… I think, yeah.
Anyway, bravo.
Thank you.
I had a question about the Rrose Sélavy,
the mannequin in ‘38 exhibition.
She has the jacket and tie on.
And I was wondering when [Frederick] Kiesler’s
portrait of Duchamp only in pants was done
as maybe a response or coda.
Ann or Jim?
This sort of discourse between Rrose Sélavy
and the Kiesler portrait?
Yeah.
You know, I think it’s a really great question.
We should explore that because it seems that
there must be a discourse going on there.
Actually let me speak into the microphone….
Lewis and Jen and Linda and others who want
to chime in I'd be really interested to hear
your thoughts on that question as well.
It struck me that there must be… that these
images have to be in conversation with one
another but although I looked at the photograph
of the mannequin previously it actually wasn't
until I heard Lewis's talk that it just hit
me that obviously these are in dialogue with
one another.
And I think that sense of them being in discourse
is enhanced by the fact that Kiesler’s piece
obviously also references the “Large Glass”
which I think becomes very evident when one
sees it, that drawing restored to that fabulous
frame that he designed for it.
And of course Duchamp is nude except for the
tie which seems to reference the Bride.
And then we've got the horizon line and he
is clothed below.
And maybe in a sense that also then evokes
with his Bride and Bachelor discourse going
on both in the Kiesler and between the Kiesler
and the Rrose Selavy.
It makes me think a little bit about on the
wonderful argument that Jim has made it his
catalogue essay about be degree to which the
Duchamp’s [“Tonsure”?] images are also
in discourse with Rrose Sélavy and perhaps
toggling back and forth.
So once again it seems to me it's just another
fabulous demonstration of the fact that these
portraits of Duchamp which I think for so
long have been put into the context of illustrations
of Duchamp to accompany discussion of other
aspects of his work are in fact really deeply
rooted in a larger set of conceptual concerns.
And also I think it gets at the fact that
Duchamp is very much a collaborator in these
portraits.
And that just became so evident to us as we
began to…
Jim and I began to look really closely at
these images.
In fact, Lewis, I like the fact that you pointed
out that Arnold Newman was only 24 when he
took that image of Duchamp because, well,
Jim and I spoke with Arnold Newman, he definitely
felt very strongly that he had come up with
that composition.
You can't help but think that somehow Duchamp
is pulling the strings, so to speak.
Well, just where they agreed to meet.
I mean, he didn’t invite him over to the
studio which looks to me what Newman probably
would have asked.
Of course there was the secret, or was there
yet the secret “Étant donnés”?
But that is in a different kind of space.
And course now in the light of installation
art, maybe we recognize that, you know, as
more significant then maybe Newman did, you
know, in the ‘40s and cropping it.
Yeah.
Ann was alluding to a discussion that we had
with Arnold Newman.
At the time we were looking at some his works
and selecting.
And one that was a particular interest to
me is one that we do have in the galleries
and it shows Duchamp with the malic molds
and then the cast shadow of his profile on
the wall.
And that was taken, of course, at Duchamp’s
apartment as the nine malic molds which have
recently been retrieved by Teeny [Alexina
Duchamp], purchased by Teeny, sat on a mantle,
on a shelf there.
Arnold believed that he was in charge of the
photograph and we had very shall we say interesting
discussion about that issue because it's clear
when one looks at that shadow in comparison
with the profile image are so iconic in the
Duchamp repertoire that Duchamp conceived
of an image and really set himself up to construct
that shadow and to construct correspondence
between himself and the malic molds.
So there’s echoes of echoes of echoes in
that.
Hi.
I just want to make a little comment here
as you’re talking about group portraits
here in which Duchamp appeared and I’d like
to add one to your inventory for consideration.
And that of course is the five-way portrait
upstairs, the one done with the pair of hinged
mirrors.
Because there is….
Duchamp makes his own group.
Okay.
Himself and his four reflections.
Okay.
Lewis, I wonder if I could just ask one other
question which is along these lines of these
philosophical concerns that are embedded in
portraits of Duchamp.
Do you have any thoughts on precisely why
Duchamp might have wanted to have himself
photographed in Max Ernst’s chair which
in fact he did on a number of occasions?
Yeah, I think the family still owns it…..
When?
It was in his apartment.
Uh-huh.
I guess I hadn’t thought that far.
What struck me is that the sort of enthroning
quality that Max Ernst sort of submits to,
Duchamp doesn’t.
That he isn't quite as overwhelmed by the
high back there.
That’s as far as I got in thinking about
it.
But I was struck by a documentary photo that
appeared in one of Newman's catalogs as I
was going back over these.
And he… it's not listed as an Arnold Newman
photograph.
It’s sort of put in a separate category
of snapshots.
There’s a snapshot of the Duchamp’s and
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Kraft at Newman's
dinner in 1966.
So that was, we presume, the kind of social
connection that generated this one.
OK, thank you.
[Applause] Our next speaker is Dr. Catherine
Craft who is an independent scholar and I
mentioned current living and working in Munich,
Germany.
In her paper, she explores connections between
two aspects of Duchamp’s identity: his thorough
identification with Dada and his apparent
cessation of artistic activity.
The title of Cathy’s paper today is “Blank
Force: Marcel Duchamp, Dada, and Pictures
of the Past.”
And with that brief introduction, Catherine
Clark.
Catherine Craft.
[Applause] I’d like to add my thanks along
with all the other participants to Jim and
Ann and the staff here at the National Portrait
Gallery for organizing this wonderful exhibition
and this symposium.
The current exhibition explores many facets
of Marcel Duchamp through portraiture but
it's very proliferation of images obscures
one element that was an essential part of
his identity, especially in the last quarter-century
of his life: the fact that he was widely believed
to have given up art in 1923.
In 1918, Duchamp had made [“Tomb”?], his
last painting, and in 1923 he signed the “Large
Glass,” declaring it unfinished.
He would never again make another painting
and it soon came to be generally accepted
that he had stopped making art altogether.
Right there you see the “Large Glass.”
In 1959 he told one journalist, “I spend
my time very easily but I wouldn't know how
to tell you what I do.
Let's just say I spend my time not painting.
There's no problem filling up the time.
I suppose you could say I spend my time breathing.”
Belief in Duchamp’s inactivity was ironically
enforced by an apparently unending stream
of portraits.
During a period when portraits of artists
tended to equate who they were with what they
did, as in Hans Namuth’s celebrated images
of Jackson Pollock, Duchamp’s own body became
a sort of substitute for the body of work
whose continuation he had supposedly abnegated.
Often, such images juxtaposed Duchamp with
his past work or even conflate the two as
in this photograph where Duchamp is shown
descending a staircase like his famous “Nude”
had forty years earlier.
Of course, Duchamp was not in active at all.
Even as his supposed inactivity burgeoned
into myth, we now know that he was secretly
at work on “Étant donnés,” a sculptural
installation that would, when revealed after
his death in 1968, dramatically change how
he and his work were understood.
Moreover, although Duchamp no longer painted,
he had never stopped making objects or undertaking
activities that we now consider a part of
his oeuvre.
Jasper Johns once observed that Duchamp allowed,
perhaps encouraged, the myth of his having
given up art.
And in fact whenever Duchamp spoke of his
inactivity, he almost always did so in terms
of painting; not of having given up art altogether.
He left that for others to extrapolate, as
when an extensive 1952 feature on Duchamp
in Life Magazine declared his complete abandonment
art, an assertion that might have been more
convincing had not been preceded by a double
page color photograph of the “Box in a Valise,”
an editioned work whose first examples were
produced a decade earlier and whose fabrication
would continue for years to come.
There's every reason to think that for an
artist who thought about, used, and repeatedly
re-conceived his identity, this element of
inactivity is essential to understanding Duchamp’s
oeuvre, especially in the last quarter-century
of his life.
In an interview conducted the year before
his death, Duchamp was asked whether he ever
had a desire to return to painting.
“No, none, none whatsoever, no.”
It was not even decision.
It was a lack of interest to which the interviewer
raised a possible objection: “but you have
worked very closely with museums here in the
United States, haven't you?”
Duchamp’s response: “oh yes, I act like
an artist, although I'm not one.”
Duchamp’s inactivity was nothing if not
performative.
It was something he was seen to be doing or
not doing.
From about 1942 when he returned to New York
during World War Two until his death, Duchamp’s
existence in the art world appeared as nothing
less in a spectacular intensification of all
the other things an artist does when not in
the studio actually making art: explaining
his work; looking at the work of other artists
and talking with them; going to openings;
serving on juries to award prizes to other
artists; designing shop windows; participating
in performances; designing posters and books;
participating in symposia; and giving interviews.
It had not always been so.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Duchamp largely stopped
showing work, asked collectors to do the same,
and turned down offers from galleries and
those wanting to write about his work.
Almost a decade after giving up the life of
an artist, however, Duchamp learned that the
“Large Glass” had been shattered while
being transported.
With news of the accident, he began to look
back at his life prior to 1923.
He successfully repaired the glass during
a summertime visit to the United States in
1936, subsequently writing that his trip to
reassemble its broken shards had been “a
wonderful vacation in my past life, a vacation
in past time instead of a new area.”
News of the damage seems to have prompted
Duchamp to travel in past time in another
sense by producing “The Green Box,” a
group of notes generated during the glass’s
conception and creation.
Its publication in turn may have spurred Duchamp
to create the “Box in a Valise,” which
would contain reproductions of most of his
previous work.
In 1942, Duchamp, bringing with him little
more than the materials for the box, arrived
in New York.
One among many illustrious figures fleeing
war in, Europe Duchamp found himself treated
as a sort of an authority in New York as a
key eyewitness to some of the most important
developments in modern art.
And scholars, curators, and dealers frequently
turned to him with their questions about the
past.
Duchamp’s fairness and honesty made him
a reliable source, an impression compounded
by the belief that he had long since stopped
making art and he therefore lacked the self-interest
typical of working artists.
Curiosity about modern art's past fed into
curiosity about Duchamp’s past.
And during this period he began to be slowly
more forthcoming to queries about his work.
During the 1940s, “The Green Box” and
the “Box in a Valise” became central points
of reference to Duchamp’s past-life.
“The Green Box” made information about
the “Large Glass” and other works available
as never before.
And in turn, reproductions from the “Box
in a Valise” began to be included in exhibitions
when the original works by Duchamp had been
lost or couldn't be loaned.
This is an installation photograph from the
1953 Dada show at the Sidney Janis gallery,
and you see for example there are several
works, images from the “Box in a Valise”
in particular.
This is the easiest one to see, “With Hidden
Noise.”
They were also used – illustrations from
the “Box in a Valise” – were also used
as illustrations for publications and as visual
prompts during interviews.
These are stills from a 1956 televised interview
with James Johnson Sweeney.
Some ten years before this interview, in 1945,
Duchamp had acquiesced in a decided departure
from his previous inclinations to a request
from Sweeney, then a curator at the Museum
of Modern Art, for interviews that would be
the basis for a monograph on Duchamp’s work.
Although Sweeney’s monograph was never completed,
Duchamp’s conversations with him would have
important consequences.
At precisely the time when Duchamp had himself
just finished an intensive process of reviewing
and formulating his own vision it his life's
work, someone else sat down with him and talked
with him extensively about this very subject,
affording Duchamp his first real opportunity
to state what he thought his work in life
had been about; to create in terms of an art
historical and biographical narrative what
“The Green Box” and the “Box in a Valise”
provided linguistically and visually.
Portions of Sweeney's talk with Duchamp were
published in 1946 in an issue of the Museum
of Modern Art’s bulletin and included Duchamp’s
comments about Dada, the avant-garde movement
founded in Zürich in 1916 that eventually
spread to Paris, Berlin, New York, and other
cities.
The Dada movement emerged from its participants’
outrage at the butchery of World War One.
But in his comments to Sweeney, Duchamp indicated
little interest in this aspect of Dada’s
identity.
In Duchamp’s view, Dada was an extreme protest
against the physical side of painting.
It was a metaphysical attitude.
It was a sort of nihilism to which I am still
very sympathetic.
It was a way to get out of a state of mind;
to avoid being influenced by one's immediate
environment or by the past; to get away from
clichés; to get free.
The blank force of Dada was very salutary.
Duchamp’s reference to Dada now seems unremarkable
but now in fact it signaled a pronounced shift
in his position toward the movement.
His connections to Dada proper had been technically
somewhat tenuous to begin with, as many of
the works by him that are now associated with
Dada, such as many at the ready-mades, were
conceived and executed before he was ever
aware of Dada or indeed before the movement
even existed.
While Duchamp recognized in Dada parallels
to his own interests, he kept a careful distance
from the movement at the time, reluctant to
relinquish his independence especially as
he saw Dada shape itself into a movement like
any other; its participants fighting with
each other and with other factions in the
art world.
But in the 1940s with Dada barely remembered
except as surrealism’s nihilistic forerunner,
Duchamp begin to associate himself with Dada
as he had never done in the past.
His comments to Sweeney were but the beginning
of a pronounced identification that was to
have a significant impact on the way both
Duchamp and Dada were understood through the
nineteen sixties and after.
By 1952, Life would hail Duchamp as the world’s
most eminent Dadaist, titling its article
“Dada's Daddy.”
By the ended the 1950s, when the odd word
Neo-Dada surfaced to label Jasper Johns, Robert
Rauschenberg, and a handful of other young
artists, the process of identification was
complete with the example of Duchamp’s ready-mades
taken as a crucial factor in the newly prominent
role of objects in contemporary art.
By the 1960s, Duchamp and Dada were virtually
synonymous, all but interchangeable terms
in popular culture as well as contemporary
criticism.
Duchamp himself contributed to his identification
with Dada quite actively, especially early
on.
For example in the late 1940s, the artist
Robert Motherwell was working on “The Dada
Painters and Poets,” the first anthology
of Dada in English – the first anthology
in English devoted to Dada.
And Duchamp played a significant role behind
the scenes, examining proofs of the book as
it progressed, making suggestions for the
inclusion of text and images, and helping
Motherwell mediate conflicts among former
participants.
And in 1953, as I've already shown, Duchamp
organized an important Dada exhibition at
the Sidney Janis Gallery, taking an active
part in the show's installation, catalog design
which you see here, and dealings with the
press.
We might fairly and ask why Duchamp decided
to identify himself so strongly with Dada
at this time.
What is striking is that it was very much
of the present moment.
Far from being simply a historical identification,
it was a contemporary one as well.
As he explained to Sweeney, Duchamp was still
very sympathetic to aspects of Dada.
And eight years later, he was telling visitors
to the Janis Dada show: “Dada is not passé.
The Dada spirit is eternal.”
Among the former members of the Dada movement
that Motherwell encountered while working
on the anthology, Duchamp was the only one
who claimed still to be Dada.
It's possible to think of Duchamp’s identification
with Dada as serving a strategic purpose.
In New York’s small community of émigrés,
surrealism pressed much closer than it had
in Paris.
Sympathetic with many of its concerns but
deeply uneasy with its group agenda, Duchamp
participated in a number of surrealist exhibitions
and activities as in this by now familiar
image of the installation for the first papers
of surrealism.
But he also tried to distance himself from
the movement's intrigues and rivalries.
Identifying himself as Dada past and present
got Duchamp caught up in no political games,
group pressures, or professional compromises.
Dada was a way to fit into the past of modern
art without conforming to it; to belong without
joining.
As abstract expressionism emerged for the
end of the decade, Dada would further offer
Duchamp an anti-painterly position of subversive
resistance to what he privately described
as a debacle in painting.
We might also consider that Dada’s blank
force also offered Duchamp a chance, as he
put it, to get free.
Dada’s offer of escape provided…
