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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
Duchamp's In the Manner of Delvaux appears on the page devoted to the myth of Original Sin (Fig. 5). At the top is a drawing by Hans Baldung Grien of Adam and Eve. They lie nude next to one another, apparently in postcoital exhaustion, Adam on his back and Eve on her side facing the viewer. Adam has his arm under Eve with his hand resting on her belly. He is feeling the future, Cain, who is already growing in her womb. In the Manner of Delvaux is at the bottom of the page. Only the photographic tondo showing the white knotted bow and the mirror reflecting the nude breasts is reproduced. Between the two reproductions is a quotation from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: "The story of the Fall shows the universal repercussion of knowledge [connaissance: a noun with many and varied senses in French, including the English sense of carnal knowledge] on spiritual life."
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[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]
In the First Papers show, Duchamp exhibited his great palimpsest, Network of Stoppages (1914, Fig. 6). The first layer is an unfinished, enlarged version of Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911, Fig. 7). Duchamp painted black borders on the sides of the canvas to bring it to the scale of The Large Glass and then drew a layout for The Large Glass at half scale over the earlier painting. For the third and final layer, he rotated the canvas ninety degrees and painted a plan (a view from above) of the Capillary Tubes that carry the Illuminating Gas from the top of the nine Malic Molds to the seven Sieves or Parasols of The Large Glass, indicating with numbers the placement of each of the molds.
Like Adam's hand on Eve's womb in the Grien drawing above it, In the Manner of Delvaux is a feeling for, a gesture at things yet to come. To understand the direction in which Duchamp's thought was moving during the early 1940s, one needs to go backward through the layers of Network of Stoppages, past the plan of the Capillary Tubes and the layout for The Large Glass, to the original erotic landscape of Young Man and Girl in Spring. The breasts reflected in the mirror of In the Manner of Delvaux are the symbols for, as well as the first elements of, that landscape. One aspect of Duchamp's renvoi miroirique was a return to the beginnings of The Large Glass, whose Bride he would now re-create not in hermetic mechanomorphic and visceral forms but as a realistic Bride lying in the erotic landscape that has been the site of her Fall. The piece, of course, is the environmental installation Etant donnes, on which Duchamp secretly worked during the last two decades of his life. (29) He finished the work in 1966, and it was installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, the year after his death. In the manual he composed for remounting Etant donnes in the museum, he wrote that it was "executed between 1946 and 1966 in New York." (30) While he began the actual construction, the execution, of Etant donnes in 1946, he began to put to work the thinking that would produce it in 1942 with In the Manner of Delvaux. (31)
