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

In the Manner of Delvaux is "the authentic work of Rrose Selavy" because it presents itself as a forgery without being one. Otherwise considered, the collage is a forgery of a forgery. Every element in the central detail of Delvaux's Aurore reappears in Duchamp's tondo, but every element is slightly different. Working by himself, or more likely with the help of professional photographers, he took individual photographs of a mirror, naked breasts, and a bow, or found them readymade in some magazine or other, either enlarged or shrank the specific details so that they would all be of the same scale, pasted the different parts together, and then took a final photograph of the photographic collage he had constructed. (16) Hayes's technique was the opposite of Duchamp's. Hayes had simply reproduced Duchamp's work exactly as it had been reproduced in Robert Lebel's monograph of 1959, and had thereby copied the work in the flesh, as it were, but not in the spirit. What was missing was the quality of "difference." And the elusive spirit of blague.

Roger Shattuck, the literary scholar and historian of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French culture, has argued that "la blague [is] the central axis of Duchamp's ethos--more important even than love or language." This categorical statement is somewhat surprising since, in the same collection of essays, Shattuck simultaneously asserts the importance of language in Duchamp's works, writing that "after 1912 (the year he 'stopped' painting), Duchamp's work became increasingly verbal. (17) Duchamp, for his part, repeatedly stressed the importance of the erotic in his work. In a 1959 BBC interview he stated, "Eroticism is a very dear subject to my life.... And it's an animal thing that has so many facets that it's pleasing to use it as a tube of paint, so to speak, to inject in your productions." (18) Returning to the theme late in life, Duchamp proclaimed, "I believe in eroticism a lot.... Eroticism was a theme, even an 'ism.' ... It kept me from being obligated to return to already existing theories, aesthetic or otherwise." (19)

Even if Shattuck is overstating his case by making "la blague ... the central axis of Duchamp's ethos," there is no doubt that it is essential in understanding the artist's writing and his works. Shattuck himself locates the origins of modern blague in the artists' studios of the mid-nineteenth century. He quotes from the Goncourt brothers' novel Manette Salomon (1865): "La Blague--the great Joke, that new form of French wit, born in the artists' studios ... raised amid the downfall of religion and society ... the modern version of the universal doubt ... the nineteenth-century Blague, the great sapper and revolutionary, poisoner of faith and murderer of respect...." (20) In the studios, blague often took the form of caricature, as practiced by Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet in his early years, and most famously by Honore Daumier. At other times it took the form of outright hoaxes, like the blank sheet of white cardboard entitled First Communion of the Chlorinated Young Ladies during a Snowfall that was exhibited at the Art Incoherent show of 1883 by Alphonse Allais. (21) A more famous painterly hoax was Joachim-Raphael Boronali's Et le soleil se coucha sur l'Adriatique, which was exhibited at the 1910 Salon des Independants. Boronali turned out to be Lolo, the donkey mascot of the cafe Lapin Agile, who had painted the picture with the switching of its tail. (22)