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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
Delvaux's Aurore suggested a different method of representing the Bride, as well as a different method of treating the landscape. The four tree-women, with their naked breasts (the fifth appearing only as an image in a mirror), recalled to Duchamp's mind a journey he had made with Francis Picabia, in the latter's automobile, in 1912. They were returning from the Jura Mountains to Paris, and with them were Picabia's wife Gabrielle Buffet, their chauffeur Victor, and the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire. After the five passengers had arrived in Paris, Duchamp composed the earliest notes that pertain to The Large Glass, which he dated 1912, and later published a two-page note in the collection called The Green Box. At this point in Duchamp's thinking, the work, which was to be on canvas, comprised three major images: the Jura-Paris road itself, the chief of the five nudes, and the headlight child.
On the one hand, the chief of the 5 nudes.... On the other hand, the headlight child.... This headlight child could, graphically, be a comet, which would have its tail in front.... The Jura-Paris road ... will lose none of its character of infinity in finding a termination at one end in the chief of the 5 nudes, at the other in the headlight child.... (32)
In the French of Duchamp's note, the "5 nudes" are "5 nus," and cinq nus is a homophone, a pun, of seins nus, or bare breasts. That is, in an obvious play on words, the five nudes of Delvaux's Aurore (the four visible tree-women of the painting plus the invisible one seen reflected in the glass) have become the bare, mirrored breasts of Duchamp's collage. The "termination ... in the chief of the 5 nudes," the single nude of In the Manner of Delvaux, will now find "its character of infinity" in the virtual image of a mirror. Duchamp explained that in creating In the Manner of Delvaux he had simply aimed "to do in photography what Delvaux had done in painting." (33) But to Duchamp the opposite must have seemed equally true: that Delvaux had made a painting that uncannily contained visual elements and suggested puns that he been working with at the time of the Jura-Paris Road project of 1912 and during the early stages of the planning of The Bride Stripped Bare.
As Duchamp continued to plan his work during 1912 and 1913, the five passengers merged into one, "the chief of the 5 nudes," who became the Bride of The Large Glass. That the women of Delvaux's Aurore are tree-women is important, for Duchamp repeatedly wrote of the Bride as the "arbor type." In French, arbre refers both to a tree and to a mechanical, and especially an automotive, drive shaft. "The bride," he observed, "is basically a motor." (34) While mechanical metaphors predominate in the long note of The Green Box that discusses the Bride, the sense of arbre as tree, as vegetable matter that blossoms and can bear fruit, always hangs in the background. In a letter penned by "Marcel Douxami" and sent to the periodical Rongwrong in July 1917, the author--Duchamp, of course, perhaps in collaboration with some of his friends--asked "how relationships are possible between a combustion engine and a flower...." (35) The unstated answer is that just such a relationship is possible if the arbor type refers both to an automobile and to a tree. Consider, for example, the related English word axletree. Duchamp describes "the cinematic blossoming" of the Bride as "Grafting itself on the arbor type...." Furthermore, he adds, "This blossoming should be the refined development of the arbor type. It is born, as boughs on this arbor type." (36)
