In the Manner of Duchamp, 1942-47: the years of the "mirrorical return"

Thomas Singer

New Yorkers out on the town for an evening of art in late October 1942 would have found Paul Delvaux's Aurore (1937) holding pride of place at the far end of the long, narrow room that displayed Surrealist works in Peggy Guggenheim's newly opened gallery Art of This Century on West Fifty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The painting depicted four tree-women nude from the waist up, bark from the waist down, standing in a circle around a short masonry pedestal on which rested a mirror and a large, white fabric bow. The mirror held the image of a fifth woman's breasts (Fig. 1). (1)

Had these art viewers then visited the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion on Madison Avenue at Fiftieth Street, they would have seen reproduced in the catalogue a photograph of the tondo of Marcel Duchamp's In the Manner of Delvaux (1942), a small collage composed of the circular photograph set on a field of tinfoil and backed with cardboard. The photograph showed the top of a small masonry pedestal on which rested a mirror and a large, white fabric bow. The mirror held the image of a woman's breasts (Fig. 2). (2)

These art viewers might reasonably have assumed that Duchamp had composed his collage either by photographing the central detail of Delvaux's painting or by cutting out a circular piece from a reproduction. (3) The two works seemed so alike that in the time it took to walk through midtown from the Art of This Century gallery to the First Papers exhibition, their slight differences, so slight as to be "infra-thin," according to a concept Duchamp had developed, would be lost to memory. (4) But contrary to what the New Yorkers of 1942 might have supposed, the photograph of Duchamp's collage was neither a photograph of the central detail of Delvaux's painting nor a cutout from a reproduction. The photograph of Duchamp's collage repeated all the elements of Delvaux's detail, but the breasts were not identically shaped, the angle of vision in the two works was slightly but noticeably different, and even the fold of the fabric bows below the mirror differed in subtle ways (Fig. 3). With these minute variations, In the Manner of Delvaux was both "the authentic work of Rrose Selavy" (5) and a humorous piece of apparent forgery, a species of artistic blague. As Duchamp later told an interviewer for a French weekly news magazine: "I have a very great respect for humour, it's a protection that allows one to pass through all the mirrors." (6)

The collage also served a more serious purpose. It was Duchamp's "visiting card." (7) In the Manner of Delvaux announced that by a personal "renvoi miroirique," a "mirrorical return," Duchamp had come back, after a delay of some twenty years, to live in New York, the city where he had exhibited the painting Nude Descending a Staircase to scandalous acclaim, constructed The Large Glass, named and publicly exhibited his readymades, and created his female persona Rrose Selavy. And, with the enigmatic sleights of hand that were Duchamp's specialty, the collage hinted at a new approach to his work, a mirror image one might say, of Duchamp's previous artistic style and practices. In short, Duchamp was moving from the two-dimensional glass of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) to the three-dimensional installation Etant donnes: 1[degrees] La chute d'eau / 2[degrees] Le gaz d'eclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas).

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is an enormous work, slightly over nine feet high and almost six feet wide, whose elements were constructed largely of oil paint, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust. It is composed of two panes of glass of the same size, one mounted on the other. The top panel is the realm of the bride, whose most important elements are the bride herself, on the left-hand side, and her cloudlike cinematic blossoming, which seems to emanate from her and move across the top of the glass from left to right. The lower panel is the realm of the bachelors, which shows, more or less from left to right, the nine malic molds, the waterwheel in its glider, the coffee grinder surmounted by the sieves and the scissors, and finally, the oculist witnesses. Duchamp abandoned work on the piece in 1923, leaving it definitively unfinished, particularly the right-hand third of the bachelors' realm, where the oculist witnesses were to have been joined toward the bottom by the corkscrewlike toboggan and the splash and, toward the top, by the boxing match and the juggler of gravity. It is not the purpose of this essay to explain how all of these elements function, let alone what we are supposed to make of the ensemble, but the reception accorded The Large Glass, and Duchamp's work in general from 1912 on, has varied from considering it one of the twentieth century's greatest hoaxes to one of its greatest enigmas.

In 1934 Duchamp published an edition of 320 copies of the almost identically titled (only the comma is missing) The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even. Each copy contained in a green-flocked cardboard box a collection of ninety-three scrupulously reproduced facsimiles of the notes, drawings, diagrams, and photographs, with one color plate, that recorded his thinking about and plans for the work in glass. Only some of these thoughts and plans were implemented; a good number were rejected or simply never executed. While most of the material comes from the years 1912 to 1915, when Duchamp was planning the work in Paris, there are pieces that date as late as the early 1920s. In part to distinguish these (almost) identically titled works, the former has been commonly referred to as The Large Glass, while the latter has been called The Green Box. In fact, they are two parts of a single work. "I thought I could collect, in an album like the Saint-Etienne catalogue [then something like the French equivalent of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue], some calculations, some reflexions, without relating them," Duchamp told an interviewer late in his life. "I wanted that album to go with the 'Glass,' and to be consulted when seeing the 'Glass' because, as I see it, it must not be 'looked at' in the aesthetic sense of the word. One must consult the book, and see the two together. (8) The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is neither The Large Glass nor The Green Box; it is both of them considered in conjunction.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The full title of Duchamp's final great work appears twice in the notes of The Green Box: "Given / 1st the waterfall / 2nd the illuminating gas." (9) Duchamp, as I will argue below, began planning this work in 1942, and he executed the piece in "silence, slowness, and solitude" from 1946 to 1966. (10) According to his instructions, the piece, the existence of which was known only to Duchamp, Maria Martins, his lover during the late 1940s, and his wife, Teeny, was installed after his death off the large room containing his earlier work, including The Large Glass, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The viewer enters a small, dark room, one side of which shows two old Spanish doors (Fig. 26). In the doors are two eyeholes through which the viewer, now a voyeur, beholds the shocking sight of a lifelike nude splayed out on a bed of twigs and holding a lamp containing the illuminating gas in her uplifted left hand (Fig. 11). Behind her rises a hilly, forested landscape down which a waterfall glitters in the bright light. The relation between The Large Glass and Etant donnes, or Given, will be the subject of much of what follows.

Just as his earlier speculations about the fourth dimension had helped Duchamp generate ideas for The Large Glass, so his current speculations about the infra-thin and the renvoi miroirique were generating ideas about new works.

During the summer of 1945, Duchamp told his friend Denis de Rougemont, "I believe that by the infra-thin one can pass from the second to the third dimension." (11) While mirror images had been important in his thinking about the fourth dimension, they took on new importance with regard to the infra-thin, and especially with regard to the "infra-thin separative difference" that intervenes between supposed "identicals," one example of which would be an object and its mirror image. In a note, Duchamp indicated a parallel between infra-thin and "... Mirror and reflection in the / mirror maximum of / this passage from the 2nd to the 3rd / dimension." Duchamp reconceived the renvoi miroirique, which originated as one of the many processes at work in The Large Glass, as an infra-thin phenomenon. The word renvoi carries different meanings besides the general sense of "return," which includes precisely the more narrow sense of the reflection of an image in a mirror (Le Petit Robert offers the phrase "Les miroirs nous renvoient notre image," Mirrors return our images). Renvoi also refers to a postponement, a deferment, or a putting off, that is, renvoi miroirique can refer to "a delay in glass," a phrase Duchamp used in order to insist that The Bride Stripped Bare was neither a picture nor a painting on glass. But the delay applies to the identity factor in mirror images as well. Mirrors, or any reflecting surface, for that matter, play a substantial role in the construction of human identity and in the fashioning of self-image. In another note on the infra-thin, Duchamp writes, "In Time the same object is not the / same after a 1 second interval--what / Relations with the identity principle?" To return to the phrase from Le Petit Robert example, mirrors reflect our images, but not ourselves--it is a renvoi with an infra-thin "delay included." (12)

In the Manner of Delvaux may seem too slight a work to inaugurate so substantial a reversal in artistic practices and style. After all, the photographic collage did not attract much attention at the time of its creation. (13) But Duchamp was a magician in the economy of small gestures. One of the delights that drew him to the world of chess was the way in which the simple movement of a pawn by one square could rearrange the dynamics of the entire board. In the Manner of Delvaux was just such a pawn, advanced a single square on the chessboard of his art.

"Difference ... Is the Authentic Work of Rrose Selavy"

A curious and telling incident preceded the first public showing of In the Manner of Delvaux following World War II, which occurred at the Pasadena Art Museum's retrospective of 1963, By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy. Months before the opening, Walter Hopps, a curator at the Pasadena Museum and the driving force behind the Duchamp retrospective, wrote the artist asking permission for four copies each to be made of four of the works that would appear in the show. The man doing the copying would be David Hayes, a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, who had earlier convinced his stepmother, Mary Sisler of the Firestone rubber and tire fortune, that Duchamp was a genius and his work should be collected. With some stipulations, Duchamp agreed. In the end, the project proved to be too expensive. Hayes produced only single copies of three works: Nine Malie Molds, Three Standard Stoppages, and In the Manner of Delvaux. At some point before the exhibition opened, Duchamp examined the copies and inscribed "pour certifie conforme Marcel Duchamp 1963" on the replications of Nine Malic Molds and Three Standard Stoppages. In the Manner of Delvaux he left unsigned and uncertified (Fig. 4). Francis M. Naumann, who has written a book on the history of the replications of Duchamp's works, explains, "In terms of quality, the small cropped photograph of In the Manner of Delvaux was clearly inferior to the original collage, which is probably why Duchamp chose to leave this work unsigned." That Hayes's copy is inferior to the original is obvious enough, but quite a few of the copies made by others of Duchamp's work are inferior in greater or lesser degrees to the originals. Clearly something more was at stake. (14)

Hayes's In the Manner of Delvaux looked like Duchamp's collage, but it lacked the quality of "difference" that marked "the authentic work of Rrose Selavy." In a note written on the stationery of the Taverne Royale in Brussels--the very city, as it happens, where young Paul Delvaux spent his childhood and studied art--Duchamp proposed the following project:

  buy or take known
  unknown paintings
  and sign them with the name of
  a known or unknown painter--
  the difference between the "style" ["facture"] and
  the unexpected name for the
  "experts",--is the authentic work
  of Rrose Selavy, and defies
  forgeries (15)

In the Manner of Delvaux is "the authentic work of Rrose Selavy" because it presents itself as a forgery without being one. Otherwise considered, the collage is a forgery of a forgery. Every element in the central detail of Delvaux's Aurore reappears in Duchamp's tondo, but every element is slightly different. Working by himself, or more likely with the help of professional photographers, he took individual photographs of a mirror, naked breasts, and a bow, or found them readymade in some magazine or other, either enlarged or shrank the specific details so that they would all be of the same scale, pasted the different parts together, and then took a final photograph of the photographic collage he had constructed. (16) Hayes's technique was the opposite of Duchamp's. Hayes had simply reproduced Duchamp's work exactly as it had been reproduced in Robert Lebel's monograph of 1959, and had thereby copied the work in the flesh, as it were, but not in the spirit. What was missing was the quality of "difference." And the elusive spirit of blague.

Roger Shattuck, the literary scholar and historian of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French culture, has argued that "la blague [is] the central axis of Duchamp's ethos--more important even than love or language." This categorical statement is somewhat surprising since, in the same collection of essays, Shattuck simultaneously asserts the importance of language in Duchamp's works, writing that "after 1912 (the year he 'stopped' painting), Duchamp's work became increasingly verbal. (17) Duchamp, for his part, repeatedly stressed the importance of the erotic in his work. In a 1959 BBC interview he stated, "Eroticism is a very dear subject to my life.... And it's an animal thing that has so many facets that it's pleasing to use it as a tube of paint, so to speak, to inject in your productions." (18) Returning to the theme late in life, Duchamp proclaimed, "I believe in eroticism a lot.... Eroticism was a theme, even an 'ism.' ... It kept me from being obligated to return to already existing theories, aesthetic or otherwise." (19)

Even if Shattuck is overstating his case by making "la blague ... the central axis of Duchamp's ethos," there is no doubt that it is essential in understanding the artist's writing and his works. Shattuck himself locates the origins of modern blague in the artists' studios of the mid-nineteenth century. He quotes from the Goncourt brothers' novel Manette Salomon (1865): "La Blague--the great Joke, that new form of French wit, born in the artists' studios ... raised amid the downfall of religion and society ... the modern version of the universal doubt ... the nineteenth-century Blague, the great sapper and revolutionary, poisoner of faith and murderer of respect...." (20) In the studios, blague often took the form of caricature, as practiced by Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet in his early years, and most famously by Honore Daumier. At other times it took the form of outright hoaxes, like the blank sheet of white cardboard entitled First Communion of the Chlorinated Young Ladies during a Snowfall that was exhibited at the Art Incoherent show of 1883 by Alphonse Allais. (21) A more famous painterly hoax was Joachim-Raphael Boronali's Et le soleil se coucha sur l'Adriatique, which was exhibited at the 1910 Salon des Independants. Boronali turned out to be Lolo, the donkey mascot of the cafe Lapin Agile, who had painted the picture with the switching of its tail. (22)

Literary blague often took the form of pastiche, the most popular examples being the A la maniere de ... volumes produced from 1908 to 1913 by Paul Reboux and Charles Muller, who parodied famous writers from the Renaissance through their own time. (23) Oddly, the pasticheur closest in spirit to Duchamp's double forgery In the Manner of Delvaux was Marcel Proust. In 1919 he published in book form Pastiches et melanges, drawn from a series of pieces published between 1900 and 1908 in the Sunday literary supplement of Le Figaro. The opening piece, "L'affaire Lemoine," recounts a historically accurate story composed of nine different pastiches ranging from the eighteenth-century memoirist Saint-Simon through nineteenth-century writers like Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and concluding with contemporaries like the now-little-read Henri de Regnier. The twist is that Proust's forgeries of the styles of others are employed to tell the story of a forgery by Lemoine involving a massive hoax: having claimed to have discovered the secret of the artificial fabrication of diamonds, Lemoine had sold enormous numbers of shares in the venture to some very rich and important people. In his note to the first page of the story. Proust explains that he came on the story by chance and found it suitable for an exercise in imitating "the style of [la maniere d(e)] a certain number of writers." (24)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Duchamp used double forgery before he made In the Manner of Delvaux. In 1917 the Fountain was offered for exhibition to the New York Society of Independent Artists, which, like its Parisian namesake, was to have no jury to accept or refuse works and to offer no prizes. The Fountain, of course, was a common men's urinal bought in a plumbing supply store, signed and dated "R. Mutt 1917." Both the object, which was not a fountain in any normally accepted use of the word, and its "artist," R. Mutt, were de la blague. One of Duchamp's close friends submitted the work made in the manner of the fictional R. Mutt. The Fountain, which some of the organizers refused to exhibit, was meant to expose the hypocrisy of the so-called avant-garde and the strict limits to their antitraditional cult of originality. (25)

Who, then, is the butt of In the Manner of Delvaux, that forgery of a forgery: Is it Delvaux, Duchamp himself, or perhaps both? And is the blague serious or merely a sly joke? The answer to the second question is surely: both. As Louise Norton (undoubtedly with the assent, if not the active participation of Duchamp and his two fellow editors Henri-Pierre Roche and Beatrice Wood) wrote about the Fountain in her "Buddha of the Bathroom" essay that appeared in the journal the Blindman (1917): "there are those who anxiously ask, 'Is he serious or is he joking?' Perhaps he is both! Is it not possible?" And then by way of explaining this double state of affairs, Norton added, "[T]here is among us to-day a spirit of 'blague.' ..." (26) Blague, in short, can be a serious joke.

[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.

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.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

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)

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."

[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)

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)

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).

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.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Les Seins Nus

Following the end of World War II, Duchamp sailed for France aboard the Brasil on May 1, 1946. In Paris, he contacted the Surrealist crowd, who assigned him the project of creating the catalogue cover for the Exposition internationale du Surrealisme, which would open during the summer of 1947. His original plan was to re-create the photograph of the two breasts of In the Manner of Delvaux as three-dimensional objects. After returning to the United States in January 1947, he began by creating two plaster models of breasts, intending to make as many as were needed for 999 covers. With time short and the mass reproduction of plaster models too laborious, Duchamp decided to purchase and then touch up the nipples of 999 foam-rubber "falsies," and with the help of Enrico Donati he glued one to each of the front covers of the deluxe catalogue, which he then shipped from New York City to Paris. The back cover carried the exhortation "Priere de toucher" (Please touch) (Fig. 9). For the nonnumbered copies of the catalogue, the breast, as was the case with In the Manner of Delvaux, was represented by a photographic image. (40)

Before returning to the United States in 1947, Duchamp had spent five weeks traveling in Switzerland with Mary Reynolds, his lover of twenty years, and at that time his close friend. They stayed in Bern at the residence of the French ambassador, with whose daughter Mary had served in the Resistance. The ambassador's wife, Helene Hoppenot, suggested they visit the small village of Chexbres, where she had stayed as a child. Duchamp and Mary spent two days there early in August enjoying both the splendid view of Lake Geneva and the picturesque waterfall that cascaded down between Chexbres and the neighboring village of Puidoux. Duchamp photographed the waterfall from several different angles (Fig. 10). (41) He had found an essential part of the landscape, the hilly, forested waterfall, that he would use first in the photographic collage of about 1947 (Fig. 8) and eventually in the photocollage of the background landscape of Etant donnes (Fig. 11).

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

During the mid-1940s, Duchamp began to create entirely new works that he added to the deluxe editions of the Box in a Valise, the portable miniature museum he had started work on in 1935. These original items both had special significance for the receiver and commented, in ways the receiver could not possibly know, on the secret project Etant donnes. (42) To the deluxe version of the Box in a Valise he gave to the Hoppenots, who had sent him to Chexbres, where he discovered the waterfall landscape, Duchamp added a piece called Reflection a main (Fig. 12). Drawn in pencil on paper is a hand that holds a straight handle at the top of which a circular cut 2 3/8 inches in diameter has been made. Behind the cutout. Duchamp placed a real mirror that faced the viewer and then mounted the whole piece on Plexiglas. (43) Francis Naumann points out in the review he wrote of the third edition of Arturo Schwarz's The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1997) that the hand in Reflection a main is taken from the original full-scale plaster cast, now extant only as a photograph, used to make the nude of Etant donnes (Fig. 13). However, at this stage, which would have been sometime between 1946 and 1948, the arm is held straight out from the body and seems to hold "some sort of small cylindrical form." (44) The hand in the photograph is in every way identical to the hand in the piece that Duchamp gave to the Hoppenots, which means that the hand of the full-size plaster cast held, of course, the mirror of Reflection a main. In the end, for reasons that are not quite clear but that may well have to do with his decision to place the viewers behind the Spanish doors (Fig. 26), thereby preventing them from seeing their own reflections, Duchamp would replace the mirror with the gas lamp.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

In presenting Reflection a main to the Hoppenots, Duchamp was doing a number of things at once. He was thanking them, naturally, for their hospitality. The mirror itself could be a reference to the glassy surface of Lake Geneva, where they stayed. But Duchamp was also thanking them--unbeknownst to the couple--for the landscape, the waterfall at Chexbres, that he would use as the background setting for Etant donnes. That is, the mirror reflects the viewer who sees himself in the Bride, who is, in turn, a reflection of the landscape. At 2 3/8 inches in diameter, the mirror of Reflection a main is the same size--give or take a quarter of an inch--as the tondo holding the mirror of In the Manner of Delvaux. And that is because they are the same mirror, showing the same thing: the Bride who is herself her own landscape. The tondo of In the Manner of Delvaux is set in a field of tinfoil, whose glossy surface creates a second mirror, in addition to the mirror of the photograph, in which the onlookers actually see themselves. The shape of the tinfoil recalls the form of the blossoming of the Bride in the top half of The Large Glass. We see ourselves in this blossoming precisely because we are the blossoming: the fruit of the Bride as Eve, the type of Mary, or as the Great Mother goddess whom Paz discusses.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

"L'Impossibilite du Fer"

Among the window displays that Duchamp designed during the 1940s was one at Brentano's flagship store on Fifth Avenue for Denis de Rougemont's book La part du diable. Thereafter, Duchamp and the Swiss moral and political philosopher, who was almost twenty years Duchamp's junior, became friends, and in August 1945 Rougemont invited the artist to spend a week at the lake house he was renting in the Adirondacks.

During lunch on the porch, Duchamp proposed an argument in favor of a very utopian form of anarchy. All that was necessary was to abolish money. After all, people needed to fill their time. The baker would continue to bake bread. What else would he do with himself? And what would be the point of taking more than you needed if you could not sell it? By the evening Duchamp had come up with an example to refute Rougemont's counterclaim during lunch that there was no historic example of a group of human beings ever living in a state of anarchy. "I know a group for which anarchy works very well: it's the family. Right? The kids take from the table or the kitchen what they need. There's no buying and selling, and no legal transactions. Everything happens freely. Between the father and his son, it just gets figured out. The family is the perfect model of a completely anarchistic society." (45)

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Rougemont observed that Duchamp seemed quite proud of his example, and he remembered just how much Duchamp's family--his parents, brothers, and sisters--meant to him. Indeed, with evident emotion, Duchamp turned the conversation to them: "Since the death of my father [pere], I feel that I don't have any points of reference [je me sens prive de repere]. Pere et repere [the pun here is as obvious as it is untranslatable]. I can no longer take on responsibilities. Marriage, for example. It seems to me that I should first go and ask my father for his advice, his O.K. I guess I never grew up and became an adult."

Duchamp then thought about the consequences for an artist of growing old.

"The great crisis comes at about forty," he said. "That's when you have to start all over again, or resign yourself to self-imitation."

"You'll feel that soon enough," he told Rougemont, who was thirty-nine. "You'll see. At about forty, you've got to become your own father."

Duchamp was talking to Rougemont, but he was also talking to himself. Duchamp had turned forty in 1927, the year of his incomprehensible marriage to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, a marriage that, he laconically explained late in life, "didn't take." (46) The point was that Eugene Duchamp had died two years earlier, and therefore his son had been unable to ask for "his advice, his O.K." And 1927 was also the year in which Duchamp devoted himself to playing chess as a professional and definitively stopped producing, for the next seven years, artworks of any kind that were not directly related to chess.

Thinking back to their conversation about remaking oneself at the age of forty, Rougemont asked Duchamp if it was true that he simply decided one day to give up painting and did so at the very moment of his greatest successes in the United States. "Not at all," he replied in a tone of amused indignation. "I didn't give up art as a conscious decision. I didn't decide anything at all. I'm simply waiting for ideas. I had thirty-three ideas; I made thirty-three pictures. I don't want to copy myself like the others do. You see, to be a painter is to copy and repeat the couple of ideas one came upon here or there.... Since the creation of the art market, everything has changed radically in the world of art. Look at how they produce! Do you think they like doing that, and that they take pleasure in painting fifty times, a hundred times, the same thing? Not at all. They don't even make pictures; they make checks."

Duchamp rose, went to his room, opened the Box in a Valise he had been working on, and pulled out the reproduction of his Tzanck Check. He handed it to Rougemont. Duchamp had meticulously created it, even down to the minuscule watermarking of its lower half, to pay his Parisian dentist for work he had done. The check was numbered 4864 in red in the upper left-hand corner, dated Paris, December 3, 1919, at upper right, paying to the order of Daniel Tzanck $150.00 drawn on "The Teeth's Loan & Trust Company, Consolidated, 2 Wall Street, New York." Stamped in red ink in a vertical line down its center was the authentication: ORIGINAL. The check was a forgery, since the funds to cover it were deposited in a nonexistent bank, but it defied forgery, since it was three times the size of a normal check. What could not be disputed was that it was "the authentic work of Rrose Selavy."

"And your dentist accepted it as payment?" Rougemont asked.

"How could he not? This isn't a fake check, since it's entirely made by me! And signed! What could be more authentic? And at least, it couldn't be passed off as something artistic." The annoying thing, Duchamp confessed to Rougemont, was that he had had to buy the check back from his dentist so that he could make reproductions of it for the Box in a Valise.

Before lunch on Friday, August 7, five days after Duchamp's arrival at Lake George, Rougemont questioned Duchamp about the reference to the infra-mince, the infra-thin, on the back cover of the March 1945 number of the avant-garde magazine View, an issue devoted to Duchamp.

"What is this category of the infra-thin that you talk about in the special number of View?" Rougemont asked. "Quand la fumee de tabac sent aussi de la bouche qui l'exhale, les deux odeurs s'epousent par infra-mince."

A wonderful piece of poetry in French: "When tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth that exhales it, the two odors are married by [the] infra-thin."

"Can you give other examples?" Rougemont asked.

Duchamp confessed that examples were all he could give: "It's something that as yet eludes our scientific definitions." He explained that he chose mince, "thin," an everyday word rather than a scientific-sounding term, because he did not want to suggest that the concept had anything to do with the kind of precise measurements one makes in the laboratory. "The sound, or the music," he gave Rougemont as a further example, "that a pair of corduroy velvet pants makes when the two legs brush against one another reveals the infra-thin. Or the hollowness between the two sides of a very thin piece of paper. I'm still working on it.... It's a category to which I've given a lot of thought during the last ten years. I believe that by the infra-thin one can pass from the second to the third dimension."

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

On August 9, which must have been the day Duchamp left Lake George to return to New York City, Rougemont summed up his thoughts about his friend. Among the word games Rougemont and his guests had played during the evenings was one in which one person wrote a question while the others simultaneously wrote answers. Rougemont wrote the question, "What is genius?" The "answer" that Duchamp had written was "L'impossibilite du fer": the impossibility of iron. Having read it, he added, "Another pun, evidently." The pun on "fer" and "faire" (to make, to do) is obvious enough, and "L'impossibilite du faire" came to Rougemont's mind when he was thinking about Duchamp's insistence on his "laziness," as he liked to call it. (47) Rougemont was not in the least convinced. "The artist-inventor is simply taking his time," Rougemont wrote in his journal. "Duchamp reveals himself through ironic withdrawals, acts through his almost cunning absences, by his imperceptibly light touches." He was, Rougemont thought, "the Leonardo da Vinci of the age."

"Renvoi Miroirique"?

The expression "renvoi miroirique" first appears among the notes of The Green Box that treat the Splash and the Occulist Witnesses. In short, the Illuminating Gas that originates in the Nine Malic Molds constantly changes its nature as it passes through the Capillary Tubes and the Sieves to fall in liquid form down the spiraling Planes of Flow at the lower right corner of the Bachelors' Domain. Except for the Occulist Witnesses, the entire right third of the lower panel remained unfinished, although the Planes of Flow are visible both in the scaled-down drawing of The Large Glass made in 1913 and in the copperplate etching of the Large Glass Completed of 1965. The drops of the Splash, which are surely related to the Bachelors' onanism, rise toward the Bride's domain, are "dazzled" by the Oculist Witnesses, which Duchamp composed by meticulously scraping away at an area of mirror silvering to form the three patterns resembling figures in an optician's chart, and then pass as mirrored images through the three planes of the horizon that separate the lower and upper panes of glass, where the drops are reflected in the realm of the Bride near the area of the Nine Shots. The Splash, with its mirrorical reflection in the upper panel, is a terminal event: it "ends the series of bachelor operations...."

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

The essential point, and Duchamp returns to it, is that the drops of the Splash never actually reach the upper panel: "The mirrorical drops, not the drops themselves but their image, pass" into the realm of the Bride. (48) The Malic Molds can never reach the object of their erotic desire because the Illuminating Gas passes up to the realm of the Bride only as a renvoi miroirique. In a note from The Green Box that repeats both the word mirror and the verb form of renvoi, Duchamp writes of the Bachelors that "they will never be able to pass beyond the Mask = They would have been as if enveloped, alongside their regrets, by a mirror reflecting back to them [d'un miroir qui leur aurait renvoye] their own complexity to the point of their being hallucinated rather onanistically." (49) In the Manner of Delvaux demonstrates a further development of the renvoi miroirique. The viewers of the piece are Bachelors twice removed from the breasts of the Bride: once, because all they see is her mirrored reflection; twice, because that mirrored reflection is presented as a photographic image.

In the Manner of Delvaux and the renvoi miroirique are explicitly linked in Duchamp's layout, with the collaboration of Arturo Schwarz, for Marcel Duchamp: Ready-Mades, etc. (1913-1964), the exhibition catalogue for Omaggio a Marcel Duchamp, a show that featured a new series of editions of Duchamp's readymades, presented at the Galleria Schwarz in Milan in the summer of 1964. The front of the dust jacket reproduces the Monte Carlo Bond of 1924, with Man Ray's photograph of Duchamp's face and hair heavily lathered with shaving soap, at top center (Fig. 14), while the back reproduces In the Manner of Delvaux. In the center of the front black clothbound cover, printed in white, is a drawing of the Fountain made earlier in the year and modeled on the famous photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz immediately after the Society of Independent Artists refused to exhibit it in 1917 (Fig. 15). Printed above the Fountain are the words:

   UN ROBINET ORIGINAL REVOLUTIONNAIRE
     "RENVOI MIROIRIQUE"?

and below:

   "UN ROBINET QUI S'ARRETE DE COULER QUAND ON NE
      L'ECOUTE PAS"

With the white drawing of the Fountain standing out against the black background, the cover suggests a photographic negative. In a series of copperplate etchings done at the same time, the drawing of the Fountain for the cover of the catalogue served as a photographic negative, or as an actual mirrored image, for the copperplate of the Fountain was an exact copy of the cover design, with the result that the etchings themselves produced a reverse mirror image of the original copperplate with the small holes in the urinal off center to the left and the large hole for the flush water off center to the right. (50)

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

"The faucet that stops running when nobody is listening to it" is part of a longer sentence that appeared first in Anemic cinema (1926), and later both as part of the puns and word games that are printed on four pages of music paper in the Box in a Valise and in Duchamp's 1939 anthology of forty-two short writings entitled Rrose Selavy. The longer sentence translates: "Among our articles of lazy hardware [quincaillerie paresseuse] we recommend a faucet which stops running when nobody is listening to it." (51) This recalls Duchamp's Lazy Hardware store window installation of April 1945 for the publication of Breton's Arcane 17, which featured a headless mannequin wearing a skimpy and largely transparent apron with a phalliclike faucet attached to the middle of her right thigh (Fig. 16). (52) The rotated Fountain, of course, functions as a faucet that stops running when no one is using it as a urinal and therefore is not listening to the urine gurgling into it. In addition, the utilitarian disconnection and the rotation of the Fountain produce a quite comical situation, a kind of quincaillerie amusante [amusing hardware]. With the hole at the base--which should be at the top to allow the water to flow down and flush out the urinal--any male who attempted to use the Fountain would find that by a renvoi miroirique his urine would come right back out of the hole to splash on him. (53)

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

The design of the dust jacket, which determined the two works that would open and close the catalogue, is of great significance to Duchamp's career as an "an-artist." (54) Monte Carlo Bond was the first work that Duchamp completed following his abandonment of The Large Glass and his rejection of all forms of painting and anything resembling what was traditionally recognized as art. As he jokingly wrote to Francis Picabia in 1924, "You see I haven't quit being a painter, now I'm sketching on chance." (55) For its part, In the Manner of Delvaux announced his mirrorical return in 1942 to works that, as he later told Rougemont, did not involve "resign[ing] yourself to self-imitation" and inaugurated a new period that would culminate in the installation Etant donnes.

Autobiographical references aside, the dust jacket's design poses the question of how Man Ray's photograph of the lathered Duchamp relates to the reflected breasts of In the Manner of Delvaux. Duchamp himself provides the clue: "RENVOI MIROIRIQUE"? That is, the images on the front and the back of the dust jacket of Marcel Duchamp: Ready-Mades, etc. (1913-1964) are mirror images of each other. The two photographs portray Rrose Selavy and Duchamp, respectively, in mirrors that reverse their gender. The "infra-thin separation" of Duchamp's "visiting card," In the Manner of Delvaux, reverses the male Duchamp as the female Bride. In one of his posthumously published notes, Duchamp mused about the interrelation of the infra-thin, the renvoi miroirique, and sexual difference: "Reflections from a mirror--or a glass ... infra-thin separation ... separation / has the 2 senses male and female...." (56) The relation of mirror imaging to "the 2 senses male and female" goes back in his work to as early as November 1908, when he published his first cartoon, the drawing Feminisme / La Femme Cure, in the newspaper Le Courier Francais: it shows a lady dressed as a curate standing before the mirror of her vanity table (Fig. 17). Among the uniforms of the Nine Malic Molds in The Large Glass is that of a priest, indicating that this Bride before the mirror has been transformed into one of the Bachelors.

[FIGURE 17 OMITTED]

In Duchamp lathered, we are presented with a portrait of Rrose Selavy transformed by the renvoi miroirique of photography into Marcel Duchamp. Although the photograph shows no mirror, one is clearly implied, as Dawn Ades persuasively argues in her article "Duchamp's Masquerades." Ades writes that "the gaze at the camera lens operates as a replay of the mirror's confirmation of beauty," points to the project proposed in the White Box notes published in 1966, "Photo ...: My portrait in the bathroom mirror," (57) and argues that for the shaver, "The bathroom mirror is the male counterpart to the dressing-table looking glass." Ades also points out that at roughly the same time that Man Ray took the photographs of Duchamp lathered, the latter was also working with Man Ray on the series of Rrose Selavy photographs in which he wears the hat of Picabia's lover, Germaine Everling (Fig. 18). (58) Clearly, the two series of photographs are related. Duchamp is Rrose Selavy (about to be, that is, "delay included") rasee, recalling the photograph of Duchamp with his head shaved in order to create the Headlight Child tonsure (from the Jura-Paris Road project--the "headlight child could, graphically, be a comet, which would have its tail in front...." (59)) of the late 1910s or early 1920s (Fig. 19), and foreshadowing the Mona Lisa rasee of 1965. (60) Duchamp wrote in 1912, "The Jura-Paris road ... [will find] a termination at one end in the chief of the 5 nudes, at the other in the headlight-child." (61) The dust jacket of the exhibition catalogue forms a perfect circle by opening and closing with references to the Jura-Paris road. At one end is Duchamp lathered, as if in preparation for the Headlight Child tonsure; at the other end the "5 nus" or "seins nus" of In the Manner of Delvaux.

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

Infra-thin: Molds and Castings

Duchamp had told Rougemont that the category of the infra-thin could not be defined scientifically. One reason for this, as he wrote in one of the forty-six notes on the concept that were published as the opening section of Notes after his death, was that the infra-thin was always an adjective and never a noun. (62) Rather than being a thing in itself, it is a concept that reveals itself in a multitude of disparate phenomena. Secondly, Duchamp wanted to keep the infra-thin grounded not in the world of scientific speculation--like the fourth dimension, which is mathematically conceivable but incapable of visualization to the three-dimensional eye--but in the world of our everyday senses and experiences. Consider the examples Duchamp provides Rougemont: the olfactory infra-thin of tobacco smoke exhaled from a mouth, the auditory infra-thin of the corduroy trousers, and the tactile infra-thin of tracing paper. Other examples from the posthumously published notes include the thermal infra-thin of heat remaining on a chair from which one has just arisen and the temporal infra-thin between the blast of a gun and the appearance of the bullet hole on a target. (63) Duchamp's last remark to Rougemont, that he believed that "by the infra-thin one can pass from the second to the third dimension," may sound scientific, in that it suggests geometric concepts, but Duchamp was more likely referring to the relation between the kinds of media in which he was working, in particular, to the shift from the two-dimensional paintings, whether on canvas or on glass, that he had produced during the years leading up to and including The Large Glass, to the three-dimensional works that increasingly interested him following his return to New York City in 1942. (64)

[FIGURE 19 OMITTED]

Duchamp told Rougemont as well that he had "given a lot of thought [to the infra-thin] during the last ten years." Indeed, Duchamp had been thinking about the infra-thin since at least the summer of 1937, when he penned the key note in which he contemplated the idea of "identicals," using the example of "the most identical 'castings'" from "the same mold." He concluded that "All 'identicals' as / identical as they may be, (and / the more identical they are) / move toward this / infrathin separative / difference." (65) In the most general terms, the infra-thin is a liminal concept, a way to think about the passage across infinitesimal thresholds, whether they be sensorial, intellectual, or artistic. The key is the "separative difference" that creates the central paradox of the infra-thin, both by intervening between "identicals," like castings produced from the same mold, or objects and their mirror images, to affirm their otherness, and by intervening between opposites, like molds and castings, or the male and female genders, to affirm their sameness.

Duchamp's concept of the infra-thin may well have grown out of, or at least grown along with, his comic musings about a "transformer ... [of] slight, wasted energies." The following note, probably written in the mid- to late 1930s, was published in Andre Breton's Anthology of Black Humor (1940):

   A transformer designed to utilize the slight wasted energies such
   as: / the excess of pressure on an electric switch. / the exhalation
   of tobacco smoke / the growth of a head of hair, of other body hair
   and of the nails. / the fall of urine and excrement. / movements of
   fear, astonishment, boredom, anger. / laughter. / dropping of tears.
   / demonstrative gestures of hands, feet, nervous tics. / forbidding
   glances / falling over with surprise. / stretching, yawning,
   sneezing. / ordinary spitting and of blood. / vomiting. /
   ejaculation. / unruly hair, cowlicks. / the sound of nose-blowing,
   snoring. / fainting. / whistling, singing. / sighs etc.... (66)

Both the example of the infra-thin that Duchamp provided to Rougemont, "The sound, or the music that a pair of corduroy velvet pants makes when the two legs brush against one another," and the above-mentioned example from the posthumously published Notes, the heat remaining on a chair from which one has just arisen, could easily fit into this list of "slight, wasted energies."

What is most evident is how Duchamp's interest in the absurd and the fantastic changed since the years when he was working on The Large Glass and playing with the paradoxes of fourth-dimensional space. Duchamp's model was no longer the delirious logic of Alfred Jarry's Pataphysics or Raymond Roussel's exotic locales and strange machines generated by outrageous word associations. Rather, the absurd and fantastic are to be found in our everyday world. Whether this shift is related to the menace of extremist political movements during the mid- to late 1930s, the violent instability in France, the rise of Nazism in Germany, the consolidation of the Stalinist state in Russia, all of which made many sensitive men and women more attentive to and appreciative of the fragility of the little things of life, is open to question. In any case, Duchamp's concept of the infra-thin, which replaced the fourth dimension as a primary generative concept, soon expanded from "slight, wasted energies" to embrace a rich new field of potential paradoxes.

In late January 1942, Duchamp enigmatically described the concept of the infra-thin in a letter to his friend Henri-Pierre Roche as "a production which is no longer manual but coudique (as in 'elbow')." (67) Here, Duchamp is clearly thinking about the note he made on "crease molds," which humorously plays with the reversibility of molds and castings. It reads:

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

   Crease molds. / in the elbow's case [dans le cas du coude] / (right
   elbow) Mold

   type ex.--worn trousers and very creased. / (giving a sculptural
   expression of the individual who wore them) / the act of wearing the
   trousers, the trouser / wearing is comparable to the hand / making of
   an original sculpture

   With in addition, a technical inversion: / while wearing the trousers
   / the leg works like the hand of the / sculptor and produces a mold
   (instead / of a molding) and a mold in cloth / which / expresses
   itself in creases.... (68)

Duchamp exploited this idea when he turned the sculptural object Female Fig Leaf of 1950 into the reversed image that appeared on the cover of Le Surrealisme, Meme early in 1956 (Figs. 20, 21). By rotating the object and then retouching a photographic negative made of it, the Female Fig Leaf appears turned inside out, its concavities become convexities, producing both a casting from the original sculpture and the original mold used to produce that sculpture. The play on mold and casting was built into the Female Fig Leaf itself, for it could be viewed either as a mold to make castings that reveal a female's private parts or as a casting to be used as a fig leaf to conceal a female's private parts.

Objet-dard of 1951 (Fig. 22) suggests the same play of mold and casting, this time with the additional twist of gender reversals. As a casting, the phalliclike object appears to be the product of a vaginalike mold; as a mold, the Objet-dard could be used for the casting of vaginas. The reversibility of mold and casting, then, is analogous to the reversibility of genders and, as such, demonstrates the quality of difference in the renvoi miroirique. In the posthumously published note quoted above, Duchamp mused about the infra-thin in its relation to sexual difference: "infra-thin separation ... has the 2 senses male and female...." (69) By a happy coincidence, the Objet-dard came from the armature used to support the breast of the fallen Bride of Etant donnes during the casting process. Because the sculpture suggests a phallus and therefore, by synecdoche, a male, Eve and Adam have swapped roles, for Eve's rib has been used to create Adam.

[FIGURE 21 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 23 OMITTED]

Through the Glass and Back Again

In addition to designing the catalogue cover for the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme of 1947, Duchamp planned an "altar" for the exhibition's "labyrinth" section before returning to the United States. He conceived the altar (but left its construction to the young Surrealist Matta, with help from Frederick Kiesler, Breton, and possibly others) as an environment displaying the Juggler of Gravity, a figure intended to occupy the right side of the upper panel of The Large Glass but never completed. Duchamp had envisioned an important role for the Juggler in the scheme of The Large Glass, as is suggested first by the very fact that it is gravity that he juggles. In an important note in which Duchamp set down his "Definitive title: The bride stripped bare by her bachelors even....," he added, "The picture in general is only a series of variations on 'the law of gravity' / a sort of enlargement, or relaxation of this law...." (70) Secondly, Duchamp remarked, in the context of a work meant to exemplify the "beauty of indifference," that the ball he juggles is itself "the instrument of indifference." (71) In the diagrams of the Juggler Duchamp made in his notes, he conceived the figure as a sort of high pedestal table, of the type one might find in a cafe, having either three or four legs from which rises a long shaft holding a large platelike surface on which a ball precariously rolls as he dances--or might dance, had the stripping in fact occurred--on the Bride's clothes. (72) Moreover, Duchamp relates the occurrence of the Splash, which initiates the renvoi miroirique, to the operation of the Juggler of Gravity (alternatively called the Tender or Handler of Gravity), with the apparatus called the Boxing Match apparently acting as intermediary. "Direct these splashes," he writes, "which should be used for the manoeuvering of the handler of gravity. / (Boxing match.)" (73)

"L'impossibilite du fer" had been Duchamp's written response to Rougemont's secret question during one of the word games played at the Lake George house in the summer of 1945. "L'impossibilite du faire" had been one sense in which Rougemont had taken his response. The doing is impossible, and yet somehow it must be done. In creating a three-dimensional installation for the Juggler, Duchamp had definitively passed, as he had mentioned to Rougemont, from "the second to the third dimension" via the infra-thin. In this instance, he passed from the two dimensions of the Glass, on which the Juggler of Gravity would have appeared, to the three-dimensional installation of the 1947 Surrealist exhibition, which hinted at the larger and much more involved three-dimensional installation he was working on secretly in his Fourteenth Street studio. The mirrored image of the breasts of In the Manner of Delvaux first announced this passage. In one of the notes on the infra-thin he remarks that a "mirror ... could serve / as an optical illustration to the idea / of the infra thin as / 'conductor' from the 2nd to / the 3rd dimension." Indeed, he continues in the same note: "Mirror and reflection in the / mirror maximum of / this passage from the 2nd to the 3rd / dimension." (74)

As a photograph of a mirror image, the Bride of In the Manner of Delvaux served as the transitional work in the movement from the second to the third dimension. Early in his thinking about the project, Duchamp had planned to use the glass of The Large Glass as a photographic plate and to transfer the Bride and other elements onto it by photographic means. (75) When this proved impractical, he satisfied himself by representing the Bride not in the earth tones of the Munich canvas of 1912 but in the black-and-white tones of photography. As a photograph, Duchamp's In the Manner of Delvaux looks back to the Bride of The Large Glass. What is new is that the breasts of the Bride in the collage are photographed as they appear in a mirror image. That is, In the Manner of Delvaux is both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, and it thereby embodies the moment of the passage, the infra-thin separative difference, between the two dimensions. In the first place, the mirror reverses the image, making the photograph we see analogous to a photographic negative, which had an important place in Duchamp's thinking about molds and castings, one of the recurring technical concerns in his work from the 1940s until his death. "By mold is meant," Duchamp wrote, "from the point of view of form and color, the negative (photographic)...." (76) Since the photograph of the mirror-reversed breasts of In the Manner of Delvaux are analogous to a "negative (photographic)," they function as a preliminary mold for the breasts of the fallen Bride of Etant donnes and, by synecdoche, the preliminary mold for the fallen Bride herself. Secondly, in a note entitled "Cast Shadows," probably written about 1913 (it was not included in The Green Box but was published separately by his artist friend Matta in 1948), Duchamp contemplated "mak[ing] a picture using cast shadows.... This for the upper part of the glass included between the horizon and the 9 holes. [C]ast shadows formed by the splashes coming from below like some jets of water which weave forms in their transparency." (77) This is the same area where the Juggler of Gravity was to have performed his dance. That is, these cast shadows would complement the renvoi miroirique of the Splash. An image in a mirror, Duchamp speculated, created the equivalent of a "Shadow projected in 3 dimensions." In the Manner of Delvaux constitutes a photographic image of breasts projected in the "3 virtual dimensions" of just such a mirror. (78) As part of the installation of The Juggler of Gravity, Duchamp repeated the motif of the photographic collage by placing one of the three-dimensional falsies from the exhibition's catalogue cover on a plate below the Juggler.

[FIGURE 24 OMITTED]

The Juggler of Gravity was taken apart when the exhibition closed and now survives only in two photographs. These photographs tell a fascinating story. In the first, the one taken by Denise Bellon, the viewer can see an ordinary household flat iron hanging in the air below the large plate of the pedestal table that holds the Juggler's ball (Fig. 23). (79) In the second photograph, taken by Willy Maywald, the iron has fallen to the ground and lies behind the breast and below the Juggler (Fig. 24). The bottom surface of the flat iron faces the viewer and reveals a surprising inscription: "A REFAIRE LE PASSE" (Fig. 25). The irony of this iron is that the French expression for a flat iron is le fer a repasse. (80) In a simultaneously verbal and visual elaboration of his phrase "L'impossibilite du fer," Duchamp has substituted the homophone faire for fer and rearranged the syllables of le fer a repasse to create the new phrase "a refaire le passe" (the past is to be redone). (81) The fall of the iron enigmatically reveals Duchamp's new project to redo the past by representing the Bride of The Large Glass, who is "the apotheosis of virginity," as the fallen Bride of Etant donnes. Over a period of five years, from 1942, when he made In the Manner of Delvaux, to 1947, when he designed The Juggler of Gravity, Duchamp worked out the techniques he would use in creating Etant donnes, a work that would be the renvoi miroirique of The Large Glass through an infra-thin passage from the second to the third dimension: a combination of photographic collage, like In the Manner of Delvaux, for the background landscape and a three-dimensional sculptural object, like The Juggler of Gravity installation, for the foreground. Duchamp had found a way, as he mentioned during his talks with Rougemont, "to start all over again." Among the paradoxes inherent in this photographic collage is that he avoided self-imitation by presenting a pastiche of another artist, and that he "start[ed] all over again" by remaking an element, the Bride, of the work that he began in 1912 with the Jura-Paris Road project and ended in 1923 with the definitively unfinished Large Glass. The work is the same, and yet it is different. The Bride is represented in a different condition and by a different technique, and the landscape in which she is placed is no longer hidden. And that "difference ... is the authentic work of Rrose Selavy."

[FIGURE 25 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 26 OMITTED]

The essential point in understanding just how Duchamp explicated "L'impossibilite du fer" is to consider that the order of the photographs taken by Bellon and Maywald (which was taken first, which second) does not matter in the least. Obviously, one was taken first, the other second, but the actual sequence is meaningless in the sense of being nothing more than a historical accident. For, as impossible as it may seem, what has fallen (the iron, "le fer," the damnable deed, "le faire") will rise again, and what has risen will again fall. That is, the order is circular, circularity being an enduring motif both in Duchamp's writings and in his works. For once the viewers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art have looked through the "trous du voyeur," the voyeur's holes, drilled into the Spanish double door (Fig. 26), they must turn around and reenter the room dominated by The Large Glass. This is true even if Duchamp himself did not stipulate that Etant donnes be placed in its exact location with only one opening to do double duty as entrance and exit (he did insist that he wanted it near The Large Glass). The placement of Etant donnes was, as Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne on the subject of the cracks in The Large Glass, "the destiny of things." (82) The onlooker physically must pass from the unfallen Bride of The Large Glass to the Fallen Bride of Etant donnes, and then, caught in Duchamp's circular logic, return to the Risen Bride. There simply is no other way out. And so on, by a renvoi miroirique, through the glass and back again. "L'impossibilite du fer," and yet, "A REFAIRE LE PASSE."

My special thanks to Monique Fong, who was close to Duchamp the man during the 1950s and 1960s and who inspired me by her conversation and her letters to write about Duchamp's post-World War II days in New York City; to Jacqueline Matisse Monnier of the Duchamp Archives, who offered encouraging words and image permissions; to Calvin Tomkins, who read and commented on an earlier version of my manuscript; to Paul Franklin, editor of Etant Donne, who was instrumental in tracking down the location of images that I had sought in vain; and to Stacey Bomento at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Department of Rights and Reproductions, who expended a great amount of time in gathering together better than half of the images I required. All mistakes are mine, but special thanks to Lory Frankel, who did a superb job of suggesting stylistic changes and editing the text. Finally, to Finnegan Bryan Singer, for whom I write what I write.

Notes

1. The painting has also been referred to in English variously as Dawn, At Break of Day, or Tree-Women. On the inaugural show of Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, entitled The Art of This Century, see Lewis Kachur, "Frederick Kiesler's Surrealist Installations," in Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 200-204; Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (1994; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 149-52; and Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography. Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict, rev. and enl. ed. (1946; New York: Universe Books, 1979).

Arturo Schwarz's, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp was literally by my side during both the research for and the writing of this essay, and to Schwarz I owe innumerable points of information that must go uncited in my text. I also have consulted Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, "Ephemerides," in Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, ed. Pontus Hulten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993); and Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), to verify numerous details concerning Duchamp's life.

2. I have been unable to find any firsthand reports confirming either that Duchamp's collage was exhibited in the First Papers show or that it appeared only in the catalogue. While the unpaginated "Chronological Table of Exhibitions" printed on yellow sheets toward the center of Hulten (as in n. 1) lists the work as one of two pieces by him on exhibit at the show (the other, Network of Stoppages, 1914, was exhibited), Robert Lebel, in the catalogue raisonne section of his monograph Marcel Duchamp, 174, cat. no. 179, specifies that it was only "Repr." in the catalogue. Since Lebel had the opportunity to consult with Duchamp about matters of this kind, awaiting further evidence I must provisionally conclude that the collage was reproduced in the catalogue but was not exhibited in the First Papers show, though it might have appeared in Peggy Guggenheim's Exhibition of Collage, which ran from mid-April to mid-May 1943 at her Art of This Century gallery. The First Papers show and the world of the Surrealist emigres in and around New York have been the subject of a number of excellent recent studies. On the Surrealist emigres, see Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995); and Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995). For a wonderfully vivid and informative essay on the New York art scene in the 1940s, see Ann Temkin, "Habitat for a Dossier," in Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp ... in Resonance, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art and Menil Collection, Houston (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998), 79-93. On the First Papers show, see Kachur (as in n. 1), 171-97; T. J. Demos, "Duchamp's Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942," October 97 (summer 2001): 91-119; and Altshuler (as in n. 1), 152-54.

3. Indeed, Francis M. Naumann was still fooled by Duchamp's piece as late as 1999. See Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions (Ghent: Ludion Press, 1999, distributed by Harry N. Abrams), 151, where he writes that "In the Manner of Delvaux ... consists of little more than the image of a woman's breasts reflected in a mirror, a circular detail physically excised from a reproduction of Delvaux's L'Aurore."

4. In Duchamp, Notes, the concept is written variously as "infra mince," "infra-mince," and "inframince." Pierre Matisse follows Duchamp's practice by translating the term exactly as the artist had written it in each particular note--that is, as "infra thin," "infra-thin," and "infrathin." Since it appears as "infra-mince" on the back cover of the March 1945 number of View, where the typographic layout was done by Duchamp himself and which was the only instance of the appearance of the word in print during his lifetime, I have adopted the spelling "infra-thin" in this paper except when quoting from the Notes, in which case I use whatever spelling appears in a particular note.

5. Duchamp, Notes, no. 169.

6. Duchamp, interview by Otto Hahn, Paris-Express, June 23, 1964, reprinted in Etant Donne 3 (2nd semester 2001): 114.

7. As Lebel, 56, noted: "For thirty years his own works have been mere visiting cards which he casually leaves here and there to remind us of his watchful presence."

8. Duchamp, quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Pagett (1971; New York: Da Capo, 1979), 42-43.

9. Duchamp, Writings, 27-28.

10. Duchamp, quoted in Denis de Rougemont, Journal d'un epoque (1926-1946) (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 563.

11. Duchamp, quoted in ibid., 568.

12. Duchamp, quoted in ibid., 568. Duchamp's discussions with Rougemont will be examined in detail below. Duchamp's remarks on the infra-thin are from the posthumously published Notes, nos. 35, 46, 7. The "renvoi miroirique," or mirrorical return, is from the collection of notes, diagrams, and drawings commonly called The Green Box, and can be found in Duchamp, Duchamp du signe, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 93; and in Duchamp, Writings, 65. The phrase "delay included/Marcel," is the full text of a note sent in an Art of This Century gallery envelope from Duchamp to Joseph Cornell on April 19, 1943. The note is included in the latter's Duchamp Dossier, a box of collected mementos, and is reproduced in Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp (as in n. 2), in the section "Joseph Cornell: Duchamp Dossier," 46, colorplate N, and "Duchamp Dossier Inventory," 308, cat. no. 15.

13. The very fact that it is unclear whether the collage was exhibited in the First Papers show is evidence of this lack of attention. Duchamp sold, gave, or bartered away the piece to Andre Breton sometime before Breton returned to Paris in May 1946, and it remained in his private collection, out of the public's eye, until Duchamp had it reproduced in Lebel, pl. 112 and gave it a public showing at the Pasadena Art Museum's retrospective of 1963. The piece was later purchased by Arturo Schwarz, who donated it to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

14. Naumann (as in n. 3), 233. Naumann writes that all three of the copies "were made from professional photographs taken of the originals." That may well be the case for Nine Malic Molds and Three Standard Stoppages. However, Andrea Clark, the registrar at the Norton Simon Museum, which owns all three of the copies, informed me in an e-mail message of June 5, 2002, that according to the information in their files, Hayes's copy of In the Manner of Delvaux was not made from a professional photograph of the original collage. Perhaps the original was still in transit to California from Andre Breton's collection in Paris. In any case. Hayes had a photograph made of the reproduction of In the Manner of Delvaux that appears as pl. 112 in Lebel. Since the size (4 3/4 in. square) of the illustration in Lebel--it is square-cropped to show only the tondo with tinfoil in the corners--was larger than the tondo image in the original collage, a second print was then made reducing the image to the specifications (2 3/4 in. square) given for the original tondo in the catalogue raisonne section of Lebel's book. The resulting glossy photograph was then set in a small, gilded dime-store frame.

15. Duchamp, Notes, no. 169.

16. For a fascinating short film that uses a magnifying glass to prove that Duchamp's piece is a photographic montage composed of distinct elements, go to http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/Multimedia/Shearer/Shearer04.html, scroll down to illustration 21A, and click on the image of In the Manner of Delvaux to download the movie. This movie is part of the article by Rhonda Roland Shearer, with Gregory Alvarez, Robert Slawinski, Vittorio Marchi, and text box by Stephen Jay Gould, "Why the Hatrack Is and/or Is Not Readymade," Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal 1, no. 3 (Dec. 2000). The movie of In the Manner of Delvaux is presented merely to show an example of Duchamp's skills at creating a photomontage. The authors of the article do not comment on the collage in their text.

17. Roger Shattuck. The Innocent Eye (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), 291, 56.

18. Duchamp, in a 1959 BBC radio interview with Richard Hamilton. This interview, as well as other recordings by Duchamp, can be found on the Internet at http://www.ubu.com/sound/duchamp02.html.

19. Duchamp, quoted in Cabanne (as in n. 8), 88.

20. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, quoted in Shattuck (as in n. 17), 70.

21. Shattuck (as in n. 17), 77.

22. Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 149.

23. Ibid., 148. On the same page Weiss writes that the pastiches were "exaggerated just enough to draw out the salient characteristics of a given manner, yet 'photographic' enough to pass ... for the real thing."

24. Marcel Proust, Pastiches et melanges (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 1919), 11 n. 1: on Proust and the Lemoine affair, see also Alexandra Parigoris, "Pastiches and the Use of Tradition, 1917-1922," in On Classic Grounds: Picasso, Leger, De Chirico, and the New Classicism, ed. Elizabeth Cowley and Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 298-99.

25. The relation to and differing attitudes about pastiche, blague, mystification, and hoax in respect to the traditionalists and neoclassicists, on the one hand, and to the avant-garde, on the other, is too involved a story to treat in sufficient detail in this essay. Suffice it to say that the term avant-garde is entirely empty in meaning unless there is an arriere-garde representing the high and fine arts for it to stand in contrast against. See Shattuck (as in n. 17), esp. "The Demon of Originality," 62-81; Parigoris (as in n. 24), 296-308; and Weiss (as in n. 22).

26. Louise Norton [et al.], "Buddha of the Bathroom," Blindman, no. 2 (1917): 6.

27. Duchamp to Katharine Kuh, "Marcel Duchamp," in The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Arlists (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 83. On Harold Rosenberg, see The Tradition of the New (1960; New York: Da Capo, 1994).

28. The pages of the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies. New York, 1942, are not numbered. The translation from Sade's French is mine.

29. Jean Clair, Duchamp et la photographie: Essai d'analyse d'un primat technique sur le developpement d'une oeuvre (Paris: Du Chene, 1977), 104: "A preliminary approach [to Etant donnes] may be found, quite probably, in a photographic collage of 1942 entitled A la maniere de Delvaux: the photograph of a feminine chest reflected in a mirror...." Craig E. Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the "Large Glass": An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 169, points out that "In the Manner of Delvaux ... shows a woman's breasts reflected in a mirror. The foil surrounding the mirror 'cut' is possibly a reference to 'le tain'--the foil used to back mirrors. Given that the last piece [Etant donnes] n-dimensionally 'mirrors' the Large Glass, its imagery is 'mirrorically returned' to us fundamentally transformed--the mechanomorphic abstractions of the former having become the realistic tableau-vivant of the latter."

30. Duchamp, Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp "Etant donnes: 1[degrees] la chute d'eau, 2[degrees] le gaz d'eclairage" (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987). The manual is unpaginated, but the title and the years of its "execution" are toward the front on a quarter-size sheet of paper cut lengthwise top to bottom.

31. As for the dating of Etant donnes, the situation is similar to that of the dating of the Large Glass itself. On the back of the Chocolate Grinder, Duchamp inscribed the title, signed the piece, and gave the dates of the work, "1915-1923." But these dates refer only to the years of the actual construction of The Large Glass in New York City. He was already at work on the plans for The Large Glass by 1912, as the date on the Jura-Paris Road note in The Green Box proves. In 1913, he created a complete model of one of its elements, Chocolate Grinder, No. 1, drew out diagrams for the Bachelor Apparatus of the lower half according to both plan and elevation (that is, as seen from above and from the side), and, by the end of that year, drew with pencil on tracing paper a study of the entire piece as seen in perspective.

32. Duchamp, Writings, 26-27. There are three more notes on the Jura-Paris Road project in the posthumous collection, Notes, nos. 109-11. Man Ray's 1921 photograph of Duchamp with the headlight-child tonsure, "a comet [with] its tail in front," will be discussed below.

33. Duchamp, quoted in Serge Stauffer, ed., Marcel Duchamp: Die Schriften (Zurich: Regenbogen, 1981), 280. Duchamp himself may well have pointed out, or at least confirmed, the "cinq nus/seins nus" pun to his first biographer, Robert Lebel. See Lebel, 25 n. 1.

34. Duchamp, Writings, 42. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, in Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the "Large Glass" and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), discusses the "automotive" conception of the Bride in great detail. See esp. "The 'Jura-Paris Road' Project," 37-39, and "The Bride as Automobile," 89-93. For all of Henderson's involved explanations about how the Bride functioned as an automobile, the reader should keep in mind what Duchamp told Francis Roberts in "I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics," Art News 68, no. 8 (Dec. 1968): 63: "My approach to the machine was completely ironic. I made only the hood. It was a symbolic way of explaining. What was really beneath the hood, how it really worked, did not interest me." There is only an apparent contradiction between Duchamp's statement that he was not interested in how the machine worked and Henderson's detailed study of its working. During and immediately following the period when the plan for The Large Glass was developing out of the Jura-Paris Road project. Duchamp was contemplating a Bride who would be, in part, a kind of automobile. Hence, the notes in The Green Box that Henderson analyzes at great length. However, eventually Duchamp decided to simplify the representation by using the major elements of the Munich Bride of 1912 to represent the Bride of The Large Glass. Hence, his remarks to Roberts. Ulf Linde, "MARiee CELibataire," in Marcel Duchamp: Ready-Mades, etc. (1913-1964), ed. Walter Hopps, Linde, and Arturo Schwarz (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1964), 66, 68, analyzes the layout of the page on which In the Manner of Delvaux is reproduced in Lebel, pl. 112, and asserts that the breasts reflected in the mirror are those of the Bride as the arbor type.

35. Reprinted in Duchamp, Writings, 178. Rongwrong was a little magazine put out by Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roche, and Beatrice Wood that appeared as a single issue. It followed their earlier little magazine the Blindman.

36. Duchamp, Writings, 42-43.

37. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Seaver Books, 1978), 118, 124-25, 148.

38. Anne D'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps make some very interesting observations on Duchamp's restoration of the landscape in Etant Donnes...: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp (1969; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), 22, 25, and esp. 30: "The Network of Stoppages suggests that the erotic narrative of The Large Glass once had a landscape background and recognizable human figures: Cols Alites [the ink and pencil drawing of The Large Glass executed in 1959 in which a landscape including a range of mountains and an electric pole with power lines have been added] indicates that a new landscape is being created for it."

39. This early introduction to the catechism and the general influence of Catholicism in Duchamp's works are emphasized in Dawn Ades, Neil Cox. and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 11, 24. For a more detailed study of Duchamp's use of Catholicism in his works, see David Hopkins, Marcel Duchump and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 60-77. Paysage fautif, consisting of seminal fluid (most probably Duchamp's) on Astrolon backed by black satin, was the title of the original piece added to the Box in a Valise that Duchamp gave to his lover Maria Martins in 1946.

40. Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, Le Surrealisme en 1947, exh. cat., Galerie Maeght, Paris, 1947 (Paris: Pierre a Feu, 1947). Adcock (as in n. 29), 168-69, points out, "The catalogue cover ... is closely related to the mannequin in Etant donnes. The working study for 'Priere de Toucher' approximates an actual plaster cast of the breast of the mannequin. As was argued earlier, Etant donnes is essentially an n + I dimensional recasting of the n-dimensional Large Glass. With this in mind, it is hardly fortuitous that Duchamp associates a two-dimensional photograph of a 'stripped bare' breast with a three-dimensional foam-rubber counterpart based upon a casting. Similar kinds of references may inform Duchamp's A la maniere de Delvaux (In the Manner of Delvaux), a work that is closely associated with the catalogue cover."

41. Gough-Cooper and Caumont (as in n. 1), Aug. 5, 1946.

42. For reproductions of these original items, see Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise: De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 281, 283, 285, 289, 293, 295.

43. Herbert Molderings, "Un Cul-de-lampe: Reflexions sur la structure et l'iconographie d'Etant donnes," Etant Donne 3 (2001), 106, discusses Reflection a la main as belonging to the allegorical tradition of the representation of Truth, pointing in particular to the famous nude holding high a resplendent mirror in Jules-Joseph Lefebvre's painting La verite (1870). In a section of his article entitled "Duchamp et son auto-renouvellement en tant qu'artiste," 101-3, Molderings corroborates a number of the associations I have made in this essay. In addition to discussing the phrase "a refaire le passe, which I will consider below, he mentions Duchamp's words to Rougemont on the crisis an artist faces at age forty and argues that "After the Second World War, in New York, a renewal of ardor, a rebirth of creativity, roused him and gave him the desire to 'renew' himself entirely" (101).

44. Francis M. Naumann, "Arturo's Marcel," Art in America 86, no. 1 (Jan. 1998): 37-38. The quote is from idem, "Marcel & Maria," Art in America 89, no. 4 (Apr. 2001): 108.

45. All the quotes and descriptions from the Lake George trip are from Rougemont (as in n. 10), 562-71. The translations from the French are mine.

46. Duchamp, in Cabanne (as in n. 8), 76.

47. Thierry De Duve comments on the phrase "L'impossibilite du fer" first in his article "The Readymade and the Tube of Paint," Art Forum 24, no. 9 (May 1986): 115, and then in his book Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 164, 168-70. His argument, in short, is that Duchamp simultaneously asserts the end of the traditional art of painting and the beginning of new forms of art like the readymade.

48. Duchamp, Writings, 63, 65. Henderson (as in n. 34) explicates all of this in considerable detail at numerous points in his book. See her "Large Glass Index," s.v. "Splash," 374.

49. Duchamp, Writings, 51.

50. Dalia Judovitz notes the similarity of the cover to a photographic negative in Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1995), 133. Schwarz, vol. 2, 840, notes the "mirrorical return" of the etchings.

51. Duchamp, Writings, 106, where, however, "couler" is translated as "dripping." See Duchamp, 1994 (as in n. 12), 154.

52. Charles F. Stuckey, "Duchamp's Acephalic Symbolism," Art in America 65 (Jan.-Feb. 1977): 94-99, discusses the installation and concludes that "Lazy Hardware ... foreshadows the voyeuristic gynecological raptures experienced by spectators of the monumental Etant Donnes...."

53. Linde (as in n. 34), 62-63, points to this amusing renvoi miroirique. He also notes, 45, that "the Jura-Paris road is of prime importance in Duchamp's work. The method that he has discovered re-appears and is developed in almost all the work of later years. Indeed, it is upon this approach that The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, the Large Glass, is based."

54. Duchamp, in a 1959 BBC radio interview by Richard Hamilton, claimed he was not an anti-artist (like being an atheist, as opposed to a believer) but "an-artist, meaning no artist at all." This interview, as well as other recordings by Duchamp, can be found at http://www.ubu.com/sound/duchamp02.html.

55. Duchamp, Writings, 187.

56. Duchamp, Notes, no. 9.

57. Duchamp, Writings, 76.

58. See Dawn Ades, "Duchamp's Masquerades," in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 98-100. Schwarz, vol. 2, dates these photographs, cat. nos. 393-96, to the year 1921, but both Ades, 109, and David Hopkins, "Men before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity," Art History 21, no. 3 (Sept. 1998): 304, fig. 2, caption, date them several years later.

59. Duchamp, Writings, 26.

60. Hopkins (as in n. 58), 317-18, discusses the affinities between the photograph of Duchamp lathered and the Mona Lisa shaved, concluding, "There is undoubtedly a correlation here with Duchamp's own activities as a 'Man Before the Mirror,' ironically assuming Rrose's identity by shaving."

61. Duchamp, Writings, 27.

62. Duchamp, Notes, no. 5.

63. Duchamp, Notes, nos. 4, 12.

64. For a different point of view, see Adcock (as in n. 29), esp. 48-49, where he finds a source for the infra-thin in Esprit Pascal Jouffret's concept of "an infinitely thin layer [couche infiniment mince]," thereby deriving the idea from Duchamp's thinking about the fourth dimension. The phrase is from Jouffret's Traite elementaire de geometrie a quatre dimensions ... (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1903), a book Duchamp is known to have read. The problem, as Adcock later admits in a passage on tracing and other techniques that leads into another discussion of Jouffret's "couche infiniment mince" and Duchamp's infra-thin, 51, is that "This note [like the notes on the infra-thin itself] do not deal specifically with the fourth dimension.... This is true for many of his notes. They do not involve four-dimensional geometry overtly, but they make more sense with the workings of geometry in mind." Fourth-dimensional thinking is essential in understanding the earlier Large Glass, and it does throw some light on the work Duchamp did from 1942 until his death, particularly on the relation of molds to castings as inside-outside reversals (see Adcock, 168-69). But geometry does not help the reader better understand the relation of the infra-thin to tobacco smoke or to the heat remaining on a chair from which one has just arisen. The facts remain that there is not a single mention of the fourth dimension in the series of notes related to the infra-thin, and that Duchamp insisted to Rougemont that the concept "eludes our scientific definitions."

65. Duchamp, Notes, no. 35.

66. Reprinted in Duchamp, Writings, 191-92; Andre Breton, Anthologie de l'humour noire (Paris: Sagittaire, 1940).

67. Duchamp, quoted in Tomkins (as in n. 1), 328.

68. Duchamp, Notes, no. 44.

69. Ibid., no. 9.

70. Ibid., no. 104. See also Duchamp, Writings, 87: "In a two-dimensional plane--the vanishing point corresponds to the center of gravity, all these parallel lines meeting at the vanishing point just as the verticals all run toward the center of gravity."

71. Duchamp, Writings, 30; and idem, Notes, no. 150 (recto).

72. There is a rough sketch of the Juggler in Duchamp, Writings, 65. More detailed drawings, as well as a much fuller explanation of his function, can be found in Duchamp, Notes, nos. 149-52, p. 2.

73. Duchamp, Writings, 66.

74. Duchamp, Notes, no. 46.

75. See, in general, Clair (as in n. 29), in particular, 46. Important notes referring to the use of photography in constructing The Large Glass can be found in Duchamp, Writings, 38, 51; and idem, Notes, no. 147.

76. Duchamp, Writings, 85.

77. Duchamp, 1994 (as in n. 12), 103; and idem, Writings, 72. For the first phrase, I have altered the translation in the latter.

78. Duchamp, Writings, 88.

79. Both the Maywald and Bellon photographs were first discovered by Herbert Molderings, though Jean Suquet first published the Mavwald version (see n. 80 below).

80. Jean Suquet, who has devoted the better part of his scholarly work on Duchamp since the 1970s to proving the centrality of the absent Juggler of Gravity to our understanding of The Large Glass, reproduces the Maywald photograph in a wide-ranging article on Etant donnes, "La mariee de la main gauche." Etant Donne 3 (2001): 54-71. Suquet discusses the differences between the Bellon and Maywald photographs, notes the iron/irony pun in "le fer a repasse" and "a refaire le passe," and argues that Duchamp formulated two related propositions in 1947: the first public, "a refaire le passe," the second private, the drawing of the Bride entitled Given: Maria, the Waterfall and the Illuminating Gas, which Duchamp gave as a gift to his lover Maria Martins. He also asserts on the subject of "a refaire le passe," 55-56, that "this wordplay has never had the honor of any manuscript by Duchamp, has never been included in a collection, neither cited nor commented on by any interpreter." Molderings (as in n. 43), 103, which appears in the same number of Etant Donne as Suquet's article, comments that "a refaire le passe" means "to begin again from the beginning." He argues, "This is precisely what happened in the artistic life of Duchamp in the years 1946-47: coming back to several of his central ideas of the period from 1913 to 1914, he started over again from the beginning his artistic journey...." This author could not agree more, though I have argued that it is a question of a return, or "renvoi," to some of his central ideas of the period beginning in 1912 with the Jura-Paris Road project.

81. Note also how the fer/faire/refaire mirrors the pere/repere play on words in Duchamp's conversation with Rougemont.

82. Duchamp, in Cabanne (as in n. 8), 75.

Frequently Cited Sources

Duchamp, Marcel, Notes: Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse (1980; Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983).

______, Writings: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (1973; New York: Da Capo Press, 1989).

Lebel, Robert, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (1959; New York: Grossman, 1967).

Schwarz, Arturo, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 3rd ed., rev. and enl., 2 vols. (1969; New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997).

Thomas Singer was granted his Ph.D. from Columbia University and initially wrote about the relation between theories of the origins of language, Renaissance ideas about hieroglyphics, and seventeenth-century projects for universal languages. More recently, he has written about Joyce, Wittgenstein, and Americans in Paris during the 1920s [Department of English, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 20057-1131].

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