Marcel Duchamp: A reappraisal of his art

Introduction

Let’s begin this consideration of Duchamp with a thought experiment:

I know nothing about art history but nor am I prejudiced against it and I make my first visit to the Tate Modern. In pride of place I see Fountain (Marcel Duchamp 1917) what am I to make of it? It is an object without any aesthetic value and yet it is in an art gallery? I learn that it is a “Readymade“ and so wasn't even made by the artist. I have to ask myself is Duchamp a genius or a fraud?  Is he is an important figure in the development of modern art or a trickster to be side-lined?  That was what happened, by the way, in 1917.

Duchamp’s failed ambition to be a painter

Marcel Duchamp came from a large artistic family whose children’s interest in art came from their grandfather who was a renowned printmaker. 

Duchamp’s eldest brother Gaston worked under the pseudonym Jacques Villon. To judge from his work Jacques was the man who liked to copy other artists, he was killed in World War I. Duchamp’s sister Susanna produced interesting semi-abstract Mechanomorphic pictures a style which Duchamp and certain of his friends, such as Francis Picabia, made popular shortly before the First World War. So here is the first revelation of something that Duchamp stole from a woman.

It’s clear that Duchamp was initially ambitious to be a painter. He won prizes for drawing at school and when he was 17 he went to live with Jacques Villon in Montmartre and enrolled in the academy Julian. When he was 18 he failed the entrance exam for the Paris École de Beaux-Arts and opted for a training course at La Vicomte printers in Rouen.  His first paintings invoke the style of Monet, Cézanne and the Impressionists. He made a living by drawing cartoons. 

His brothers introduced him into the avant-garde circle of the Groupe de Puteaux which included Léger, Kupka, Gleizes and Metzinger plus Apollinaire. Kupka was doing mechanical paintings at the end of the 1920s.  Duchamp was

then immersed in Cubism as well as the Orphic abstraction of Kupka.

Between 1911 and 1912 Duchamp painted Cubo-futurist works. He was interested in studying motion and speed and declared that he was interested in the photography of Eadweard Muybridge and Jules-Etienne Marey.

Duchamp Then shifted from a post-impressionist style to what he referred to as “elementary parallelism“ e.g. paintings such as Sad Young man on the Train 1911- which is very similar to Nude Descending a Staircase 1912. The idea of parallel images in these paintings is very Futurist and well as being clearly influenced by Muybridge and Marey. Léger’s paintings particularly Nudes in the Forest 1909–10 also treat the human body in this mechanistic way.  So, whilst these paintings are the most original that Duchamp painted they are in no way breakthrough works.

Nude descending a staircase was a turning point in that Duchamp submitted it to the Salon des Indépendants composed of some of the Puteaux artists, including his brothers, and they rejected it.  Duchamp later recalled, “I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you.” He painted little after this painful and humiliating rejection.  In due course this painting become the most notorious work of the decade. 

In this resumé of Duchamp’s short painting career you can glimpse an artist interested in the cutting-edge art of the day but one who is continually behind the curve.  Furthermore, whilst it is fine for an artist to copy the styles of others whilst he is developing his own, Duchamp was pretty unoriginal. 

When Duchamp stopped painting and became a “conceptual artist” this is betrayed as an heroic decision. In reality he simply took the hump because his work was turned down for exhibitions and was generally considered unexceptional.  His original enthusiasm to become a painter was soured by continual rejection, so he gave it up.

The Large Glass

On then to his objects. The Large Glass (1915-23) is a piece that is endlessly written about. As a piece of visual art The Large Glass is nothing which means that the only interesting thing about it is Duchamp’s commentary that illuminates his intelligence, his reading and the deviance of his interpersonal relationships.  A cynic might say that Duchamp took great pains to shroud this piece in a huge fog of verbiage which has worked to obscure the fact that it is more Dada, more nonsense, more absurdist art. 

One thing that Duchamp did was to make endless copies of his work, packaged up for sale to collectors and galleries.  This is not art but commerce.

Chessplayer

Although Duchamp’s skills as a painter were no more than average, he was an ardent and skilled professional chess player, he played it every day and studied it intensively, it was his solitary pursuit, his real passion.  This is perhaps how he should be remembered, it wasn’t art that obsessed and motivated him but chess.  He was really pretty uninterested in showing or making art.  You have to wonder why you should take seriously the art of a man who treated it with disdain.

Patrons

It’s no secret that artists need patrons and dealers that believe in them in order to make it.  Duchamp’s principal patrons were Lou and Walter Arensberg (another chess fanatic).  Duchamp’s friendship with the talented artist Man Ray was also significant in establishing his reputation.  Man Ray was also a chess fanatic.  Later in his career Katherine Dreier became an important source of financial support.  It seems that Dreier and Peggy Guggenheim found him irresistible.  Perhaps we should look for the origins of Duchamp’s fame in his ability to network and provide advice to rich collectors on what art to buy.  There is also the fact that Duchamp, with the help of Hans Richter and Man Ray, managed to be the first artist to benefit from a cult of personality.  I suspect that Duchamp’s talent for self-promotion and his connections allowed him to influence the development of art criticism and install himself at its heart.

The Readymade

Duchamp is best known for pioneering the Readymade.  This is when an object from the world e.g. a urinal is given a fancy name e.g. Fountain and declared to be an art object.  Put like that the idea is preposterous.  The idea may not even have been Duchamp’s – he may have stolen it from Baroness Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven a contemporary performance artist, poet and sculptor. The Baroness may even have been the originator of the original joke to submit Fountain to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. 

Fountain, and Readymades in general, seem to be just pieces of anti-art but have been celebrated in various ways: as deflating the pomposity of art, as negating the division between the art object and the everyday object etc.  No really it is rubbish isn’t it?  At the Tate gallery the version on show is part of an edition authorised by the object – something that in itself renders the idea of the “Readymade” absurd – why doesn’t the Tate simply exhibit a urinal bought at B&Q?  Even the idea that the “Readymade” introduces the idea of including fragments of the real world into art pieces is wrong as it had already been done by the Cubists with their papier collés.  It’s claimed that the “Readymade” initiated a process whereby questions relating to the status of original and copy gradually become obsolete. It doesn’t seem to me that this has actually happened and, if it has, then that is attributable not to the Readymade but to the possibilities of mechanical reproduction.

What then of the claim that Duchamp shifted art fundamentally from the visual to the conceptual? Again, I’m wondering how this can be considered true in any normal sense of the word. Surely art has always been conceptual, albeit that usually it has, in addition, skill and perhaps beauty.  Thus an allegory is conceptual, reading history painting requires a lot of knowledge and concepts are required if one is analysing the symbolism of a religious painting from the Middle Ages. If by conceptual one means questioning the nature of art i.e. what art can be then “Fountain” is important. However, equally, there are other art/non-art interfaces that are just as significant e.g. art/craft. The interface between the Readymade and art is surely easy to negotiate, the Readymade just isn’t art!

How did Duchamp hold up in the face of criticism of his anti-art act of submitting a urinal to an art exhibition? He reasserted his lack of interest in art and departed for Buenos Aires where he played chess.  Worse than this, at the time critics of Fountain, who were the majority, were simply indifferent to the idea of the Readymade.  It seems that even Lydie (Duchamp’s first wife) and Duchamp thought of Fountain as no more than a practical joke. She found Duchamp’s continuous puns detestable!

Representations of Sexual deviance and a flawed socialisation

Cros in her book on Duchamp (really it’s an uncritical hagiography) describes Duchamp playing chess against a naked woman as exceedingly dada-esque, I note that the famous photograph from the photo-shoot is the one where you cannot even see the woman’s face, this image is just eroticism.

It is when we look at Duchamp’s relationships and then again at his oeuvre what we start to see a much darker motivation for his post-painting art which calls into question not merely its quality but its acceptability.

In April 1910, Duchamp started an affair with the model, Jeanne Serre. As she was married, there was no pressure on Duchamp for a permanent relationship or family responsibilities which was just how he liked it. Nevertheless, Jeanne gave birth to a daughter, who was generally presumed to be Duchamp’s child, although he made no effort to see her or have any further contact with her mother.

Marcel Duchamp met his first wife Lydie Sarazin-Levassor at the end of March 1927. On 7 June, they were married. The painter and writer Francis Picabia acted as a witness and the ceremony was filmed by Man Ray. On 25 January 1928, the couple divorced.

In a memoire Duchamp’s first wife Lydie Sarazin-Levassor says that when she met Duchamp she was 24 and he was 40.  She believed that he was seeking to settle down and to put an end to the life of leisure he had been leading up to then. Duchamp could be seductive and kind-hearted, and this overweight, inexperienced and unassured young woman worshipped him.  Lydie was desperate to escape her family situation and seems to have been pretty open-minded in the way she accepted Duchamp and his ideas.  Lydie’s mother’s friends thought Duchamp a frightful catch and that her father had sacrificed his daughter in order to be with his mistress; it seems that Lydie’s father couldn’t get divorced from her mother until Lydie was married. When the time came for their marriage contract to be signed Duchamp was “too sensitive” to ask her father how much he was planning to give her as an allowance,. It was only later that it became clear that he had been hoping for a large lump sum and that he was in real financial need.  Up to that stage in his life, remember he was 40, Duchamp had lived on an allowance from his parents, but both had now died.  Furthermore, Duchamp had speculated and bought some Brancusi sculptures but the collector that he intended to sell them to had passed away and now Duchamp could not realise the prices that he had hoped for. In short Duchamp was short of money and then had to face the disaster that the parental allowance from Lydie’s father was only just enough for one person!  After the amount of the allowance was established it became clear to Lydie that Duchamp had only courted her because he hoped for a substantial dowry and an allowance to live on. She hadn’t imagined that he had no income at all. Clearly this was extraordinarily hard on her as she had really doted on him.  Within four months of their marriage Duchamp had sorted out separate flats for the two of them and visited her only very infrequently. It seems that he couldn’t bear to share his flat with her. When Lydie realised that Duchamp preferred chess to her she glued his chess pieces to the board.  They were divorced within a year, he having completely rejected her. In parentheses Lydie says that she didn’t like Man Ray who she thought clung to Duchamp like a leech.

During his marriage Duchamp had been continuing a relationship that he started with Mary Reynolds in 1923 and continued up to her death in 1950.  He kept this relationship secret until his divorce from Lydie.  After that, Duchamp permitted Reynolds, who was a young widow, to be seen with him in public, but he would neither marry her nor live with her full time. Reynolds said that Duchamp was unfaithful to her and was attracted to "very common women."  She suspected Duchamp as being "incapable of loving" and unable to commit to one person. Under Gestapo surveillance beginning in the summer of 1942, Mary Reynolds was forced to flee France. Leaving via Madrid, she finally arrived in New York in 1943. By that time, however, Duchamp had begun his ill-fated romance with Maria Martins, the socialite surrealist sculptor and wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the U.S.

In Maria Martins, the great seductress, the great seducer met his match. He had broken the hearts of many women, but in a drawing for Martins, he demonstrated his infatuation when he drew a red heart below an inscription that begged her not to crush it. Martins was an aggressive domineering femme fatale.  Exulting in the idea that she was a Venus flytrap, Martins caught Duchamp in her web and had him in her thrall until 1950 when she moved back to Brazil with her husband and three children.

In 1954, at the age of sixty-seven, Duchamp took as his second wife Alexina Sattler—called Teeney—a widow whose first husband had been Pierre Matisse, a New York gallery owner and son of the famous painter. The marriage seems to have been calm and happy.  Duchamp explained his willingness to marry at this late stage on the grounds that his wife was too old to have more children, the outcome he had sought to avoid by not marrying before (unless it was for money). The implication was that the couple could have sex without worrying about offspring, but something darker is suggested by the gift Duchamp gave his wife when they married in January 1954. It was a small sculpture (just over two inches high), called Chastity Wedge, consisting of two interlocked pieces of plastic, one in the shape of a wedge, its edge inserted so that it fills up the slit-like opening of the other, a rounded block of material of a flesh-like color and texture. The title confirms that the space stopped up by the wedge is the opening of the female genitalia, making it impossible for anything else to find entry there; later Duchamp reported that the couple kept it displayed on a table and that, when they traveled, "we usually take it with us, like a wedding ring." This suggests a preoccupation with sex, but somehow blocked rather than freely engaged in; whatever else, it is hard to read it as the emblem of a couple with an ordinary sex life.

The tide is starting to turn against the sexually exploitative nature of Surrealism.  I’d say that it needs to start to turn against Duchamp as well.

Chasity Wedge wasn’t the only sexually explicit cast that Duchamp made, he made copies of the genitals of Maria Martins as well. I’d say that casts of your lover’s perineum are fetishist in the genuinely Freudian sense. Here were things for Duchamp to fondle in his hands.  This brings us onto Duchamp’s last, secret work, Étant Donnés.  The figure in this work was again made using more casts from Martins body.  It’s a representation of a dead woman with her vulva in the face of the viewer who looks at her through a peephole.  There is nothing that would convince me that this is anything but creepy and disgusting.  Is there more?  Well there is Faulty Landscape from 1946, a work that Duchamp made from semen on satin?  In 1959 he made Torture-morte, 1959, a foot covered in flies in a glass box, then, in collaboration with André Breton, he designed the cover of the exhibition catalogue for Surrealism in 1947, which shows a deflated woman’s breast, the work is called Please Touch. 

Let’s look back at The Bride Stripped Bare by her Suiter’s Even 1917, now even the title seems to imply violence or even rape.  In Duchamp’s painting Bride (1912), a precursor of The Large Glass, the woman has been described as disembowelled.  The mechanical woman of Duchamp and Picabia are the realization of the prophecy of Villiers de l’Isle Adam in La Nouvelle Eve (The New Eve) that the women of the future would be robots. The idea of a mechanical doll, an electrified Copelia or a neutered mannequin was part of the fantasy life of the men of this generation.  In the context of the title of the work the descriptions of the parts of the large glass: Scissors, Oculist Witnesses, Chocolate Grinder (which is supposed to be a reference to masturbation) are all slightly disturbing.  It seems then that we could describe much of Duchamp’s work as the representation of what now seem unacceptable sexual fantasies.  This doesn’t necessarily make them poor art but it does obliterate the mystique that they once had.

My contention this is that only the Readymades that escape the twin censures of unoriginality and being nothing more than sexual fantasies. But the Readymades are only toys, games, anti-art gestures that are without merit, even Duchamp and Lydie agreed on that.  Duchamp is perhaps allied to Jeff Koons in laughing behind his hand at the art world’s acceptance of his hoaxes.