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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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80. Jean Suquet, who has devoted the better part of his scholarly work on Duchamp since the 1970s to proving the centrality of the absent Juggler of Gravity to our understanding of The Large Glass, reproduces the Maywald photograph in a wide-ranging article on Etant donnes, "La mariee de la main gauche." Etant Donne 3 (2001): 54-71. Suquet discusses the differences between the Bellon and Maywald photographs, notes the iron/irony pun in "le fer a repasse" and "a refaire le passe," and argues that Duchamp formulated two related propositions in 1947: the first public, "a refaire le passe," the second private, the drawing of the Bride entitled Given: Maria, the Waterfall and the Illuminating Gas, which Duchamp gave as a gift to his lover Maria Martins. He also asserts on the subject of "a refaire le passe," 55-56, that "this wordplay has never had the honor of any manuscript by Duchamp, has never been included in a collection, neither cited nor commented on by any interpreter." Molderings (as in n. 43), 103, which appears in the same number of Etant Donne as Suquet's article, comments that "a refaire le passe" means "to begin again from the beginning." He argues, "This is precisely what happened in the artistic life of Duchamp in the years 1946-47: coming back to several of his central ideas of the period from 1913 to 1914, he started over again from the beginning his artistic journey...." This author could not agree more, though I have argued that it is a question of a return, or "renvoi," to some of his central ideas of the period beginning in 1912 with the Jura-Paris Road project.

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81. Note also how the fer/faire/refaire mirrors the pere/repere play on words in Duchamp's conversation with Rougemont.

82. Duchamp, in Cabanne (as in n. 8), 75.

Frequently Cited Sources

Duchamp, Marcel, Notes: Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse (1980; Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).

______, Writings: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (1973; New York: Da Capo Press, 1989).

Lebel, Robert, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (1959; New York: Grossman, 1967).

Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 3rd ed., rev. and enl., 2 vols. (1969; New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997).

Thomas Singer was granted his Ph.D. from Columbia University and initially wrote about the relation between theories of the origins of language, Renaissance ideas about hieroglyphics, and seventeenth-century projects for universal languages. More recently, he has written about Joyce, Wittgenstein, and Americans in Paris during the 1920s [Department of English, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 20057-1131].

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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