It’s astonishing, I thought—as I toured the brain-teasing, patience-testing, must-see survey devoted to the work of Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art (his first North American retrospective in 50 years, co-curated by Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo at MoMA and Matthew Affron at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it will travel in October)—how vast Duchamp’s influence has been over the past half century of artmaking. Also, how much his protean practice anticipates what I’m tempted to call a Gen Z sensibility.
Consider, for example, his feminine alter ego, Rose (later Rrose) Sélavy, a sly presence at MoMA. Born from his imagination in 1920s Paris, she hung around for over two decades, making salacious puns and cosigning his art, posing for painter Florine Stettheimer (in a double portrait with Duchamp) and photographer Man Ray (as a glamour puss and solo). Or consider Duchamp’s issuance, in 1924, of the Monte Carlo Bond, also on view at MoMA. This mock stock certificate promised dividends based on his future roulette winnings, a scheme with the volatility of today’s cryptocurrency market. The payouts proved minimal, though a few collectors who hung on to the bond as art won big. What was art, anyway, but a vast gamble with posterity?
Duchamp was a transcontinental nomad, at home everywhere and nowhere, and inclined to “travel light,” according to his biographer, the late Calvin Tomkins. Born in 1887 into a solidly bourgeois family in northern France that turned out to be a breeding ground for creativity (his two older brothers were also artists), he moved to Paris in 1904 and began painting in a style inspired by Cézanne and Matisse. In 1915, he sought refuge from war-torn Europe in New York, where two years earlier the succès de scandale of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase—a Cubist-style motion study—at the Armory Show had made him famous. A few years later, his readymades—ordinary objects, a bicycle wheel or bottle rack, plucked from daily life and presented as sculpture—caused a seismic shift in artmaking that still reverberates.
In Paris during the 1930s, he began crafting small-scale copies of his works, creating a miniature DIY retrospective of his art at a time when no museum had acquired any of his work. During World War II, he shipped these copies from Nazi-occupied France to New York, and once there he fitted them into ingeniously designed, leather-bound briefcases, creating The Box in a Valise—his life’s work rendered portable, compact, and for sale as multiples. Reduce, reuse, and recycle: the environmentalist mantra of today finds an uncanny echo in this survival technique for the artist as refugee.
My interest in Duchamp is likely colored by my long-ago love affair with an artist (now gone) who could plausibly claim to be one of Duchamp’s descendants. My ex had big ambitions for his own art, which he mostly achieved, though he worried that his unprepossessing appearance posed a serious impediment to his career. Duchamp and Picasso, he would moan, were both lookers. What about him?
“Duchamp was a handsome Norman,” wrote Peggy Guggenheim in her memoir Out of This Century. “Every woman in Paris wanted to sleep with him.” And quite a few did, though not Guggenheim, despite her infatuation with him. (Instead, she profited from his counsel and connections beginning in 1938, when, knowing little about modern art, she opened her first gallery in London.)
Secretive, elegant, exquisitely polite, creatively open yet emotionally withholding, and as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa (a postcard of which he transformed into another infamous readymade), Duchamp was the type to inspire mad, often unrequited crushes. “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell,” the German-born, Greenwich Village–based artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven would recite at dadaist soirees…and she may have meant it literally. (A 1920 photograph of her portrait of Duchamp—an airy assemblage including feathers, a spring, and a fishing lure, all perilously balanced in a wine glass—is included in the MoMA exhibition.)
Surely he must have harbored some feelings for his great patron and supporter, Katherine Dreier, a cofounder, with Duchamp and Man Ray, of the Société Anonyme (which promoted modern art in the 1920s). But it was a friendship he navigated for three decades with delicacy.
Yet Duchamp was not immune to love. And since art historians have often viewed the stylistic transformations in Picasso’s oeuvre as evolving in tandem with his significant amorous encounters—see Sue Roe’s recent group biography, Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso’s Life—I wondered if a consideration of the women who belonged, at least for a time, to this most elusive of Modernists might bear similar fruit. Rrose Sélavy’s name was, after all, a pun in French: Éros, c’est la vie. (“Eros is life.”) What was the effect of Eros on Duchamp’s creative endeavors?
At MoMA, while listening to strains of experimental music that Duchamp had composed, I thought of Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, an accomplished musician who abandoned her promising career in composition after marrying the painter Francis Picabia. The couple’s passionate love triangle with Duchamp (recounted in sisters Anne and Claire Berest’s novel, Gabriële) ignited years of intense creative ferment for both Duchamp and Picabia; it was followed by a lifetime of friendship for all three.
Another gallery at MoMA showcases the bookbindings that Duchamp collaborated on with Mary Reynolds, an expatriate American who was his primary companion in Paris for close to two decades—even weathering, in 1927, his eight-month marriage to an automobile heiress. In the 1930s, Reynolds took up bookbinding, just as Duchamp was preparing to bind his oeuvre into The Box in a Valise. Is it possible that she also influenced him? (During World War II, despite the danger—and Duchamp’s urging her to join him in New York—Reynolds opted at first to remain in occupied Paris, where she played a key role in the Resistance.)
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Duchamp was 67 when he at last found long-term fidelity and domestic happiness with Alexina (“Teeny”) Duchamp, an art-world insider who shared his profound love of chess. Their union ended only with his death in 1968. But in the years before Teeny, Duchamp experienced a final clandestine passion. Scholar Francis Naumann tells the story in his fascinating new book, Impossible: The Love Affair Between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins, and the Artwork It Inspired.
Duchamp and Maria Martins most likely met in March 1943, at the opening of an exhibition of her sculptures at the Valentine Gallery on East 57th Street, which was also showing new paintings by Piet Mondrian. (Duchamp knew the Dutch painter from Mondrian’s years in Paris.) If opposites attract, that was the case then. The Brazilian sculptor was vibrant and outgoing, a beautiful socialite married to a diplomat, and the mother of two teenage daughters. Yet Martins was also a serious and ambitious artist, whose biomorphic sculptures, drawing upon iconography from Amazonian folklore and flora, had earned her significant critical recognition and commercial success.
An article about Martins appeared in Vogue in April 1943, with a picture of her carving a life-size female figure in her atelier atop the Brazilian embassy in Washington, DC. (A year later, Vogue would run a photograph of jewelry she created, superimposed on an image of her face.) Yet she also kept a duplex apartment/studio on Park Avenue and 58th Street (just around the corner from the gallery that represented her). A picture taken there in 1946 shows her in a spacious workroom, surrounded by massive plaster and bronze casts; just visible in the background is a small framed photograph of Duchamp. By then, the two artists had fallen deeply in love. Their affair, though largely secret, would persist in different forms—erotic, aesthetic, intellectual, and epistolary—for eight years and far longer in memory for them both.
What is the true measure of a relationship’s success? For historians looking on from the outside, it’s a difficult thing to determine. We do know that Duchamp helped to introduce Martins to the community of exiled European Surrealists who had gathered in New York during the war and that, while she was involved with him, her work grew in psychological depth and erotic intensity. Duchamp, on the other hand, was inspired to create a handful of small sculptures now on view at MoMA: erotic objects such as Female Fig Leaf (1950), teasingly abstract yet seemingly cast from a woman’s intimate body part.
Martins also modeled for the life-size, naked female figure at the center of Duchamp’s last major work, which he labored on in secret during the final 20 years of his life (when he claimed to have given up artmaking for chess). His studies for this work, Étant donnés (Given) (1946–66), are on display at MoMA. Duchamp, ever the trickster, arranged for the work to be put on public view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art only after his death; it remains there today.
Meanwhile, visitors to the Duchamp exhibition, which fills MoMA’s entire sixth floor, can also take the escalator one flight down to a light-filled, fifth-floor atrium, where amid sculptures by Matisse, Picasso, and other men, stands a major work by Maria Martins. Impossible III (1946), cast in expressive bronze, shows two figures—one ambiguously male, the other female, yet both strangely vegetal—who appear at once locked in an embrace and repelled from each other by an invisible force. Surrealist and Existentialist, floridly tropical, monstrous yet deeply moving, it is her monument to the force of an impossible love.
And art lovers with deep pockets, take note: The first of three known versions of this bronze, belonging to a private collection, is currently on display at Rago/Wright (501 West 20th Street), where it will join the auction house’s May 14 sale of postwar and contemporary art. So some lucky individual—or hopefully, some public institution—may be inspired to take the artistic fruit of a very private passion home with them.