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In the Manner of Duchamp, 1942-47: the years of the "mirrorical return"

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2004 by Thomas Singer

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Les Seins Nus

Following the end of World War II, Duchamp sailed for France aboard the Brasil on May 1, 1946. In Paris, he contacted the Surrealist crowd, who assigned him the project of creating the catalogue cover for the Exposition internationale du Surrealisme, which would open during the summer of 1947. His original plan was to re-create the photograph of the two breasts of In the Manner of Delvaux as three-dimensional objects. After returning to the United States in January 1947, he began by creating two plaster models of breasts, intending to make as many as were needed for 999 covers. With time short and the mass reproduction of plaster models too laborious, Duchamp decided to purchase and then touch up the nipples of 999 foam-rubber "falsies," and with the help of Enrico Donati he glued one to each of the front covers of the deluxe catalogue, which he then shipped from New York City to Paris. The back cover carried the exhortation "Priere de toucher" (Please touch) (Fig. 9). For the nonnumbered copies of the catalogue, the breast, as was the case with In the Manner of Delvaux, was represented by a photographic image. (40)

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Before returning to the United States in 1947, Duchamp had spent five weeks traveling in Switzerland with Mary Reynolds, his lover of twenty years, and at that time his close friend. They stayed in Bern at the residence of the French ambassador, with whose daughter Mary had served in the Resistance. The ambassador's wife, Helene Hoppenot, suggested they visit the small village of Chexbres, where she had stayed as a child. Duchamp and Mary spent two days there early in August enjoying both the splendid view of Lake Geneva and the picturesque waterfall that cascaded down between Chexbres and the neighboring village of Puidoux. Duchamp photographed the waterfall from several different angles (Fig. 10). (41) He had found an essential part of the landscape, the hilly, forested waterfall, that he would use first in the photographic collage of about 1947 (Fig. 8) and eventually in the photocollage of the background landscape of Etant donnes (Fig. 11).

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[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

During the mid-1940s, Duchamp began to create entirely new works that he added to the deluxe editions of the Box in a Valise, the portable miniature museum he had started work on in 1935. These original items both had special significance for the receiver and commented, in ways the receiver could not possibly know, on the secret project Etant donnes. (42) To the deluxe version of the Box in a Valise he gave to the Hoppenots, who had sent him to Chexbres, where he discovered the waterfall landscape, Duchamp added a piece called Reflection a main (Fig. 12). Drawn in pencil on paper is a hand that holds a straight handle at the top of which a circular cut 2 3/8 inches in diameter has been made. Behind the cutout. Duchamp placed a real mirror that faced the viewer and then mounted the whole piece on Plexiglas. (43) Francis Naumann points out in the review he wrote of the third edition of Arturo Schwarz's The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1997) that the hand in Reflection a main is taken from the original full-scale plaster cast, now extant only as a photograph, used to make the nude of Etant donnes (Fig. 13). However, at this stage, which would have been sometime between 1946 and 1948, the arm is held straight out from the body and seems to hold "some sort of small cylindrical form." (44) The hand in the photograph is in every way identical to the hand in the piece that Duchamp gave to the Hoppenots, which means that the hand of the full-size plaster cast held, of course, the mirror of Reflection a main. In the end, for reasons that are not quite clear but that may well have to do with his decision to place the viewers behind the Spanish doors (Fig. 26), thereby preventing them from seeing their own reflections, Duchamp would replace the mirror with the gas lamp.

In the Manner of Duchamp, 1942-47: the years of the "mirrorical return"

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2004 by Thomas Singer

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