The Many Forms of Marcel Duchamp
Love isn’t a word, or a concept, that one usually associates with Marcel Duchamp, the modernist master of irony and distance, but love—love of the mind and what it can do, love of bodies and play, love of freedom, love of what art can be, love of women, queerdom, poetry, and chance—is what makes “Marcel Duchamp” (at the Museum of Modern Art, through August 22nd) such a wonder. Curated with a respect that’s never slavish by Matthew Affron, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin, it’s the first retrospective of Duchamp’s work in North America since a 1973 exhibition, also shown at MoMA, mounted by the legendary curators Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine. As was the case back then, the curatorial team is a collaboration between institutions: Affron works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (as did d’Harnoncourt), whose signature Duchamp collection the artist himself helped to install, while Kuo and Temkin are at MoMA (where McShine was a curator). The current show works because its curators, whose interests are wide-ranging, support Duchamp’s own wide-ranging interests, honoring the pieces not as relics but as possibilities.
The exhibition, which takes up the museum’s entire sixth floor, is too vast to absorb in one go. Duchampian idea after Duchampian idea stimulates thought after thought of your own, and it’s important to rest after each visit, the better to synthesize those thoughts. The warmth you’ll feel on your second or third viewing of “Marcel Duchamp” will come from the realization that Duchamp jettisoned the artist’s ego—the “I” that demands attention and equates success with money—and replaced it with something more perverse, at least by art-world standards: the embrace not of one easily commodifiable style but of many. There are numerous versions of Duchamp here, but what they all share is a disregard for capital and for the way it shapes or encroaches on artistic practice, corrupting the freedom of the mind.
Duchamp, who died in 1968, did not spring from the head of Apollo fully formed. Born in Normandy in 1887, Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was the fourth of seven children of Justin-Isidore Duchamp, a notary, and his wife, Marie-Caroline-Lucie Nicolle, who had been an amateur artist in her youth. The family lived near Rouen, in a splendid stone-and-brick house, where chess was a favorite pastime. (For part of his adult life, Duchamp tried to pass himself off as a chess bum who had “retired” from art-making, though he never did.) Like his older brothers, Gaston and Raymond, Marcel appreciated his father and disliked his mother. As revealed in Calvin Tomkins’s searching and beautifully written 1996 biography, “Duchamp,” Lucie was a remote figure to her boys, emotionally cut off and with poor hearing that further isolated her.
The mother you can’t reach is the mother you long for, and unconsciously emulate: Duchamp’s fabled distance spoke to Maman’s own. Still, for most of his life, Duchamp’s closest cohorts were female, beginning with his sister Suzanne, who was two years his junior and shared his joyful sense of exuberance and wonder. One of Duchamp’s earliest sketches, from 1902, “Suzanne Duchamp Skating,” is a charming rendering of a figure moving freely in space. Like Suzanne and Marcel, Gaston and Raymond were artistically inclined, but their papa wasn’t happy: Couldn’t they find more respectable ways to be in the world? They tried—Gaston studied law and Raymond medicine—but it was no use. By 1904, when Marcel joined them in Paris, where he aimed to become an artist, Gaston and Raymond had dropped out of school and changed their names—to Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, partly in homage to the medieval poet François Villon—as a way of protecting themselves from their father’s disapproval, or, more accurately, claiming the freedom that all artists need in order to develop. (Jacques made Cubist-influenced work, while Raymond built largely figurative sculptures representing human and animal forms.)
In 1905, Duchamp learned that, if he got certified as an essential “art worker,” his obligatory military service would be reduced from two years to one, and he returned to Rouen to apprentice with a copperplate printer there. (The knowledge he acquired at the printing house no doubt contributed to his interest in making books, cards, and other ephemera.) Then, after a year in an infantry regiment, he returned to Paris, settling in the artistic enclave of Montmartre, in 1906. By that time, his brothers had moved to the suburbs, where he frequently visited them. Duchamp never completely distanced himself from the idea or the reality of family, and his father, despite his initial skepticism about his sons’ vocation, provided a modest allowance. For most of his working life, Duchamp—who did not view art as a product and thus a means for gaining capital—was also helped by wealthy friends, former lovers, and collectors. (His second wife, Alexina, or Teeny, whom he wed in 1954, had been married to the gallerist Pierre Matisse and was a sometime dealer for Joan Miró and other artists, as well as Duchamp’s most steadfast benefactor and confidante. Teeny knew the value of a dollar.)
For a time, Duchamp worked as an illustrator, and the MoMA show has a fair number of his satirical early drawings, ink-on-paper observations about everyday life: a couple at a skating rink, a horse-drawn cab, a woman annoyed by being stood up. The image that jumped out at me, presaging, as it did, the artist’s fascination and engagement with the nonbinary, was a drawing from 1909. Titled “Ni Homme, Ni Femme, Pas Même Auvergnat” (“Neither Man Nor Woman, Not Even from Auvergne”), the drawing is a three-quarter view of someone wearing a frock coat and trousers, against a light background—a delicate depiction of a queer person living in their own undefined space. I think that Duchamp, who, in the early twenties, created an alter ego named Rrose Sélavy—a play on “Eros, c’est la vie”—had a nonbinary soul. (Man Ray photographed Duchamp as Rrose, in a stylish hat and fur stole.) “In 1920, I decided that it didn’t suffice [for] me to be a lone individual with a masculine name,” Duchamp said in 1960. “I wanted . . . to make another personality from myself.” Putting a mustache and goatee on the “Mona Lisa” for his great 1919 work “L.H.O.O.Q.”—a homophone for “elle a chaud au cul,” which Duchamp translated euphemistically as “there is fire down below”—performed the opposite feat, masculinizing the most famous female portrait in the world.
Duchamp’s other drawings are more Toulouse-Lautrec than anything else, though he lacked Toulouse-Lautrec’s eye—a reportorial vision that delighted in the show-biz choreography of Parisian life. Similarly, his paintings from 1910 and 1911 interested me only in that they were a bridge to something else. They’re clotted with barely digested Fauvist influences, not to mention late Cézanne and early Cubism. (Duchamp later referred to one of his portraits from this period as full of “technical wishy-washiness.”) His dark and somewhat confused 1910 portrait of his father gives you a glimpse less of Duchamp’s mind than of his brief foray into dutifulness: painting family portraits is how you become an artist.
But there is one piece from this time that nods toward the future. “The Bush” (1910-11) is a large oil-on-canvas work that depicts two nude women: one of whom, a brunette, stands, with her hand resting on the head of the other, a blonde, who is on her knees. (Duchamp is said to have used Jeanne Serre, who was then his mistress, as a model for the kneeling figure.) The women’s fleshiness, the roundness of their faces and bellies, is echoed in the fullness of the vegetation behind them. A note in the catalogue says that, with this painting, the artist began giving what he said was “an important role” to his titles, “which I added and treated like an invisible color.” “Bush” is a colloquial term for a woman’s pubic hair, and we can see the brunette’s pubic hair delineated in the painting. (The associations pile up when you consider that “the bush” is also, in English, a term for backwoods or hinterlands.) Is the blonde kneeling to pray? To show respect for her companion? Is Duchamp, that wonderful scrambler of ideas about gender, the brunette? And is the hand on the head a gesture of comfort or of benediction? One loses and finds things in bushes—perhaps even la jouissance.
But was this kind of representation of the body, or of the artist’s feelings about the human form, even worth Duchamp’s time when, all around him, the world had changed, and was changing, and the whole question of what made a person, a body, was up for grabs? The First World War, just a few years off, would unite death and patriotism. Would there be any way to avoid sentimentalizing the body? Duchamp, a lover of poetry—he considered Stéphane Mallarmé, Raymond Roussel, and Jules Laforgue, all of them disturbers of the form, his influences—needed to make his own poems, and one way he could do that was by fucking with reality.
In 1964, Calvin Tomkins spent time with Duchamp, at his home on West Tenth Street in New York, chatting about his shift from the figurative to what I call the retinal theoretical—by which I mean a process of both visual and verbal intellection—and about the fun of being a trickster. (These conversations appear in Tomkins’s lively 2013 book, “Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews.” At one point, Duchamp tells Tomkins, “I don’t believe in talking. Here we have been talking for hours! But don’t believe what I say.”) In 1911, Duchamp said, his brother Raymond had asked a few artists working in the Cubist style to make small oil paintings for his kitchen. Duchamp decided to paint an everyday object—a coffee mill. Measuring thirteen by five inches, “Coffee Mill” is not a particularly arresting work. But it revolutionized Duchamp’s practice by teaching him that movement could be represented by an arrow—a kind of “writing” that showed the mill turning or about to turn. “Coffee Mill” was the first line of Duchamp’s epic poem about seeing differently, being different. Tomkins asked Duchamp if he had thought about “the machine being characteristic of the time.”
“Coffee Mill” released something in Duchamp, and the canvases he produced after it—the astonishing “Nude (Sketch) Sad Young Man in a Train” (1911-12) and “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)” (1912)—are an explosion of feeling about the work that he didn’t want to do anymore, evidence both of an artist trying to free himself from his “talent,” and of what loneliness looked like in the modern, cinema-influenced world. Duchamp described “Sad Young Man” in Pierre Cabanne’s 1967 book, “Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp”: “First there’s the idea of the movement of the train, and then that of the sad young man who is in a corridor and who is moving about. . . . Then, there is the distortion of the young man—I had called this elementary parallelism. It was a formal decomposition; that is, linear elements following each other like parallels and distorting the object. The object is completely stretched out, as if elastic.”
Critics have argued that Duchamp was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, with its interest in speed and the mechanical. Duchamp resisted the association. By contrast, he openly acknowledged how much his friendship with the great Francis Picabia (1879-1953), who became a kind of surrogate older brother to him, meant. Picabia, who worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, and film, was also a poet, and his exuberance made a lasting impression on Duchamp. (He also fell in love with Picabia’s wife, such a clear act of displacement that one wonders if it was Picabia himself who made Duchamp feel a fire down below.) Despite his free-flowing creativity, Picabia was, Duchamp told Cabanne, “a negator. With him it was always, ‘Yes, but . . .’ and ‘No, but . . .’ Whatever you said, he contradicted. It was his game.” You could call that critical distance, but it was also a way, Duchamp realized, for Picabia to defend himself and his right to change.
The act of removing oneself from the discourse around one’s work was a tactic that Duchamp employed more and more after “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)” was presented at the Armory Show in New York, in 1913. As the curators of “Marcel Duchamp” write, this work struck the “American public as an outrageous provocation.” A Times review likened it to “an explosion in a shingle mill.” A sister work to “Sad Young Man,” it is also executed in browns, ochres, and yellows that portray both movement and movement in stasis. To viewers at the time, the figure did not look nude; it did not look human. Duchamp’s genius was pushing up against the limits of the frame. That same year, he essentially renounced painting. What painting could contain his belief in movement as a metaphor not only for progress but for continuing to develop, never accepting the limitations of a proper, socialized self and sacrificing what really counts: the expression of the conscious and subconscious mind? The world was spinning, spinning, and Duchamp couldn’t help but make art that represented that evolution, that revolution.
Giving up painting didn’t mean that Duchamp wasn’t working; he was never not working. But he began to look for a different way to produce art, for other media in which to explore movement. His pieces about motion, or spinning in stillness_—_such as the readymade “Bicycle Wheel” (the show includes several versions and replicas of the lost 1913 original) and the beautiful, psychedelic “Rotoreliefs (Optical Disks),” from 1935, which reminds me of the way movies once represented hypnosis or a psychological break—are also about the death of objects. What happens to the “aura” of objects when they are no longer in use? We once buried the dead with their possessions; in this way, we could make those things live in our minds forever, as our loved ones do. But, in Duchamp’s mechanical age, death and remembrance took on a different cast. What are we to do with that old-fashioned hat rack? That comb? Who in the world will touch us now? Define us? What constitutes a memory? That ball of twine? That lovely ampoule of Parisian air?
By 1915, Duchamp had begun making “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” (1915-23), which, for all its formal beauty—it consists of figures made from oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust set on two panes of glass—remains transparent in its retinal and psychological complexity.
To supplement his income, Duchamp gave French lessons to the wealthy Stettheimer sisters, hosts of a New York salon frequented by such modernists as Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. (In 1923, Florine Stettheimer made a painting of Duchamp’s dual selves, “Portrait of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy,” which perfectly captures his slight build and his playfulness.) After sitting out the war in New York and spending a year in Buenos Aires, Duchamp returned to France. (He would make round-trip journeys across the Atlantic many times, eventually splitting his life between France and the U.S., and becoming an American citizen in 1955.) In Paris in 1927, he met and married—very quickly—Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, a much younger woman, who recalled in a memoir:
The marriage lasted less than a year, but in Sarazin-Levassor’s reminiscence we see that what Duchamp once said about himself was true: if he had to choose between a country house, a wife, children—the trappings of convention—and art, he would choose art. Art could keep up with him.
The MoMA show doesn’t include two of Duchamp’s Joycean masterpieces: “The Bride Stripped Bare” and the magnificent “Étant Donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage . . .” (1946-66). (They’re permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the retrospective will open in October.) But the exhibition’s “incompleteness” makes it all the more Duchampian; it will remain in memory as a series of movements that propel our thoughts forward, commanding us to open our hearts, our bodies, our eyes, our sense of humor and of wonder. See something! Make it new! It’s up to you!
While walking around the show one recent afternoon, I thought of the artists on whom Duchamp has had an indelible effect. And I pondered how—aside from David Hammons, in such early performances as “Bliz-aard Ball Sale” (1983), in which he sold snowballs for a dollar on a street corner (thus playing with the idea of snowballs in hell, and with the unlikelihood of a Black artist’s gaining a foothold in an art world that was still overwhelmingly white)—few of those who’ve claimed Duchamp as a major influence have been able to question, in the way Duchamp did throughout his career, the centrality of the artist. As large as this show is, there’s something purifying about it. It embodies what Louise Glück describes in her great poem “Bats”: “There are two kinds of vision: / the seeing of things, which belongs / to the science of optics, versus / the seeing beyond things, which / results from deprivation.” You can’t see clearly if you’re worried about what you might be missing. If you free yourself from the desire for acquisition and glory, your subconscious will bloom, and so will you. Freedom of thought requires you to divorce your eye from the familiar.
Speaking to Tomkins in 1964, Duchamp noted, “The poor Mona Lisa is gone because no matter how wonderful her smile may be, it’s been looked at so much that the smile has disappeared.” He continued, “I believe that when a million people look at a painting, they change the thing by looking alone. Physically. . . . There is an action, transcendental, of course, that absolutely destroys whatever you could see when it was alive.” But Duchamp’s work behaves differently. His “readymades” are about defunct or useless things—things we discarded and replaced with others that we thought might help us move faster or look prettier—which are brought back to life by the viewer’s vision.
We are an accumulation of desires, and how will others remember us if not through what we desired? I was very taken by “Study for ‘Please Touch’ ” (1947), a plaster cast of a breast, which says as much about the closeness and the remoteness of the desired object, and about how we see one another not as whole but in pieces, as Duchamp’s “erotic objects” do: “Female Fig Leaf” (1950), for instance, or “Wedge of Chastity” (1954), or the funny, phallic “Objet-Dard (Dart-Object)” (1951). What are we, who are we? Body parts crying out to be completed by the gaze of another person? Our subconscious keeps moving, carrying with it eros and dreams, art and politics.
To Cabanne, Duchamp professed not to be political, but that was just another performance. Think about his feminism, his shape-shifting, his radicalization of art itself. He was fervent in his belief in possibility—in our possibility as thinking adults, if only we could give ourselves permission to stretch the rules. If we did, he told Tomkins, “there would be more imagination, more leeway, more lack of seriousness, more play, more breathing rather than working. Why should man work to live, after all? . . . I can conceive of a society where the lazies have a place in the sun.” Duchamp was poking at the American bear, which measures life not in coffee spoons but by achievement. But to what end? He was always searching for the bride who would believe him, and we are that inscrutable bride, whether he knew it or not. ♦