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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
My special thanks to Monique Fong, who was close to Duchamp the man during the 1950s and 1960s and who inspired me by her conversation and her letters to write about Duchamp's post-World War II days in New York City; to Jacqueline Matisse Monnier of the Duchamp Archives, who offered encouraging words and image permissions; to Calvin Tomkins, who read and commented on an earlier version of my manuscript; to Paul Franklin, editor of Etant Donne, who was instrumental in tracking down the location of images that I had sought in vain; and to Stacey Bomento at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Department of Rights and Reproductions, who expended a great amount of time in gathering together better than half of the images I required. All mistakes are mine, but special thanks to Lory Frankel, who did a superb job of suggesting stylistic changes and editing the text. Finally, to Finnegan Bryan Singer, for whom I write what I write.
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Notes
1. The painting has also been referred to in English variously as Dawn, At Break of Day, or Tree-Women. On the inaugural show of Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, entitled The Art of This Century, see Lewis Kachur, "Frederick Kiesler's Surrealist Installations," in Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 200-204; Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (1994; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 149-52; and Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography. Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, rev. and enl. ed. (1946; New York: Universe Books, 1979).
Arturo Schwarz's, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp was literally by my side during both the research for and the writing of this essay, and to Schwarz I owe innumerable points of information that must go uncited in my text. I also have consulted Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, "Ephemerides," in Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, ed. Pontus Hulten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); and Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), to verify numerous details concerning Duchamp's life.
2. I have been unable to find any firsthand reports confirming either that Duchamp's collage was exhibited in the First Papers show or that it appeared only in the catalogue. While the unpaginated "Chronological Table of Exhibitions" printed on yellow sheets toward the center of Hulten (as in n. 1) lists the work as one of two pieces by him on exhibit at the show (the other, Network of Stoppages, 1914, was exhibited), Robert Lebel, in the catalogue raisonne section of his monograph Marcel Duchamp, 174, cat. no. 179, specifies that it was only "Repr." in the catalogue. Since Lebel had the opportunity to consult with Duchamp about matters of this kind, awaiting further evidence I must provisionally conclude that the collage was reproduced in the catalogue but was not exhibited in the First Papers show, though it might have appeared in Peggy Guggenheim's Exhibition of Collage, which ran from mid-April to mid-May 1943 at her Art of This Century gallery. The First Papers show and the world of the Surrealist emigres in and around New York have been the subject of a number of excellent recent studies. On the Surrealist emigres, see Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); and Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995). For a wonderfully vivid and informative essay on the New York art scene in the 1940s, see Ann Temkin, "Habitat for a Dossier," in Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp ... in Resonance, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art and Menil Collection, Houston (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998), 79-93. On the First Papers show, see Kachur (as in n. 1), 171-97; T. J. Demos, "Duchamp's Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942," October 97 (summer 2001): 91-119; and Altshuler (as in n. 1), 152-54.
