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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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In presenting Reflection a main to the Hoppenots, Duchamp was doing a number of things at once. He was thanking them, naturally, for their hospitality. The mirror itself could be a reference to the glassy surface of Lake Geneva, where they stayed. But Duchamp was also thanking them--unbeknownst to the couple--for the landscape, the waterfall at Chexbres, that he would use as the background setting for Etant donnes. That is, the mirror reflects the viewer who sees himself in the Bride, who is, in turn, a reflection of the landscape. At 2 3/8 inches in diameter, the mirror of Reflection a main is the same size--give or take a quarter of an inch--as the tondo holding the mirror of In the Manner of Delvaux. And that is because they are the same mirror, showing the same thing: the Bride who is herself her own landscape. The tondo of In the Manner of Delvaux is set in a field of tinfoil, whose glossy surface creates a second mirror, in addition to the mirror of the photograph, in which the onlookers actually see themselves. The shape of the tinfoil recalls the form of the blossoming of the Bride in the top half of The Large Glass. We see ourselves in this blossoming precisely because we are the blossoming: the fruit of the Bride as Eve, the type of Mary, or as the Great Mother goddess whom Paz discusses.
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"L'Impossibilite du Fer"
Among the window displays that Duchamp designed during the 1940s was one at Brentano's flagship store on Fifth Avenue for Denis de Rougemont's book La part du diable. Thereafter, Duchamp and the Swiss moral and political philosopher, who was almost twenty years Duchamp's junior, became friends, and in August 1945 Rougemont invited the artist to spend a week at the lake house he was renting in the Adirondacks.
During lunch on the porch, Duchamp proposed an argument in favor of a very utopian form of anarchy. All that was necessary was to abolish money. After all, people needed to fill their time. The baker would continue to bake bread. What else would he do with himself? And what would be the point of taking more than you needed if you could not sell it? By the evening Duchamp had come up with an example to refute Rougemont's counterclaim during lunch that there was no historic example of a group of human beings ever living in a state of anarchy. "I know a group for which anarchy works very well: it's the family. Right? The kids take from the table or the kitchen what they need. There's no buying and selling, and no legal transactions. Everything happens freely. Between the father and his son, it just gets figured out. The family is the perfect model of a completely anarchistic society." (45)
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Rougemont observed that Duchamp seemed quite proud of his example, and he remembered just how much Duchamp's family--his parents, brothers, and sisters--meant to him. Indeed, with evident emotion, Duchamp turned the conversation to them: "Since the death of my father [pere], I feel that I don't have any points of reference [je me sens prive de repere]. Pere et repere [the pun here is as obvious as it is untranslatable]. I can no longer take on responsibilities. Marriage, for example. It seems to me that I should first go and ask my father for his advice, his O.K. I guess I never grew up and became an adult."
