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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
Octavio Paz, in his essay on Etant donnes, "* Water Writes Always in * Plural," evokes the myths both of Diana and Actacon and of the Great Mother in explaining the installation in terms of "The dialectic of the look that looks at nudity and nudity that looks at itself...." The Bride is a tree-woman, a re-evocation of "Diana ... [as] an arboreal divinity ... [who] was originally a dryad.... The tree that spreads its leaves to the heavens is a feminine tree...." She and her landscape are one and the same, for "The center of the world--Eden--coincided with the Goddess; or rather, it was the Goddess. The holy tree of the sanctuary became the column of the temple, and the column became the axis of the cosmos." (37) Paz wrote this essay for the catalogue of the 1973 Duchamp retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His intuitions about "the Bride ... [as] a tree-woman" who is "one and the same" with her landscape would be corroborated with certainty only in 1993, when the Duchamp retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice first exhibited another photographic collage, this one an early study of Etant donnes, of about 1947, that came from Duchamp's estate. In this work the Bride does not lie prone but instead stands in the wooded hills down which flows a waterfall, as though she, too, were a tree or, in any case, a tree-woman at one with the landscape that envelops her (Fig. 8).
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By conceiving the Bride, in part, as a tree-woman, In the Manner of Delvaux and Etant donnes restore the landscape that was implicit in Duchamp's early thinking about The Large Glass. (38) The landscape of Etant donnes, from this point of view, is paradise: Paradise at the moment of the Fall, at the moment of original sin, a "guilty landscape [paysage fautif]" that marks the moment of passage from innocence to experience. It was a subject that was dear to Duchamp, who was among the final generation of French schoolchildren to be instructed in the catechism of the Catholic Church while attending public school. (39) As early as 1910 he painted a young friend, the future Dr. Dumouchel, as a fallen Adam who covers his private parts with his hands while Eve sits beneath him. During the gala performance of Picabia's theatrical piece Relache on December 31, 1924, Duchamp himself momentarily appeared onstage as a naked but bearded Adam, also covering his private parts, with the lovely Bronia Perlmutter as Eve by his side. In December 1967, at the very end of his life, Duchamp used a photograph taken by Man Ray of his appearance in Relache to create a copper engraving of the tableau vivant. That same month he made another engraving that is the companion piece to Relache. Entitled Apres l'amour, it shows two horizontal lovers resting in one another's embrace. While they are not explicitly identified as Adam and Eve, Duchamp had reproduced, with some minor changes in positioning, the Grien drawing of Le peche originel page of the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue that featured In the Manner of Delvaux.
