Marcel Duchamp's Secret Masterpiece
by Rachel Wolff
For two decades, Marcel Duchamp fooled the world into thinking he had retired, while quietly creating his last great work. Rachel Wolff on the multiple love affairs that inspired it.

... Working in secret for 20 years, Duchamp constructed much of Étant donnés in his diminutive studio on West 14th Street in New York, confiding only in three women (two lovers, one wife, to be exact) and, in the work’s later stages, artist/collector William Nelson Copley. By the 1940s, Duchamp had gone “underground” with his art, claiming to have given it up entirely for chess. “Nobody had any interest in what he was doing because nobody, including myself, knew he was doing anything,” Copley once said. “This gave him all the freedom in the world.”

Duchamp decided in the 1950s to will his pièce de résistance to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to join the largest collection of the artist’s work. Étant donnés was permanently installed at the museum in 1969, one year after Duchamp’s death. It has since beguiled artists, critics, and art historians alike with its uncharacteristic look and perceivably lewd message. Jasper Johns called it “the strangest work of art any museum has ever had in it”; visitors feigned shock, bemoaning the piece to the director and even, at times, to guards and staffers in the galleries; and in his New York Times review, John Canaday wrote: “For the first time, this cleverest of 20th-century masters looks a bit retardataire.” It became sort of an art world in-joke and there’s little existing scholarship on the piece. It seemed, for the longest time, that no one quite got it.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art hopes to change that with Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, a[n]...exhibition...The show gathers a fascinating array of photographs, documents, objects, and artworks related to Étant donnés and its conception....

In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.
A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called "Pharmacy" after adding two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon.
In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote "In advance of the broken arm."
It was around that time that the word "Readymade" came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation.
A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these "Readymades" was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.
The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anaesthesia.
One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the "Readymade."
That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal. ...

I've tripped out on and adored these since childhood.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
- Marcel Duchamp

Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.
—Marcel Duchamp
New York, March 1952

Back of Marcel Duchamp's head - tonsured by Georges de Zayas
1920

Jul 22, 2008
canned chance; an escape from taste

David Need is in New York and visited MOMA yesterday. He sent a note to a listserv we're on that he came upon Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages. There are two artifacts by that title in MOMA -- a boxed set of three wooden templates and glass panels, and then a painting that uses the template shapes.

Duchamp took three meter-long strings and dropped them from a meter's height above treated canvas. Then he fixed them just how they landed, producing three wavering curves that he called stoppages and mounted on glass panels. Then he cut a wooden template along each of these three stoppages.

The whole lot fits in a repurposed croquet box, which gives it a sanctioned feel. Keep in mind that at this time (around the onset of WWI) the definition of the meter was the distance between two lines on a standard bar of 90% platinum and 10% iridium at 0° Celsius. Of course that distance was based on an erroneous geographical measurement...

Fingers
1930

... Long live Dadaism in word and image! Long live the Dada events of this world! To be against this manifesto is to be a Dadaist!

Berlin, April 1918
Tristan Tzara, Franz Jung, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Richard Hülsenbeck, Gerhard Preisz, Raoul Hausmann


unpretentious proclamation
by tristan tzara
8th april 1919