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

In the Manner of Delvaux may seem too slight a work to inaugurate so substantial a reversal in artistic practices and style. After all, the photographic collage did not attract much attention at the time of its creation. (13) But Duchamp was a magician in the economy of small gestures. One of the delights that drew him to the world of chess was the way in which the simple movement of a pawn by one square could rearrange the dynamics of the entire board. In the Manner of Delvaux was just such a pawn, advanced a single square on the chessboard of his art.

"Difference ... Is the Authentic Work of Rrose Selavy"

A curious and telling incident preceded the first public showing of In the Manner of Delvaux following World War II, which occurred at the Pasadena Art Museum's retrospective of 1963, By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy. Months before the opening, Walter Hopps, a curator at the Pasadena Museum and the driving force behind the Duchamp retrospective, wrote the artist asking permission for four copies each to be made of four of the works that would appear in the show. The man doing the copying would be David Hayes, a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, who had earlier convinced his stepmother, Mary Sisler of the Firestone rubber and tire fortune, that Duchamp was a genius and his work should be collected. With some stipulations, Duchamp agreed. In the end, the project proved to be too expensive. Hayes produced only single copies of three works: Nine Malie Molds, Three Standard Stoppages, and In the Manner of Delvaux. At some point before the exhibition opened, Duchamp examined the copies and inscribed "pour certifie conforme Marcel Duchamp 1963" on the replications of Nine Malic Molds and Three Standard Stoppages. In the Manner of Delvaux he left unsigned and uncertified (Fig. 4). Francis M. Naumann, who has written a book on the history of the replications of Duchamp's works, explains, "In terms of quality, the small cropped photograph of In the Manner of Delvaux was clearly inferior to the original collage, which is probably why Duchamp chose to leave this work unsigned." That Hayes's copy is inferior to the original is obvious enough, but quite a few of the copies made by others of Duchamp's work are inferior in greater or lesser degrees to the originals. Clearly something more was at stake. (14)

Hayes's In the Manner of Delvaux looked like Duchamp's collage, but it lacked the quality of "difference" that marked "the authentic work of Rrose Selavy." In a note written on the stationery of the Taverne Royale in Brussels--the very city, as it happens, where young Paul Delvaux spent his childhood and studied art--Duchamp proposed the following project:

  buy or take known
  unknown paintings
  and sign them with the name of
  a known or unknown painter--
  the difference between the "style" ["facture"] and
  the unexpected name for the
  "experts",--is the authentic work
  of Rrose Selavy, and defies
  forgeries (15)