heyday of the open-house salon slowly came to a halt. Extramarital affairs by both Walter and Louise, combined with his drinking problems and increasingly bad investments of their joint family wealth, lead to the Arensbergs’ move to California in the early 1920s and to their permanent settlement in Hollywood in 1927. Their vast collection of pre-Columbian and modern art, including some forty works by Duchamp, among them his most significant, was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1950.
ARMORY SHOW
There is no doubt that Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 (1912), shown at New York's Armory Show in 1913, is the basis for his recognition and visibility today. Four paintings by the artist were included in the more than 1,000 works presented in this seminal exhibition, which introduced European and North American modern and avant-garde art to the broadest public possible. During the course of the show’s run between February and May, including its tour to Chicago and Boston, all of Duchamp’s works were sold to American collectors. As Milton W. Brown (1911-98), the exhibition’s minute chronicler, writes, the Armory Show ‘had been calculated from the beginning as a mental jolt to stir America out of its long esthetic complacency’.[23-A] In this it succeeded and, to this day, Duchamp is famous for his very own brand of iconoclasm, his humour and his fascinatingly complex works. In the summer of 1915, upon the suggestion of the art scholar and artist Walter Pach (1883-1958), one of the show's organizers, Duchamp followed his Nude, as well as his friend Francis Picabia (1879-1953), to New York. At that time, at the age of twenty-seven, Duchamp had already abandoned painting and conceived his first readymades. When he set foot on American soil, he was one step ahead, yet again.
ART
In 1913, while in his mid-twenties, Duchamp wondered: ‘Can one make works which are not works of “art”?’[24-A] Never one to believe in absolutes, definite theories or progress, he questioned whether art could ever be ‘adequately defined because the translation of an esthetic emotion into a verbal description is as inaccurate as your description of fear when you have been actually scared.’[25-A]
ART HISTORY
In an interview with art historian George Heard Hamilton (1910-2004) and artist Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), Duchamp made it clear that in his opinion ‘art history is not art’[26-A] He believed in the mortality of painting and sculpture and was aware that ‘rt history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist.a’[27-A] In an interview for Vogue in 1963, he reiterated what he had written to his sister Suzanne (1889-1963) and her husband Jean Crotti (1878-1958), both artists, about a decade before: the ‘smell of the flower’,[28-A] or of ‘any fragrance ... evaporates very quickly’,[29-A] thereby losing its ‘soul’[30-A] Whatever is left will be ‘classified by the historians in the chapter “History of Art”’.[31-A] Posterity, not an artist’s own contemporaries, will thus judge that artist’s significance. Duchamp said of art history that ‘anything systemized becomes sterile very soon’[32-A]‘The History of Art is what remains of an epoch in a museum, but it’s not necessarily the best of that epoch, and fundamentally it's probably even the expression of the mediocrity of the epoch, because the beautiful things have disappeared - the public did not want to keep them.’[33-A]
ARTIST
‘I don't believe in art. I believe in the artist.’[34-A]
ART MARKET
Duchamp did not think highly of galleries, dealers, criticism or art history, and was most of all put off by the commercialism that he believed was the biggest threat to creativity, Therefore, he made sure that his own works ended up in the hands of just a small number of collectors, who would then donate them to only a few museums. This is the reason why Duchamp, contrary to his status as one of the most important artists of the 20th century, plays almost no part in the art market. If at all, the works that can still be bought are mostly editions and rarely major originals, Francis M. Naumann (b. 1948) remarks that he ‘was not only successful in thwarting attempts to commercialize his work in his lifetime’, but that ‘his efforts continue to have an effect to this very day’.[35-A]Almost to today, in fact. For example, in the late 1990s, a signed edition of 1964-65 of Fountain (1917) could still be bought for less than a million dollars, but prices rocketed in 2008 when the readymade perfume bottle Belle Haleine (1921) sold for $11.4 million, and in 2012 a small preliminary study of its label fetched nearly $2.5 million.
ASSOCIATION MARCEL DUCHAMP
When Duchamp passed away in October 1968, it was his wife Alexina Sattler (Teeny; 1906-95) who guarded his legacy and created an archive with the works and documents he had left behind. According to Francis M. Naumann (b. 1948), the artist’s estate was valued at around $360,000, whereas Pablo Picasso's (1881-1973) was estimated at $312 million when he died in 1973.[36-A] Duchamp's stepdaughter and the granddaughter of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the artist Jacqueline Matisse Monnier (b. 1931), put together the last sixty or so unassembled Boxes-in-a-Valise, which her mother then signed. With a rubber stamp signature of Duchamp’s or her own, Teeny sometimes endorsed numbered editions of his work, such as the Anaglyphic Chimney (1995). She also allowed the posthumous publication of almost 300 notes that she had discovered. In close collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to which she generously continued to donate many of Duchamp’s works and documents, she issued certificates of authenticity, such as for the readymade of the licence plate of her Volkswagen car (automobiles).
After Teeny's death in late 1995, Monnier took over from her mother and in 1997 became founding president of the Association Marcel Duchamp, which ‘is devoted to the protection, preservation, publication, administration, and the collection of rights related to the work of Marcel Duchamp.’[37-A] When it comes to research, exhibitions or the use of Duchamp’s visual vocabulary by other artists, the Association is generous, caring and genuinely interested - none of which should be taken for granted. The Association reserves the right to take legal action against unsigned, undated and unnumbered samples of readymades from the edition of 1964-65. In 2000, it supported the creation of the annual Prix Marcel Duchamp, awarded by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to young artists living in France. In 1998, the Association pour l'étude de Marcel Duchamp was founded to encourage the development of studies focused on the artist. Its scholarly journal Étant donné Marcel Duchamp is published in both French and English. Single volumes appear about every year and a half and often focus on one or two specific subjects as well as on the relationships between the artist and his closest friends and collaborators, Paul B. Franklin (b. 1967), president of the Association pour l'étude de Marcel Duchamp and editor in chief of Étant donné, is one of the foremost Duchamp scholars of our time.
AUTOMOBILES
In the Futurist manifesto of 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) hailed the beauty of speed and declared a ‘roaring motor car’ to be ‘more beautiful’ than the Louvre's famous Greek marble sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace.[38-A] Young artists in the early 20th century were certainly enthralled by automobiles and Duchamp had a lifelong fascination with them. His drawing 2 personnages et une auto (1912) blends eroticism with mechanical forms, and the abstract with the figurative. In the same year, one of his more famous notes mentions a roadtrip from the jura Mountains back to Paris together with his artist friend Francis Picabia (1879-1953), among others, who was an avid collector of automobiles, Duchamp rather poetically describes the ‘headlight child’ as a ‘comet in reverse’, which has ‘its tail in front’ and ‘absorbs by crushing (gold dust, graphically) this Jura-Paris road.’[39-A] His notes on the upper half of the Large Glass (1915-23), known as the Bride's Domain, often read like an anatomical dissection of car parts, including the engine, spark plug, gear lever and cooling system. It is here that an electric ‘desire motor’[40-A] with ‘quite feeble cylinders’[41-A] is ‘activated by the love gasoline, a secretion of the bride’s sexual glands and by the electric parts of the stripping’.[42-A] The ‘blossoming of the bride’ is likened to an ‘image of the motor car, climbing a slope in low gear. (The car wants more and more to reach the top, and while slowly accelerating, as if exhausted by hope, the motor of the car turns over faster and faster, until it roars triumphantly). ’[43-A] Such a preoccupation with auto-eroticism (onanism) is found throughout Duchamp’s work. A less well-known jotting, published posthumously, refers to the car in both a strangely blasphemous and a morbidly comic way: ‘The christ glued on an automobile carriage window with the paw serving for lifting the glass. ’[44-A]
In June 1927, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Levassor (1903-88), the daughter of a well-known Parisian car manufacturer whose family included several famous race drivers. Duchamp never learned to drive so their honeymoon travels were spent with Lydie behind the wheel of a Citroén. In the 1950s, when he was married to Alexina Sattler (Teeny; 1906-95), the vehicle of choice was her Volkswagen Beetle. In 1945, on the publication of his first monograph as a single issue of Charles Henri Ford's (1913-2002) avant-garde literary and art magazine, Duchamp subtly changed the title on the cover from VIEW to VieW, so that only 'VW’ appeared in capital letters. His last readymade was the red-and-white licence plate of Teeny's VW Beetle, which he signed and inscribed around 1962 for a friend, Grati Baroni de Piqueras (b. 1925). Its title, Faux Vagin, is a pun based on the French pronunciation of Volkswagen, which in turn sounds just like ‘false vagina’. In an etching five years later, Duchamp employed a related visual pun, likening a falcon (French: ‘faucon’) to a ‘false cunt’ (French: ‘faux con’) and it may be that both of these are allusions to the anatomically incorrect female sex at the centre of his Étant donnés (1946-66).
On a more practical level, Duchamp was a visionary of car-sharing initiatives. John Cage (1912-92) remembered that ‘early in the century he proposed the use of private cars for public transportation - people driving cars wherever they liked and just leaving them; other people would take the same cars and drive on.’[45-A]
NOTES: A
[1-A] Gough-Cooper and Caumont, in Pontus Hultén (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, within the entry for 9 November 1959, n.p. [2-A] Ibid., 8 April 1959, n.p. [3-A] Duchamp, ‘Pop’s Dada’, Time (5 February 1965), p. 65, quoted in Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp. The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York: Abrams, 1999, p. 257. [4-A] John P. O'Neill (ed.), Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, pp. 39, 208.
[5-A] Leah Dickerman, Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925. How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York (exh. cat.), 23 December 2012—15 April 2013, p. 34. [6-A] James Johnson Sweeney, ‘Eleven Europeans in America’, The Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 13, nos. 4-5 (New York, 1946), pp. 19-21, p. 19. [7-A] Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, New York: Grove Press, 1959, p. 73. [8-A] Richard Hamilton, ‘Foreword’, in Not Seen and/or Less Seen of/ by Marcel Duchamp/ Rrose Sélavy 1904-1964 (exh. cat. for the Mary Sisler Collection), New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1965, n.p. [9-A] Quoted in Henry McBride, ‘The Nude-Descending-a-Staircase Man Surveys Us’, The New York Tribune (12 September 1915), p. 2. [10-A] George Heard Hamilton and Richard Hamilton in conversation with Duchamp, ‘Marcel Duchamp Speaks’, BBC Third Programme (October 1959); published as a tape by William Furlong (ed.), Audio Arts Magazine, vol. 2, no. 4 (London, 1976). [11-A] Quoted in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (eds), Marcel Duchamp, Munich: Prestel, 1989, p. 263. [12-A] Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1989, p. 48. [13-A] Exhibition guide for Hammer’s anatomische Original Ausstellung, Munich, 1916, p. 11. [14-A] Michael Taylor, Étant donnés, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009, p. 194. [15-A] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1987, p. 29. [16-A] Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp. The Afternoon Interviews, New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2013, p. 83. [17-A] Ibid. [18-A] Katherine Kuh, ‘Marcel Duchamp’ (1961), in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists, New York: Da Capo, 2000, pp. 81-93, p. 88. [19-A] Leroy C. Breunig, Apollinaire on Art. Essays and Reviews, 1902-1918, Boston: MFA Publications, 2001, pp. 71, 184. [20-A] Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, New York: Wittenborn, 1970, p. 48. [21-A] Duchamp quoted in Rosa Regás, ‘Entrevista con Marcel Duchamp’, Siglo, vol. 20, no. 26 (Barcelona, 23 October 1965), p. 85. [22-A] Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia quoted in Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows. The First American Avant-Garde, New York: Abbeville Press, 1991, p. 260. [23-A] Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, New York: Abbeville, 1988, p. 43. [24-A] Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1989, p. 74. A more recent and accurate translation by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk suggets: ‘Can works be made which are not “of art”’, in Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk (eds), Marcel Duchamp, À l'infinitif: In the Infinitive. A Typotranslation, Cologne: Walther Konig, 1999, n.p. [25-A] ‘The Western Roundtable on Modern Art, San Francisco, 1949’, in Bonnie Clearwater (ed.), West Coast Duchamp, Miami Beach: Grasstield, 1991, pp. 106—14, p. 106. [26-A] George Heard Hamilton and Richard Hamilton in conversation with Duchamp, ‘Marcel Duchamp Speaks’, BBC Third Programme (October 1959); published as a tape by William Furlong (ed.), Audio Arts Magazine, vol. 2, no. 4 (London, 1976). [27-A] Quoted from Duchamp’s lecture ‘The Creative Act’ (1957). [28-A] William Seitz, ‘What Happened to Art? An Interview with Marcel Duchamp on Present Consequences of New York’s 1913 Armory Show’, Vogue, vol. 141, no. 4 (New York, 15 February 1963), pp. 112-113, 129-31, p. 131. [29-A] Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk (eds), Affect. Marcel. The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000, p. 321 (from a letter of 17 August 1952 to his sister Suzanne and her husband Jean Crotti). [30-A] William Seitz, ‘What Happened to Art? An Interview with Marcel Duchamp on Present Consequences of New York’s 1913 Armory Show’, Vogue, vol. 141, no. 4 (New York, 15 February 1963), pp. 112-113, 129-31, p. 131. [31-A] Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk (eds), Affect. Marcel. The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000, p. 321 (from a letter of 17 August 1952 to his sister Suzanne and her husband Jean Crotti). [32-A] Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp. The Afternoon Interviews, New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2013., p. 60. [33-A] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1987, p. 67. [34-A] Quoted in Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada. Redefining Art 1958-1962 (exh. cat.), New York: American Federation of Arts, 1994, p. 85. [35-A] Francis M. Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost. Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Readymade Press, 2012, p. 480. [36-A] Ibid., p. 211. [37-A] Jacqueline Matisse Monnier, e-mail to the author, 13 June 2013. [38-A] Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-1990, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 147. [39-A] Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1989, pp. 26, 27. [40-A] Ibid., p. 39. [41-A] Ibid., p. 42. [42-A] Ibid., p. 43. [43-A] Ibid. [44-A] Paul Matisse (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, Notes, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983, n.p. (Note no. 178). [45-A] Moira and William Roth, John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview’ (1973), in Carlos Basualdo and Erica F. Battle (eds), Dancing Around the Bride. Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 30 October 2012-21 January 2013, and Barbican Art Gallery, London, 14 February-9 June 2013 (exh. cat.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 126-38, p. 137.
— B —
BIBLIOTHÈQUE SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE
In 1913, after enrolling on a course in library science, Duchamp became a librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. He secured the job through his good friend Francis Picabia (1879-1953), whose uncle ran the library at the time. Put off by the dogmatic infighting of Cubism, Duchamp said he got a job not only to ‘make a living’ but also 'to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude’.[1-B] Apparently, he earned enough money and had fewer than four hours of low-stress work a day, which made it possible for him to spend his time there wandering around reading whatever he liked. It is probable that he delved into the vast collection of optical treatises and books on the science of perspective (optics), which were of great interest to Duchamp and informed his work.
BICYCLE WHEEL
Two years before Duchamp coined the term readymade, the very first one came into existence, in Paris in 1913, when he mounted a bicycle wheel onto an upside-down fork, which was fixed to a white kitchen stool. In 1912, during his trip to Munich, Duchamp had seen ordinary and industrial objects exhibited at the Deutsches Museum as well as at the Bavarian Trade Fair. The French government envoy to Munich declared the mass-produced articles on display ‘entitled to be considered works of art just as painting or a stone sculpture.’[2-B] Back in Paris later that year, during a visit to an aviation show, Duchamp purportedly asked Fernand Léger (1881-1951) and Constantin Brâncuşi (1876-1957), ‘Painting is over and done with. Who could do anything better than this propeller. Look, could you do that?’[3-B] As for the Bicycle Wheel, its spokes turn around a central axis similar to a propeller. Duchamp, who had once referred to it as ‘interior decoration’[4-B] and never thought of exhibiting it for the first four decades of its existence, enjoyed the movement of the wheel, as the reflected light reminded him of a fireplace. Later on, he would refer to the choice of readymades as devoid of aesthetics and taste, involving chance, humour and indifference instead.
Incidentally, just like its second version made in New York in 1916, the original Bicycle Wheel was lost too. The third version, from 1951, previously owned by the well-to-do art collector Sidney Janis (1896-1989), has a story attached to it. In August 1995, a young man walked into MoMA and took the Bicycle Wheel from the second floor gallery in which it was permanently exhibited. The thief managed to leave the building unnoticed, returning the artwork the next day by throwing it over the wall of the museum’s sculpture garden.[5-B]
THE BLIND MAN
The father of Beatrice Wood (1893-1998) was extremely worried that his daughter might go to jail because of The Blind Man, ‘this filthy publication’,[6-B] which she was coediting with her close friends Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959) and Marcel Duchamp. He was utterly convinced that Wood was ‘out of her mind’.[7-B] The only two numbers of this slim - and ultimately harmless - Dada magazine rolled off the press in April and May 1917. Instead of a third number, two months later a unique issue of their magazine Rongwrong appeared in New York. Including covers and advertisement spreads, the combined number of pages of these journals barely exceeded thirty. The Blind Man was published for four years before the single issue of Duchamp's and Man Ray's (1890-1976) New York Dada magazine appeared. Its second number is best remembered today, as it contains Louise Varèse's (née Norton; 1890-1989) and Beatrice Wood's defense of Duchamp's urinal Fountain (1917) and features the artist's Chocolate Grinder, No. 2 (1914) on its cover. The short essays, poems and artists’ vignettes (including one about the American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius, 1864-1941) celebrate the independence and anti-commercialism of new art and those behind it - and celebrate they did. ‘The Blindman’s Ball’, held on 25 May 1917 at Webster Hall in New York, was billed as an ‘ultra-bohemian, pre-historic, post-alcoholic’ wild dance party with costumes.[8-B] A drunken Duchamp climbed onto a chandelier in front of everyone, and in the early hours of the morning he ended up in his apartment’s bed with four men and women.[9-B]
BOREDOM
In 1966, Duchamp was sure that ‘the principle factor of art today is boredom’[10-B] - his own philosophy revolved around his fear of dying of boredom if he took life too seriously. He struck a slightly more conciliatory note a few years later when assessing the shenanigans of Fluxus and Neo-Dada: ‘The public comes to a happening not to be amused but to be bored’, which he conceded was ‘quite a contribution to new ideas’.[11-B] To Duchamp, the ‘shocking, annoying and boring’ was an ‘element of esthetic value’ just as much as ‘pleasure’ - at opposite ends, yet of ‘the same general concept’.[12-B]
BOXES
Duchamp’s interest in printing, binding, typography and graphic design can be traced back to his time as an apprentice at the Imprimerie de la Vicomte in Rouen in 1905. For what came to be known as the Box of 1914, executed in an edition of five, Duchamp published sixteen photographic facsimiles of his notes as well as one of his drawings mounted on matboards. The seemingly random, ephemeral notes do not have a specific order and the Box of 1914 constituted the first box in art history as well as an entirely new genre of artistic expression.
Twenty years later, after four years of work, his Green Box (1934) was published in an edition of 320, comprising almost 100 facsimile notes, drawings and photographs. To achieve complete authenticity, Duchamp used zinc stencils to cut the reproductions to the correct shapes from the original types of paper where they were still available. Titled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even the Green Box bears the same alternative name as the Large Glass (1915-23), the magnum opus that he left unfinished about a decade before. It is to this work that most of the notes included in the 1934 box refer. To Duchamp, the Green Box remained a ‘very incomplete realization of what I intended. It only presents preliminary notes for the Large Glass and not in the final form which I had conceived as somewhat like a Sears, Roebuck catalogue to accompany the glass and to be quite as important as the visual material.’[13-B] Just as the ‘accumulation of ideas’ that is the Large Glass was meant as ‘a wedding of mental and visual reactions’,[14-B] so is the Green Box an essential component of the work.
In 1967, in an edition of 150, Duchamp published À l’infinitif, or the White Box, containing facsimiles of seventy-nine additional notes mostly relating to the Large Glass. Upon the suggestion of its translator, Cleve Gray (1918-2004), the notes were grouped in seven black envelopes entitled ‘Speculations’, ‘Dictionaries and Atlases’, ‘Colour’, ‘Further References to the Glass’, ‘Appearance and Apparition’, ‘Perspective’, and ‘The Continuum’. The Plexiglas cover of the White Box contained an original silkscreen miniature print of the ‘glider’ from the Bachelors' Apparatus of the Large Glass. Its movements back and forth were, according to a note from the Green Box, made up of, among other things, ‘slow life’, ‘vicious circle’, ‘eccentrics’, ‘junk of life’ and ‘onanism’.[15-B]
BOX-IN-A-VALISE
With his Bôite-en-valise, or Box-in-a-Valise, Duchamp embarked on one of his more ambitious projects: a portable museum of miniature replicas and facsimiles created with the help of elaborate reproduction techniques such as pochoir (a type of hand stencilling) and comprising his most important works. Conceived in the mid-1930s and consisting of up to sixty-nine items, it was first released in 1941 and continued to be assembled in various editions until after his death, with the final seven different series totaling about 300 items. However, only the limited de luxe edition of the first twenty boxes was actually contained within a leather valise. An original artwork was included in each of these, usually mounted on the inside of the valise lid. The very first Box-in-a-Valise went to Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) who displayed its contents within a specially designed viewing device at her Art of This Century gallery in New York. ‘Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase’,[16-B] Duchamp said, and everything important about that little suitcase may be found in Ecke Bonk’s (b. 1953) Marcel Duchamp: The Portable Museum (1989). From Rrose Sélavy, listed by Duchamp as a co-creator of the box, to the order in which his miniatures, especially those of his readymades - the glass ampoule Air de Paris (1919), the typewriter cover Traveller’s Folding Item (1916-17), and Fountain (1917) - are placed in relation to the Large Glass (1915-23) at the centre of the back of the box, everything has been scrutinized by Duchamp scholars. Bonk called the Box-in-a-Valise ‘the synthesis of his paradoxical principles, of his apparently - but only apparently - contradictory rationale. The manifold overlaps and cross-references in his work as a whole are reflected in the spatial construction of the Bôite, as well as in the arrangement of the reproductions. His artistic statements and achievements, in all their heterogeneous and many-sided profusion, are presented here by Duchamp as a carefully ordered whole.’[17-B]
Just as Duchamp made sure that virtually all of his most important artworks would eventually be permanently exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, so his Box-in-a-Valise (1941) allowed all of the miniatures of his works to be seen in one place, at a time when many of the originals had been lost or dispersed widely, with an uncertain future ahead in the midst of the Second World War. In 2014, the French artist Mathieu Mercier, winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2003, published the Box-in-a-Valise as a pop-up book.
CONSTANTIN BRÂNCUŞI
Almost ten years’ Duchamp’s senior, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi (1876-1957) arrived in Paris just a short time before the artist himself in 1904 and they probably first met in the early 1910s. Duchamp and his later-to-be wife Alexina Sattler (Teeny; 1906-95) became good friends with the sculptor. The two artists’ aloofness from the art world, their sense of humour and the recognition of their work, which was greater in the US than in their native Europe, were just a few of the things that they had in common. Works by both were exhibited at the Armory Show and when, in the autumn of 1926, a New York customs official classified a sculpture by Brâncuşi under ‘kitchen utensils and hospital supplies’ rather than art, which made it subject to a major import tax instead of the no taxation policy on artworks, Duchamp rushed to the defence: ‘To say that the sculpture of Brâncuşi is not art is like saying that an egg is not an egg.’[18-B] At a second show of Brâncuşi’s works at Manhattan's Brummer Gallery in 1933-34, Duchamp was full of praise about the joy and power of his friend’s sculptures, speaking of his obsession with form and his in-depth examination of the materials used.[19-B] Much later, in 1951, the artists exhibited together at the Sidney Janis gallery, and Duchamp helped organize several shows of Brâncuşi’s sculptures, among them a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1955. Throughout his life, Duchamp bought and sold his friend’s works (dealer) and helped place them in important private and public collections. Within their correspondence, both frequently signed off as ‘Morice’, a name that ‘according to Brâncuşi could be used only among those who possessed a pure heart and soul, which, apparently, were qualities he felt they shared.’[20-B]
BREASTS
For the cover designs of the numbered de luxe edition catalogue of the Paris exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 (curating), Duchamp used over one thousand pink foam-rubber breasts. A collaboration with his friend and fellow artist Erico Donati (1909-2008), each catalogue’s cover consisted of a falsie pasted onto the pink cardboard flap, surrounded by a rough circle of black velvet. The back cover read ‘Prière de toucher’, or ‘Please touch’. Before deciding on falsies, Duchamp experimented with plaster cast breasts modelled on his lover Maria Martins (1894- 1973), a process that he developed further while working on Étant donnés (1946-66) over the next two decades. Casts of breasts were not new in the realm of art and terracotta breasts were used as offerings and good-luck charms throughout antiquity. Later they also served as intricate artefacts for anatomical studies.
Breasts appear frequently throughout Duchamp's ceuvre. For example, In the Manner of Delvaux (1942) is a small enigmatic collage based on Women Trees (1937), a painting by the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) in which breasts feature prominently. The little-known work (not listed in his catalogue raisonné) punningly titled For Sitting Only (1957) consists of a ring-shaped toilet seat cover decorated with seven falsies - all nipples tinted pink - and was presented by Rrose Sélavy and Alexina Sattler (Teeny; 1906-95) as a wedding gift to Duchamp’s friends Jean (1912-2003) and Julien Levy (1906-81).
ANDRÉ BRETON
When it comes to contemporary displays or studies of Surrealism, its mercurial founder, André Breton (1896-1966), is often denigrated. However, Surrealism would not exist or stand as tall without Breton, an uncompromising, inspiring force of utmost integrity whose obsessions and insatiable enthusiasm for anything from folk art to utopian thought make him one of the more interesting figures of 20th-century art. At a time when nationalism raged in Europe, he embraced its diverse cultures, chastised colonialism, denounced the mighty societal forces of religion and early on warned against Nazism as well as the Socialist Realist doctrine of communism. Through his movement’s forays into the subconscious, he returned the dream, the nonsensical and poetry to a militant world of economic bonfires and technological progress, often devoid of hope and rather distrustful of feelings.
Unfortunately, Duchamp reaffirmed some of the negativity surrounding Breton. Although he felt a ‘sympathy of individuals’ towards him - ‘man to man’, not of an intellectual but rather ‘of a sensual kind’ - he did ‘not approve of his way of thinking’ and reprimanded him for his ‘chameleonisms’[21-B] Duchamp never understood why Breton could not just laugh things off or contradict himself (contradictions). According to the artist, Surrealism's inhibited founder was a tragic figure, a vulnerable ‘post coitum animal triste’,[22-B] while ‘the Surrealists are a sad lot, they who stand up in defense of humour, with “theory”’[23-B] Duchamp gave him credit for the ‘incredible nerve’ it took to lead Surrealism for forty years, but he regarded the task ‘a strange ambition’ that required ‘extraordinary egoism’[24-B] In private correspondence with his lover Maria Martins (1894-1973), he wrote that ‘André can be really very vulgar at times and his Hitlerite attitude is often synonymous with imbecility.’[25-B] Yet, despite this, of all the artists Breton championed throughout his lifetime, there was not one he revered more than the ever-elusive Duchamp, whom he thought beautiful, a poet and the most intelligent man of the 20th century. Without ever having seen the Large Glass (1915- 23), he wrote his essay ‘The Lighthouse of the Bride’ (1935) using photographs of the work and the artist’s notes, It was the first study on what Breton named one of ‘the most significant works of the twentieth century’.[26-B] He was in awe of this ‘trophy of a fabulous hunt through virgin territory, at the frontiers of eroticism, of philosophical speculation, of the spirit of sporting competition, of the most recent data of science, of lyricism and of humor.’[27-B]
Duchamp and Breton first met in Paris sometime between late 1919 and 1921 and they jointly conceived several major Surrealist exhibitions in Paris and New York. From cover designs and window displays for many of Breton’s publications to the design of the door of his Gradiva gallery, Duchamp supported him in numerous projects. Yet theirs was not ‘a miraculously uncompromised friendship’,[28-B] as Duchamp's biographer Calvin Tomkins (b. 1925) has it. As early as 1929, within the pages of the second Surrealist manifesto, Breton subtly chided a detached Duchamp for his silence as well as for playing chess instead of creating art. Later in life, Breton took it personally when Duchamp sided with Roberto Matta (1911-2002), whom others blamed for the suicide of the painter Archile Gorky (1904-48) as he had run off with the latter’s wife. Moreover, in the early 1950s, Breton's requests for Duchamp to write an article about ‘Science and Surrealism’ or to contribute to the controversial debate about Michel Carrouges’s (1910-88) Les machines célibataires (1954), in which the Large Glass features prominently, were never honoured by his artist friend. In 1960, Breton strongly disagreed with him for including Salvador Dali (1904-89) in a Surrealist exhibition; Breton denounced Dali as ‘Hitler’s former apologist, the fascist painter, the religious bigot, and the avowed racist’.[29-B] Breton also grew increasingly bitter about his refusal to sign a petition against three young painters, among them Eduardo Arroyo (b. 1937), who had jointly created a series of works depicting Duchamp’s murder in 1965. A year later, the year in which Breton would pass away, he and Duchamp were still engaged in blame games about who should call whom and who was entitled to be angry about a missed appointment with the other.
Theirs was a lifelong courtship of sorts, petty fights included, between incompatible personas that could often make the greatest things happen together. In an interview after Breton's funeral, which Duchamp attended, he reserved some of the nicest things he ever said about anyone for the founder of Surrealism: ‘I have never known a man who had a greater capacity for love, a greater power for loving the greatness of life, and you don’t understand anything about his hatreds if you don't realize that he acted in this way to protect the very quality of his love for life, for the marvelous in life. Breton loved like a heart beats. He was the lover of love in a world that believes in prostitution.’[30-B]
BRIDE
Returning drunk from a Munich beer hall in the summer of 1912, Duchamp was haunted by a nightmare in which a giant beetle-like insect inflicted harrowing torments upon him with its jaws. At around the time Franz Kafka (1883-1924) composed his novella The Metamorphosis (1915), Duchamp - in part inspired by the dream - set out to paint his warm-hued, strange Bride (1915), a painting he later came to prefer over all his others. Sometimes using his bare fingers instead of a brush, he later said that he arrived at a ‘very precise technique’ that no longer lent itself to a ‘realistic interpretation’ but to ‘my concept of the bride expressed by the juxtaposition of mechanical elements and visceral forms’.[31-B]
The Bride later reappears on the left side of the upper half of the Large Glass (1915-23), where all her rotating, expanding, contracting and electrically conductive elements already apparent on canvas are put to full use as part of the intricate mechanisms of the coital function within Duchamp's magnum opus. Duchamp gave the Bride to his friend Francis Picabia (1879-1953) with whose wife, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (1881-1985), he was both passionately and unrequitedly in love at the time. The Bride marks the culmination of Duchamp’s creative powers in painting, his idiosyncratic technique and his perfection of a personal style free from all schools and ‘isms’.
BUENOS AIRES
Duchamp lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, from September 1918 to June 1919, although he had originally planned to stay for a couple of years. Not knowing anybody in Buenos Aires, he left New York by ship together with his lover, Yvonne Chastel (1884-c. 1967). Duchamp's easygoing attitude towards journeys is legendary. In this case, his nomadic travels were a means of escaping the First World War and its militant patriotism, which had already brought him from France to New York in 1915. In 1918, his status as a non-citizen in the US did not entirely protect him from the draft. With Argentina, he had chosen a neutral country in which he could remain until after the armistice and then return safely to France. While there, he taught French, worked on studies of the Large Glass (1915-23) and played chess in a local club. He analyzed the game thoroughly, even reading up on it at night.
He did not mind that outsiders were not welcome in social circles in Buenos Aires. Indeed, the isolation proved rather productive. Notably, he created a small work on glass, To be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918) (perspective), now the pride of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He also designed a chess set with local craftsmen, further explored stereoscopy (optics) and instructed his sister Suzanne (1889-1963) in Paris to create an Unhappy Ready-made (1919) by hanging a geometry book from a balcony (readymade), thus exposing it to the wear and tear of the elements. So much of Duchamp's work is ephemeral, not made or meant for exhibiting or sale. Just as this wedding present for Suzanne eventually vanished, so did his Sculpture for Travelling (1918), which he had initially brought to Buenos Aires from New York. Made of strips cut from colored rubber bathing caps, cemented together at random intersections and hung by strings of different lengths from various walls of a room, the work was lost or simply disintegrated.
GABRIELLE BUFFET-PICABIA
Gabrielle Buffet Picabia (1881-1985) was married to Francis Picabia from 1909 to 1930 and, like her husband, she was a great friend of Duchamp’s. Before this friendship truly prospered, however, the artist had been madly in love with her, unrequitedly as it turns out. There are many Duchamp scholars who see the Large Glass (1915-23) as, above all, an allegory of unfulfilled desire and unconsummated longing for the bride in the upper region of the work, i.e. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (Bride, trains). From a visit to see Raymond Roussel’s (1877-1933) play, Impressions d’Afrique, to an automobile trip from the Jura Mountains back to Paris again, Buffet- Picabia was with Duchamp during what he later described as some of the most significant experiences of his life. It is thanks to Buffet-Picabia’s many insights in her writings that we catch glimpses of the artist’s work, life and character that would otherwise have been lost. For example, while Duchamp openly embraced chance and denounced logic, Buffet-Picabia nevertheless saw him ‘possessed by a need for absolute logic, ceaselessly anxious for a perfection of which he is the only source and arbiter.’[32-B] As for chance, ‘not one single item is left to chance; he seeks out, tracks down and ruthlessly eliminates everything which seems a remnant of show, emotion, sensation, personal sensitivity’.[33-B] Although the artist approved of laziness, his apparently ‘strict discipline necessary to [his] self-control’ bordered on the ascetic. His overall ‘state of dissidence’ was ‘perhaps the key to Duchamp's work’.[34-B]
When Buffet-Picabia and her husband visited New York in 1916, she found that the young man who had been in love with her had grown up, become less timid and was much more confident around women. As for Duchamp's art, ‘he was interested only in finding new formulas with which to assault the tradition of the picture and the painting; despite the pitiless pessimism of his mind, he was personally delightful with his gay ironies.’[35-B]
NOTES: B
[1-B] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1987, p. 17. [2-B] Pascal Forthuny, ‘Ein franzözisches Urteil über die Bayrische Gewerbeschau’, Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (11 July 1912), p. 6. [3-B] Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1989, p. 160. [4-B] Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp. The Afternoon Interviews, New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2013, p. 58. [5-B] See, for example, Melik Kaylan, “The Case of the Stolen Duchamp’, in Forbes Online, 20 June 2001, www.forbes.com/2001/06/20/0620hot.html> (29 June 2013). [6-B] Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996, p. 31. [7-B] Ibid. [8-B] Ibid., p. 33. [9-B] See the drawing by Beatrice Wood titled Lit de Marcel (Après Webster Hall) (1917), in which the names of three women and two men, including Beatrice and Marcel, are listed. [10-B] Quoted in Gough-Cooper and Caumont, in Pontus Hultén (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, within the entry for 8 September 1966, n.p. [11-B] From a ‘BBC Interview with Marcel Duchamp, conducted by Joan Bakewell’ (London, 5 June 1968), quoted in Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp. The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York: Abrams, 1999, pp. 300-6, p. 306. [12-B] Quoted from an ‘Interview by Colette Roberts’, Art in America, vol. 57, no. 4 (July-August 1969), p. 39. [13-B] Katherine Kuh, ‘Marcel Duchamp’ (1961), in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists, New York: Da Capo, 2000, pp. 81-93, p. 83. [14-B] Duchamp quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Delano Greenidge, 2000, p. 724. [15-B] Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1989, pp. 56, 57. [16-B] Quoted in Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Portable Museum, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1989, p. 257. [17-B] Ibid., p. 9. [18-B] Quoted in ‘Brancusi Bronzes Defended by Cubist’, New York Times (27 February 1927), p. 14. [19-B] Laurie Eglington, ‘Marcel Duchamp, Back in America, Gives Interview’, Art News, vol. 32, no. 7 (New York, 18 November 1933), pp. 3, 11. [20-B] Francis M. Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost. Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Readymade Press, 2012, p. 273. [21-B] Quoted in Gough-Cooper and Caumont, in Pontus Hultén (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, within the entry for 6 January 1961, n.p. [22-B] Serge Stautter, Marcel Duchamp. Die Schriften, Zürich: Regenbogen, 1981, p. 287. [23-B] From a letter by Duchamp to Maria Martins of 6 October 1949, quoted in Michael Taylor, Étant donnés, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009, p. 415. [24-B] Quoted in Gough-Cooper and Caumont, in Pontus Hultén (ed.), Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, within the entry for 6 January 1961, n.p. [25-B] From a letter by Marcel Duchamp to Maria Martins of 24 May 1949, quoted in Michael Taylor, Étant donnés, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009, p. 411. [26-B] Breton, ‘Lighthouse of the Bride’ (1935), in Charles Henri Ford (ed.), View, vol. 5, no. 1 (New York, March 1945), pp. 6-9, 13, p. 13. [27-B] Ibid., pp. 7-8. [28-B] Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp. A Biography, New York: Holt, 1996, p. 443. [29-B] André Breton et al., ‘We Don’t Ear it That Way’, Surrealist tract of December 1960 in opposition to Dalí’s inclusion in the exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter’s Domain, D’Arcy Galleries, New York, 28 November 1960-14 January 1961. [30-B] Quoted in Robert Lebel, ‘Marcel Duchamp and André Breton’, from a 1966 interview with André Parinaud, in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (eds), Marcel Duchamp, Munich: Prestel, 1989, pp. 135-41, p. 140. [31-B] Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (eds), Marcel Duchamp, Munich: Prestel, 1989, p. 263. [32-B] Buffet-Picabia, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Fluttering Hearts’ (1936), in Anthony Hill (ed.), Duchamp: Passim, Langhorne, PA: G+B Arts International, 1994, pp. 15-18, p. 16. [33-B] Ibid. [34-B] Ibid., p. 15. [35-B] Buffet-Picabia, ‘Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp’ (1949), in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets. An Anthology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988 (1951), pp. 253-67, p. 260.
