Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared. - Review - book review

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Sheldon Nodelman

Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared, by David Hopkins, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998; 211 pages, $115.

D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent [Besides, it's always the others who die]. While thinly masking a metaphysical abyss, Marcel Duchamp's piercingly ironic farewell, engraved on his tombstone in Rouen, also suggests that he would not have been entirely surprised at the status he has lately assumed as the 20th century's most influential artist. The current crush of publications on Duchamp, which shows no sign of abating (to the point that this writer is embarrassed to admit his intention of adding to it(1)), is but one reflection of this preeminence. The 10 books listed above are only some of those which have appeared--in English alone--over the past few years,(2) and a broader survey of no more than the last decade, inclusive of important works in the major European languages,(3) would multiply this number severalfold.

Such attention may not be excessive for one who is now acknowledged not only as an uncannily prescient pioneer in, if not in some cases the outright inventor of, many of the artistic movements and genres which marked the 20th century's latter half--Conceptual art, assemblage, Pop art, Op art, installation, process art, chance art, performance, body art, to name only some. Nor is it surprising when applied to an artist widely regarded as the original and long avant la lettre postmodernist, even while a central figure in the history of modernism itself. But it is nevertheless remarkable for one who, with a certain degree of exaggeration, could refer to himself, little more than a decade before his death in 1968, as a "forgotten artist."(4)

Although Duchamp had attained international fame as early as 1913 (with the succes de scandale of Nude Descending a Staircase at the New York Armory Show that year), little was known and even less understood in the 1950s, outside a small coterie of associates and art-world insiders, of the true scope of his art. Duchamp had to wait until 1959 for the appearance of the first monograph (by his friend Robert Lebel) that presented an overview of his work to the general public,(5) and until 1963 for his first important retrospective--not in New York or Paris, but at the Pasadena Museum of Art. (This survey was followed in 1966 by another at the Tate Gallery, London, and then by four posthumous "blockbusters": Philadelphia/New York in 1973, Paris in 1977, Barcelona in 1984 and Venice in 1993. Each accompanied by a major catalogue, these exhibitions mark the trajectory of ascent to his current superstar standing.) During the postwar decades, Duchamp indeed remained a celebrity of sorts, but one remembered for his achievements in a now-remote past, in the years around World War I. If he was famous for anything in the 1940s and '50s, it was for being the artist who since the early '20s had notoriously renounced art--in favor of chess or even, as he himself once put it in an interview, of simply "breathing."(6)

Of course this entire image--which Duchamp did everything possible to promote--was an illusion, a deliberate artifice compounded partly of direct misrepresentation, partly of cunning indirection like that in Poe's "The Purloined Letter," where an object is hidden by being exposed in plain sight. As we now know, Duchamp had been planning since about 1938, and actively but secretly preparing between 1946 and 1966, a great new installation work, Etant donnes--the dialectical counterpole and completion of the Large Glass--which would be revealed only after his death, in 1969. Now installed adjacent to the Large Glass in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this stupefying masterpiece has lost none of its mystery or power to shock in the three decades since its appearance. Retroactively, it throws a transformative light on a long series of productions, activities and gestures, which, though in no way concealed, had been rendered indistinct in their meaning through a deficit of context.

But in a larger sense, Duchamp's entire artistic activity since the "definitive incompletion" of the Large Glass in 1923 was an exercise in strategic invisibility, giving rise to objects and events which--because they were apparently too impermanent or unimportant or insubstantial, or because they eluded established genre conventions, or because they confused or diluted authorial identity--evaded recognition as "works of art." That category, in the optic of the time, was largely limited to "paintings" and "sculptures" designated as such by traditional markers of boundedness, stability, scale, material and fabrication. According to such criteria, even the infamous readymades, which had contributed so substantially to Duchamp's reputation as the enfant terrible of the avant-garde, could be considered mere provocations and so dismissed as something less than "real" works of art. This was yet more definitely the case with Duchamp's many apparently trivial or simply instrumental productions: the occasional sketch or altered scrap of printed matter given to a friend, the single door designed to serve alternately a studio's kitchen and bathroom.