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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
32. Duchamp, Writings, 26-27. There are three more notes on the Jura-Paris Road project in the posthumous collection, Notes, nos. 109-11. Man Ray's 1921 photograph of Duchamp with the headlight-child tonsure, "a comet [with] its tail in front," will be discussed below.
33. Duchamp, quoted in Serge Stauffer, ed., Marcel Duchamp: Die Schriften (Zurich: Regenbogen, 1981), 280. Duchamp himself may well have pointed out, or at least confirmed, the "cinq nus/seins nus" pun to his first biographer, Robert Lebel. See Lebel, 25 n. 1.
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34. Duchamp, Writings, 42. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, in Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the "Large Glass" and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), discusses the "automotive" conception of the Bride in great detail. See esp. "The 'Jura-Paris Road' Project," 37-39, and "The Bride as Automobile," 89-93. For all of Henderson's involved explanations about how the Bride functioned as an automobile, the reader should keep in mind what Duchamp told Francis Roberts in "I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics," Art News 68, no. 8 (Dec. 1968): 63: "My approach to the machine was completely ironic. I made only the hood. It was a symbolic way of explaining. What was really beneath the hood, how it really worked, did not interest me." There is only an apparent contradiction between Duchamp's statement that he was not interested in how the machine worked and Henderson's detailed study of its working. During and immediately following the period when the plan for The Large Glass was developing out of the Jura-Paris Road project. Duchamp was contemplating a Bride who would be, in part, a kind of automobile. Hence, the notes in The Green Box that Henderson analyzes at great length. However, eventually Duchamp decided to simplify the representation by using the major elements of the Munich Bride of 1912 to represent the Bride of The Large Glass. Hence, his remarks to Roberts. Ulf Linde, "MARiee CELibataire," in Marcel Duchamp: Ready-Mades, etc. (1913-1964), ed. Walter Hopps, Linde, and Arturo Schwarz (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1964), 66, 68, analyzes the layout of the page on which In the Manner of Delvaux is reproduced in Lebel, pl. 112, and asserts that the breasts reflected in the mirror are those of the Bride as the arbor type.
35. Reprinted in Duchamp, Writings, 178. Rongwrong was a little magazine put out by Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roche, and Beatrice Wood that appeared as a single issue. It followed their earlier little magazine the Blindman.
36. Duchamp, Writings, 42-43.
37. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Seaver Books, 1978), 118, 124-25, 148.
38. Anne D'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps make some very interesting observations on Duchamp's restoration of the landscape in Etant Donnes...: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp (1969; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), 22, 25, and esp. 30: "The Network of Stoppages suggests that the erotic narrative of The Large Glass once had a landscape background and recognizable human figures: Cols Alites [the ink and pencil drawing of The Large Glass executed in 1959 in which a landscape including a range of mountains and an electric pole with power lines have been added] indicates that a new landscape is being created for it."
