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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
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
As for the butt of the blague, the answer must again be: both. Duchamp offers us a pastiche of Delvaux's style, his maniere, which features in painting after painting groups of women in various stages of nudity parading through dreamlike landscapes. Duchamp's pastiche both is and is not photographic. The tondo of the collage is a photograph, but only apparently a photograph of a detail from Delvaux's Aurore. In the Manner of Delvaux finally is not in the manner of Delvaux but in the manner of Duchamp, a self-ironist to the end. The gesture is a double reverse. Duchamp feigns the submission of a detail of someone else's work, appropriated and signed by himself, whereas, in fact, the work is his own creation.
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Duchamp was aware both of the trap of traditionalism and the impossibility of completely freeing himself from it. He told an interviewer in the early 1960s, "Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what had already been done." That would mean also, as in the case of Delvaux, that it was too easy to follow in the footsteps of what Harold Rosenberg called "the tradition of the new." Rather, Duchamp continues in the interview, "I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself. I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.'" (27)
Indeed, the "little game between 'I' and 'me'" lasted from 1912, when Duchamp gave up traditional painting on canvas, until his death. He may well have been uninterested in looking at himself in an aesthetic mirror. But, as will be explained in what follows, staring out of the mirror of In the Manner of Delvaux is the face of Marcel Duchamp.
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The Return of the Jura-Paris Road
The reproduction of Duchamp's In the Manner of Delvaux appears in the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue in a section entitled "On the Survival of Certain Myths and on Some Other Myths in Growth or Formation." The "mise en scene" is attributed to Andre Breton, but surely Duchamp had some input on his page. Among the myths treated are the Golden Age, Orpheus, Icarus, the Philosopher's Stone, the Grail, the Messiah, the Putting to Death of the King, the Androgyne, and the Myth of Rimbaud. The general technique is the emblematic juxtaposition of three elements, two visual and one literary. The myth of "Le surhomme," for example, shows a photograph from 1873 of Friedrich Nietzsche at the top and a 1942 cartoon drawing of Superman flying with Lois Lane in his arms at the bottom. In the middle of the page is a quotation from the marquis de Sade: "The furniture that you see here, said our host, is alive; all will start moving about at the slightest sign.... You see that this table, these chandeliers, these armchairs are only composed of groups of girls artistically arranged." (28)
