Money is no object: by deciding early on that he would not depend for a living on sales of his work, Marcel Duchamp took a crucial step toward freeing his art from material constraints and the vicissitudes of commerce - Duchampiana II - Museum Jean Tinguely, Basel - Critical Essay

Art in America, March, 2003 by Francis M. Naumann

It is unlikely that Duchamp authorized the production of this edition for purely monetary reasons. Before the appearance of this edition, most of the readymades were known only through photographs. Now they existed as actual objects that could represent Duchamp in important private and public collections throughout the world. Even though the readymades would be assigned a specific monetary value, Duchamp still tried to separate the esthetic and philosophical importance of these works from whatever commercial worth they might have. A year after the readymades were issued, for example, when the American painter Douglas Gorsline asked Duchamp to sign a bottle rack that he had found along a roadside, Duchamp told him that his agreement with Schwarz prevented him from signing such things as freely as he had in the past. "But signature or no signature, your find has the same `metaphysical' value as any other readymade," he explained. "[It] even has the advantage to have no commercial value." (37)

During the last 15 years of his life, Duchamp lived quite comfortably. In 1954, he married Alexina (Teeny), the former wife of Pierre Matisse. She was not wealthy, but, like his first wife, she did not need to rely on his income for support. He proudly reported to Cabanne that he received $57 a month from Social Security, and that if someone offered him $100,000 yearly for his entire production--just as Knoedler had offered an equivalent amount in 1916--he would not hesitate to refuse. (38) Although it was not information he cared to share with the general public, it is now known that Duchamp also received quarterly checks from the estate of Mary Reynolds, his closest female companion during the years he lived in Paris between the wars, who died in 1949. This amounted to a yearly income of somewhere between $5,000 and $6,000, a considerable amount at the time, enough, at least, to free him from worrying about money during the last years of his life. (39)

In the end, the way in which Duchamp conducted his life mirrored decisions that he made in his art. He expressed it best himself two years before his death. When asked what his greatest achievement was, he responded:

Using painting, using art, to create a modus vivendi, a way of understanding life; that is, for the time being, of trying to make my life into a work of art itself, instead of spending my life creating works of art in the form of painting or sculptures. I now believe that you can quite readily treat your life, the way you breathe, act, interact with other people, as a picture, a tableau vivant or a film scene, so to speak. These are my conclusions now: I never set out to do this when I was twenty or fifteen, but I realize, after many years, that this was fundamentally what I was aiming to do," (40)

Although Duchamp's finances have been largely ignored by critics and historians, several artists have addressed the subject in their work. The artist Richard Pettibone, for example, who has appropriated both Duchamp and Brancusi, painted a small canvas depicting an image of Duchamp smoking a cigar and hung it over a shelf lined with miniature versions of Brancusi's Endless Column, amusingly titling the finished assembly Brancusi's Dealer (1999-2000). With a similar sensitivity, Douglas Vogel, a contemporary artist who has investigated Duchamp's conceptual strategies for more than 30 years, used the artist's photos of unwrapped cigarettes from the cover of poet Georges Hugnet's La Septieme face du de as the point of departure for Couvert (2001), an image that seems to be a wry comment on the artist's disdain for the commercialism of art. Here, Duchamp's rolls of tobacco are replaced with compressed cyclinders of shredded money, a hint, perhaps, of the potential for money to go up in smoke. (41)