It came as a great surprise to Marcel Duchamp that in New York, when he arrived here for the first time, in 1915, he was considered a famous person. His reputation “was equalled only by Napoleon and Sarah Bernhardt,” according to his friend Henri-Pierre Roché. “He could have had his choice of heiresses, but he preferred to play chess and to live on the proceeds of the exclusive French lessons he gave for two dollars an hour. He was an enigma, contrary to all tradition, and he won everybody’s heart.”
That his fame derived from a single painting, exhibited two years earlier at the Armory Show, must have made it seem all the more astonishing. French newspapers had carried only brief and sketchy reports on that groundbreaking exhibition, and Duchamp, who was delighted that all four of the paintings he had sent to it were sold, did not fully comprehend the American reaction to his “Nude Descending a Staircase.” The immense furor set off by this rather sombre Cubist composition is still hard to fathom. “Her room was mobbed every day,” according to one account. “People formed queues, waiting for thirty, even forty minutes just to stand momentarily in her presence, venting their shocked gasps of disbelief, their rage, or their raucous laughter before giving way to the next in line.” Newspaper reporters stumbled over one another trying to think up funny descriptions of it—Julian Street’s “explosion in a shingle factory” was the one that many people remembered, along with J. F. Griswold’s cartoon takeoff in the Evening Sun, called “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway).” American Art News offered a ten-dollar prize for the best explanation of the picture and awarded it to a poem called “It’s Only a Man”:
To a great many visitors, Duchamp’s painting seemed to sum up everything that was arbitrary, irrational, and incomprehensible in the new art from Europe. The public response to it, though, was not really angry. Nobody wanted to burn Duchamp in effigy, as Chicago art students talked of doing to Matisse and Brancusi when the Armory Show came there. Matisse was the main villain in the eyes of established American artists and critics: the “Apostle of the Ugly,” whose violent colors and distortions of the human figure (in particular, the “female form divine,” as it was often referred to then in American art circles) were decried as “epileptic,” “depraved,” “coarse,” “hideous,” and “revolting.” By comparison, the attacks on Duchamp seemed relatively good-natured. Duchamp always maintained that the reactions to his “Nude” had to do mainly with its title, and in the United States this certainly seems to have been the case. Nudes weren’t supposed to come down stairs in art, and an artist who proposed to show one doing so (even if you couldn’t see her doing it) must be kidding, right? Could Duchamp be making fun of Cubism, and not only of Cubism but of modern art in general? His famous “Nude” may have actually appealed to some of the same prejudices that found it so outrageous.
Duchamp’s reasons for coming to New York in 1915, at any rate, had nothing to do with art. In January, he had been judged medically unfit for military service in the First World War, because of a slight rheumatic-heart condition, and his life in Paris had become increasingly unpleasant as a result. Patriotic citizens seeing an apparently healthy young man not in uniform would glare, or even spit, at him on the street, and one of his sisters-in-law—his two older brothers were both in the service, as were most of his artist friends—regularly reproached him for being behind the lines. “I do not go to New York, I leave Paris,” he had written to his American friend Walter Pach, one of the principal organizers of the Armory Show, shortly before he boarded the S.S. Rochambeau, in June. New York nevertheless soon became his favorite city—the place where he felt freer and more at home than anywhere else, and to which he returned again and again in the years to come.
For the rest of his life, Duchamp carried happy memories of his first few months here. Although he barely spoke English when he arrived, he found New York and its inhabitants wonderfully congenial. “For a Frenchman, used to class distinctions, you had the feeling of what a real democracy, a one-class country, could be,” he recalled years later. “People who could afford to have chauffeurs went to the theatre by subway, things like that.” Pach introduced him to Greenwich Village, which struck Duchamp as “a real Bohemia. Delightful. Why, Greenwich Village was full of people doing absolutely nothing.”
It took the press three months to discover that Duchamp was in New York. “THE NUDE-DESCENDING-A-STAIRCASE MAN SURVEYS US” was the headline over a Sunday feature story in the Tribune on September 12th—the first of several interviews published in newspapers and magazines during the fall of 1915. Most of the interviewers were surprised to find that the Armory Show’s bête noire was so agreeable. “He neither talks, nor looks, nor acts like an artist,” one reporter marvelled. The poet Alfred Kreymborg, writing in the Boston Evening Transcript, described him as “a young, decidedly boyish human with the quietest air and the most genial simplicity in the world.” These early interviews contain a good deal of misinformation (one spells his name “Duchamps”; another reports that “he is away from the French front on a furlough”), and the writers can’t seem to agree on what he looks like. Arts & Decoration gives him “red hair, blue eyes, freckles, a face . . . and a figure that would seem American even among Americans,” while the Tribune reporter calls him “quite handsome, with blond, curly hair,” and says he could be taken “for a well-groomed Englishman.” (In a photograph that accompanied an unsigned article in Vanity Fair—it was made by Pach Brothers, the portrait studio run by Walter Pach’s father and uncle—he looks very grave and indelibly French. The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service records for 1915 list Duchamp as five feet ten inches tall, with a fair complexion, brown hair, and “chestnut” eyes.) The interviewers were charmed by Duchamp, and Duchamp, in spite of his natural inclination to listen to them rather than to talk about himself (several reporters mentioned this), rewarded their curiosity with quotable remarks on the American woman (“Always knows what she wants, and therefore always gets it”), American art (“New York itself is a . . . complete work of art”), Cubism (“That word cubism means nothing at all”), and the war (“I admire the attitude of combatting invasion with folded arms”).
The self-confident, ironic tone of his remarks—delivered in a language that still gave him plenty of trouble—makes you wonder what had become of the shy, somewhat withdrawn young man his friends had known in Paris. There is no doubt that New York had a liberating effect on Duchamp. He seemed to feel that for Americans the past—the cultural record—was somehow cancelled out. “In Paris, in Europe, the young men of any generation always act as the grandsons of some great man,” he once told me. “Of Victor Hugo in France, and I suppose of Shakespeare in England. They can’t help it. Even if they don’t believe it, it goes into their system, and so, when they come to produce something of their own, there is a sort of traditionalism that is indestructible. This does not exist here. You don’t give a damn about Shakespeare, do you? You’re not his grandsons at all. So it is a perfect terrain for new developments.”
Ever since 1912, when Duchamp started thinking about a “large scale project” that would eventually become “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” the masterpiece of his early career, his overriding ambition had been to invent a new means of expression that had nothing to do with Cubist theories or with what he called “retinal” art—art whose appeal was mainly or exclusively to the eye rather than to the mind. He wanted to discover something that neither he nor anyone else had seen or thought of before, and New York, with its bumptious and lighthearted iconoclasm, seemed like a fine place to do that.
Walter Pach had arranged for him to stay in Walter and Louise Arensberg’s duplex apartment, at 33 West Sixty-seventh Street. The Arensbergs, who were spending the summer in a house in Pomfret, Connecticut, had started to collect modern art as a result of their exposure to it at the Armory Show. (Louise’s family owned J. P. Stevens, the hundred-year old New England textile firm.) They had heard a lot about Duchamp from Pach, who was now their main adviser on art, and when they met him for the first time the two men took to each other instantly. “Duchamp was the sparkplug that ignited him” is how one of Arensberg’s friends put it; and Arensberg, as patron, admirer, and friend, would play a major role in Duchamp’s subsequent career.
When the Arensbergs returned to town in September, Duchamp moved into a furnished room on Beekman Place and then into a one-room studio in the Lincoln Arcade Building, at 1947 Broadway, between Sixty-fifth and Sixty-sixth Streets. One of the first things he did after that second move was to buy two big sheets of heavy plate glass, set them up on sawhorses, and embark on the large-scale work that he had been planning for the last three years. It was to be a painting on glass, nine feet high and five and a half feet wide, on the theme ofsexual desire—or, to be more precise, the machinery of sexual desire.
Virtually all the thinking and planning for “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”—also known as the “Large Glass”—had been done in France, but the work itself was constructed entirely in New York. He began with the upper panel, on which he carefully outlined in lead wire the mysterious elements of the bride machine (a combination of mechanical and visceral forms), working from a drawing on paper attached to the underside of the glass. It was a slow, tedious process, and after two hours of it he was usually ready to quit for the day. “You see,” he explained, “it interested me but not enough to be eager to finish it. I’m lazy, don’t forget that. Besides, I didn’t have any intention to show it or sell it at that time. I was just doing it—that was my life. And when I wanted to work on it I did, and other times I would go out and enjoy America. It was my first visit, remember, and I had to see America as much as I had to work on my ‘Glass.’ ”
Although very far from being the most famous art work of our century, the “Large Glass” may well be the most prophetic. The “Glass,” together with the “readymades” that were so closely associated with its development—common manufactured items that Duchamp promoted to the status of works of art simply by selecting and signing them—are primary sources for the conceptual approach that has come to dominate art in the second half of the twentieth century: an approach that defines art primarily as a mental act.
The readymade idea first came to full, conscious fruition one day in the winter of 1915-16, when Duchamp and his friend Jean Crotti, a Swiss artist who was sharing the Lincoln Arcade studio with him at the time, went into a hardware store on Columbus Avenue and bought a snow shovel. It was an ordinary snow shovel, with a flat galvanized-iron blade and a wooden handle; there were thousands just like it in hardware stores all over America, stacked up in advance of the winter storms—or, as Duchamp would say, in the title that he inscribed on the shovel’s business end, “In Advance of the Broken Arm.” Why did he choose this particular item?” Neither he nor Crotti had ever seen a snow shovel before, he explained some years later—such things were not made in France. Duchamp recalled how pleased and proud Crotti had looked as he carried the purchase, slung like a rifle on his shoulder, the few blocks to their studio, where Duchamp, after painting the title on and signing it “d’après Marcel Duchamp” (to show that it was not “by” but simply “From” the artist), tied a wire to the handle and hung it from the ceiling.
Two years earlier, in his studio in Paris, Duchamp had mounted the front wheel of a bicycle, in its straight fork, upside down on an ordinary kitchen stool. He did that with no particular idea in mind, simply “as a pleasure,” he said, “pleasant for the movement it gave.” Another readymade-before-the-name had come into being in 1914—a cast-iron rack for drying wine bottles, which Duchamp picked up at the Bazar de l’Hotel-de-Ville. He had bought it as “a sculpture already made,” and he planned to write something on it—a phrase that would be “without normal meaning”—but he never got around to doing that. The bottle rack gathered dust in a corner. The readymade idea had not yet been born: only by receiving a title and an artist’s signature could an object attain the odd and endlessly provocative status of a readymade, a work of art created not by the hand and skill but by the mind and decision of the artist.
In a letter mailed from New York to his sister Suzanne, in Paris, Duchamp described how he had bought a snow shovel and had written on it an English inscription that had nothing to do with it “in the Romantic or Impressionist or Cubist sense.” He then asked her to help him make “a ‘Readymade’ from a distance.” Suzanne was to take the iron bottle rack in his abandoned Paris studio and write on the base and on the inside of the bottom ring, “in small letters painted with an oil-painting brush, in silver white color, the inscription that I will give you after this, and you will sign it in the same hand as follows: from Marcel Duchamp.” He was too late. In clearing out his studio, Suzanne had thrown away both the bottle rack and the bicycle wheel, which she must have decided were useless junk. A similar fate befell almost every one of the original readymades, including “In Advance of the Broken Arm.” Even the phrase that Suzanne was supposed to write on the bottle rack has vanished; it may have been on a separate page of Duchamp’s letter, which got lost. But that scarcely mattered: the ready-made idea had now been loosed upon the world, with incalculable effects on twentieth century art, art history, and critical discourse. As Duchamp said once, toward the end of his life, “I’m not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn’t the most important single idea to come out of my work.”
Duchamp’s own statements about the readymades cut right through the fog banks of commentary by others. Readymades were his antidote to retinal art, because “it was always the idea that came first, not the visual example.” The readymades posed the question “What is art?” and suggested, quite disturbingly, that it could be anything at all; a readymade, in fact, was “a form of denying the possibility of defining art.” Duchamp made a note to himself to “limit the no. of rdymades yearly,” and he followed his own instructions, producing no more than twenty in his lifetime; only by limiting the output, he felt, could he avoid falling into the trap of his own taste, and taste—good or bad—was “the greatest enemy of art.” Duchamp knew perfectly well that there was a contradiction here. Just by selecting one object rather than another, he was exercising taste, no matter how hard he tried to avoid it, and each of the readymades can be said to reflect Duchamp in its ironic, humorous, quietly diabolic ambiguity. “My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself,” he said. “Call it a little game between T and ‘me.’ ”
Without any apparent effort on his part, Duchamp had become the star of the Arensberg circle. His mental agility and ironic wit set the tone for gatherings that took place three or four evenings a week on West Sixty-seventh Street, where paintings by Duchamp were starting to outnumber those by any other artist. Evenings at the Arensbergs’ began around nine o’clock, after dinner, and did not break up until long past midnight. In addition to the American artists Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, Morton Schamberg, John Covert (who was Walter Arensberg’s cousin), and Man Ray, all of whom had been strongly influenced by European modernism, the regulars included a lively group of poets and writers: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, Walter Pach, Maxwell Bodenheim, Allen and Louise Norton, Carl Van Vechten and his pretty wife, the actress Fania Marinoff, and Arensberg’s Harvard friend Dr. Elmer Ernest Southard, a psychiatrist, who was the director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. (Southard came whenever he was in New York, and encouraged guests to tell him their dreams.)
At the Arensbergs’, however, it was the European visitors who provided most of the intellectual and behavioral fireworks. Francis Picabia and his wife, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, arrived in New York in 1915 and were brought into the Arensberg circle by Duchamp. In addition to being an extravagantly gifted artist, Picabia was rich, self-indulgent, and opposed on principle to every received opinion. “Whatever you said, he contradicted,” according to Duchamp. Picabia and Duchamp liked to poke fun at Albert Gleizes, a somewhat humorless artist who argued the case for his own, “reasonable” Cubism (as opposed to the more unreasonable brand practiced by Picasso and Braque) with undue persistence. They were more respectful of Edgard Varese, a young French composer, who joined the group early in 1916 and mesmerized everyone with his plans for “the liberation of sound” through the use of gongs, sirens, and electrically generated noises. There was also the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a fortyish, once beautiful eccentric, who was described as leading a life “unhampered by sanity.” She conceived a great passion for Duchamp. Although she insisted that it was fully reciprocated, Duchamp “would never even touch the hem of my red oilskin slicker,” she explained, because “something of his dynamic warmth—electrically—would be dissipated by the contact.”
Picabia’s “machine style” had a powerful effect on several of the Americans in the Arensberg group. He told a reporter at the time, “Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression. . . . The machine has become more than a mere adjunct of life. It is really a part of human life—perhaps the very soul.” The drawings and paintings that Picabia did in New York, with their machinelike forms and erotic titles (“Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity,” for example, is a precise rendering of an automobile sparkplug), addressed in cruder and more explicit fashion the same theme that animated Duchamp’s “Large Glass.” Machinery with human attributes soon turned up in works by Man Ray, John Covert, and Charles Sheeler. The Italian-born Joseph Stella, who was rarely absent from the Arensberg gatherings, did a group of paintings on glass after he saw the slowly developing masterwork in Duchamp’s studio. Even Charles Demuth, whose delicate and incisive style seemed to owe nothing to Duchamp, said in 1923 that Duchamp had been his “strongest influence in recent years.”
Not all the Americans in the Arensberg circle succumbed to Duchamp’s spell. William Carlos Williams, in his autobiography, tells of an evening when he followed Duchamp around the Arensbergs’ living room waiting for a chance to say something about a painting of his that hung on the wall:
It is hard to imagine what was so devastating about Duchamp’s “Do you?” Williams himself concedes, in the same passage, that he “bumped through these periods like a yokel.” But, in spite of what must have seemed to him an offer sophisticated atmosphere at the Arensbergs’, where French was spoken almost as frequently as English, Williams came to their living room like a moth to the light. It was his main connection to the ideas that were shaping the new century’s art and thought. “There had been a break somewhere,” he wrote, “we were streaming through, each thinking his own thoughts, driving his own designs toward his self’s objectives. . . . I had never in my life before felt that way. I was tremendously stirred.”
Beatrice Wood, a hundred and three years old and still going strong, remembers the day she met Marcel Duchamp. It was September 27, 1916. She had gone to visit Edgard Varèse in St. Vincent’s Hospital, where the composer was lying with a broken leg in a cast, after being knocked down by a car while he was waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus. As she entered the room, “a cough made me turn to face a man sitting at the far side of the bed,” she wrote in one of her many memoirs. “With a slight shock, I became aware of a truly extraordinary face. He did not exhibit the hardiness of a lifeguard flexing his muscles, but his personality was luminous. He had blue, penetrating eyes and finely chiselled features. Marcel Duchamp smiled. I smiled. Varèse faded away.”
Intensely romantic and unconventionally pretty, her pale skin accentuated by a cloud of dark hair, Wood was twenty-three at the time and was in full rebellion against her domineering, socially prominent mother. She had lived in France for two years, closely chaperoned, and when she met Duchamp she was acting with a French repertory troupe in New York—something her mother had reluctantly agreed to, thinking “that my being an actress would not be so bad if I were acting in French.” It was because of her French that she was visiting Varèse; a friend who knew him had asked her to go to see him in the hospital, because his English was so poor. This was her third visit. When the conversation that day turned to modern art, Wood showed her ignorance by saying that anybody could make such scrawls. “Why don’t you try to make some?” Duchamp suggested. The gentle sarcasm was tempered by his use of the familiar “tu.”
A week later, Wood and Duchamp had dinner together at the Dutch Oven, in Greenwich Village, chaperoned by Alissa Frank, a journalist friend of hers. There were several more meetings, some with others present and some with just the two of them. Wood brought him a drawing she had made. Why not try painting? he asked her. When she told him there was no place to do that in her parents’ apartment, Duchamp said she could use his studio, and Wood, whose heart “lost a beat” at the invitation, accepted immediately. It was understood that she would always telephone beforehand. If Duchamp said not to come, she would assume he had “a lady” with him. Duchamp had many ladies, she had heard, most of them quite homely. He told her that unattractive women made love better than beautiful ones. Sex and love, he explained, were two very different things. Beatrice Wood didn’t believe that. She was still a virgin, and Duchamp, whose French upbringing ruled out initiating jeunes filles, treated her with a respect that she longed to break down.
Several afternoons a week, she came to his studio, which by then was a one-room apartment in the Arensbergs’ building, on West Sixty-seventh; Duchamp had moved there from the Lincoln Arcade Building in the fall of 1916. In her memory, it was a “typical bachelor’s niche”—a square room on the back, with a Murphy bed, two chairs, one table, clothing in untidy piles, strange objects (readymades) lying around or hanging from the ceiling, and always a half-eaten box of crackers and Swiss chocolate on the window sill. Wood sketched and painted, and Duchamp offered laconic criticisms, through which she began to understand a few things about modern art. “I felt an extraordinary harmony with him,” she said. “We could spend hours together and not talk, and the silence was so potent. Marcel didn’t seem to have any egotism.” Often he would take her to a cheap restaurant for dinner. At night, she dreamed about him. “Except for the physical act,” she wrote, “we were lovers.”
During the early part of 1917, much of the conversation at the Arensbergs’ apartment had to do with plans for a second great exhibition of modern art in New York. The coalition that put together the Armory Show had fallen apart soon after the show ended. Several groups of American artists were eager to strike another blow for modernism and against the restrictive policies of the National Academy of Design, however, and they had joined together in 1916 to form the Society of Independent Artists, whose main goal was to mount annual exhibitions modelled on those of the Paris Société des Artistes Indépendants, with a policy of “no jury, no prizes.” Any artist who paid the five-dollar annual fee and a one-dollar initiation fee could become a member of the society and be entitled to show two works, and applications poured in from all parts of the country; within two weeks of the first announcement, the society had six hundred members. National pride and a sense of destiny were in the air. European art had been shut down by the war, Paris was under siege, and any number of artists and critics believed that America was ready to pick up the torch of modernism.
The 1917 Independents exhibition, which opened on April 10th at the Grand Central Palace, on Lexington Avenue, was nearly twice as large as the Armory Show. It was the biggest art exhibition that had ever been put on in America, in fact, with two thousand one hundred and twenty-five works of art by twelve hundred artists—more than two miles of art, Duchamp claimed. Every sort of art could be found there, from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s “Titanic Memorial,” an eighteen-foot-high granite statue of a Christlike young male, to Brancusi’s “Portrait of Princess Bonaparte” (now known as “Princess X”), a polished-brass sculpture of a nearly abstract female that also suggested, unmistakably, the male genitalia. Most of the works on view, however, were by no means avant-garde. Thanks to Duchamp’s hanging system, which followed the alphabetical order of the artists’ last names, Cubist still-lifes cohabited with academic landscapes and also with amateur photographs, batiks, and artificial flower arrangements. Beatrice Wood’s entry, a painting of a nude female floating in a bathtub, with a cake of real soap glued (at Duchamp’s suggestion) to her pubic area, attracted a lot of attention; several gentlemen tucked their calling cards into the frame. Although Duchamp was rumored to be sending in a Cubist canvas called “Tulip Hysteria Coordinating,” no such work turned up either in the catalogue or in the exhibition. Indeed, Duchamp is not listed as having contributed anything at all to the 1917 Independents. He was responsible, nevertheless, for the show’s most notorious artifact—a work the public never saw.
Walter Arensberg, Joseph Stella, and Marcel Duchamp went shopping for this item a week or so before the exhibition opened, following a spirited conversation at lunch. They went to the showroom of the J. L. Mott Ironworks, at 118 Fifth Avenue—a manufacturer of plumbing equipment—where Duchamp picked out and bought a flat-backed, Bedfordshire Model porcelain urinal. He carried it to his studio, turned it onto its back, and painted on the rim at the lower left, in large black letters, the name “R. MUTT” and the date “1917.” Two days before the official opening, this object was delivered to the Grand Central Palace, together with an envelope bearing the fictitious Mr. Mutt’s six-dollar fee and the work’s title—“Fountain.”
The story of “Fountain” ’s rejection and the ensuing brouhaha has entered art history mainly through Beatrice Wood’s eyewitness account. She describes walking into one of the exhibition’s storerooms and finding Walter Arensberg and the artist George Bellows in the midst of a furious argument, with the “glistening white object” on the floor between them. “You mean to say,” Bellows shouted, quivering with rage, “if a man sent in horse manure glued to a canvas we would have to accept it?” Arensberg, “with a touch of undertaker’s sadness,” replied, “I’m afraid we would.” The issue was not resolved until an hour or so before the private opening, on April 9th, when ten members of the society’s board of directors met and, according to an article in the Herald, “Mr. Mutt’s defenders were voted down by a small margin.” William Glackens, the society’s president, in a statement to the press, voiced the immemorial ery of the artistic rear guard when under attack: the object, he said, was “by no definition a work of art.” Duchamp and Arensberg immediately resigned from the board in protest.
What happened to “Fountain,” which disappeared forever soon after the exhibition opened, has been obscured by the conflicting statements of several participants. Did Walter Arensberg make a great show of buying it and carrying it away in triumph, as Duchamp once reported? Since “Fountain” was never listed as part of the Arensberg collection and nobody ever saw it there, this story is certainly apocryphal. Did Glackens “solve” the problem by lifting the object over his head and letting it smash on the exhibition floor, as his son, Ira Glackens, has written? We know that this didn’t happen, because a week later the urinal was at Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession gallery, called “291,” for its address on Fifth Avenue. Duchamp had taken it there himself, and Beatrice Wood tells us why: “At Marcel’s request, he”—Stieglitz—“agreed to photograph the ‘Fountain.’ . . . He was greatly amused, but also felt it was important to fight bigotry in America. He took great pains with the lighting, and did it with such skill that a shadow fell across the urinal suggesting a veil.” The best guess regarding “Fountain” ’s disappearance is that it stayed on at “291” after Stieglitz photographed it, and that when Stieglitz closed his gallery for good, soon afterward, it met the same fate as the original bicycle wheel and the bottle rack: it was thrown out with the trash.
Not one of the newspaper accounts identified the controversial object as a urinal, decorum requiring that it be referred to as a “bathroom fixture.” Not one reporter, moreover, seemed to connect R. Mutt with Duchamp. (The name, Duchamp later explained, was a play on Mott, the name of the ironworks, but it also referred to the comic strip “Mutt and Jeff.”) A month later, in May, Stieglitz’s photograph of “Fountain” appeared in an ephemeral little magazine called The Blind Man, which was put out by Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and a new friend of Duchamp’s—Henri-Pierre Roché, another French noncombatant, who had arrived in New York shortly before as an adviser to the American Industrial Commission to France. Opposite the photograph was an unsigned editorial on “The Richard Mutt Case,” whose authorship has been attributed variously to Beatrice Wood, to Louise Norton, and to the “editors” of The Blind Man. The ideas in it, at any rate, are clearly Duchamp’s. “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance,” the text read, in part. “He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.” As a definition of the readymade, this one has never been surpassed.
The 1917 Independents exhibition and its attendant festivities constituted the high-water mark of New York’s first artistic avant-garde. America had declared war on Germany a few days before the exhibition opened. Military needs and wartime restrictions would soon cut deeply into the freedom of thought, expression, and behavior that had made life in New York so agreeable for Duchamp and his friends, but for a while longer the war still seemed far away, and a hectic gaiety prevailed.
Love and sex were disrupting the Arensberg circle. Beatrice Wood, unable to break down Duchamp’s reserve, had fallen in love with Henri-Pierre Roché, and he quickly relieved her of her troublesome virginity. (Roché, a connoisseur of ménages à trois, later wrote the novel “Jules et Jim,” which Francois Truffaut made into the famous film.) Wood was devastated when she learned that Roché was also sleeping with her friend Alissa Frank. Wood went to Montreal to perform with a French theatre group, moved in with the manager, and eventually married him—a disastrous marriage. Before she left New York, though, she slept with Duchamp for the first time. “It just happened in the most natural way,” she recalls, more than seventy years later. “He was as gentle in that as he was in everything else.” Louise Arensberg, meanwhile—shy, self-effacing Lou—had fallen deeply in love with Roché, and he with her. Their affair required all sorts of clandestine arrangements. Although Walter was quite open about his own infidelities, he had made it clear that he could not tolerate an unfaithful wife, and when he did find out about Lou and Roché he threatened to kill himself.
Picabia was drinking more and more heavily, and working himself into a manic state that eventually led to a nervous breakdown. Insatiably priapic, he embarked on an affair with Isadora Duncan, who used to show up occasionally at the Arensberg gatherings. (One night, Isadora’s overenthusiastic parting embrace of Waiter Arensberg caused him to fall face down in the elevator, breaking his front teeth.) Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia left New York in the fall of 1917. Her tolerance for Picabia’s drinking and womanizing had finally run out, and she wanted to be with her two children, in Switzerland. A month later, Picabia pulled himself together and left to join her; he never again, in his long life, returned to the United States.
Duchamp told Roché he was thinking of leaving, too, but he stayed on almost a year longer—long enough to complete the last oil painting on canvas he would ever do. It had been commissioned by a well-to-do artist and collector named Katherine Dreier, to fill a long, narrow space over the bookshelves in her library, and the painting, which a good many people (including me) consider one of his three or four masterpieces, did not please him at all. Entitled “Tu m’,” it is dominated by the cast shadows of three readymades: “Bicycle Wheel,” “Hat Rack,” and a corkscrew that may have been going to but never did become a readymade. Starting at the center and receding in perspective to the upper-left corner is a series of what look like diamond-shaped paint samples, which cover the spectrum from bright yellow to pale gray to crimson to black, and which Duchamp did not paint himself. He assigned that rather tedious task to Yvonne Chastel, the former Yvonne Crotti, who had returned to New York after her divorce from Jean Crotti and moved in with Duchamp.
A lot of Duchamp’s earlier ideas are recapitulated in “Tu m’.” Games of illusion and reality, new and personal forms of measurement, jokes that call into question the definition of art—all these were part of Duchamp’s ongoing search for an art that moved beyond retinal effects to mental constructs, but apparently he felt that “Tu m’ ” did not push the search along in useful ways. “The painting was a form of résumé,” he said, “which is never a very attractive form of activity. . . . I never liked that painting myself.” The do-it-yourself title—the viewer is free to complete it with any French verb that begins with a vowel is usually read as “Tu m’emmerdes,” a “very coarse verb” (according to Cassell’s French Dictionary) meaning “you bore me,” and it may very well have summed up Duchamp’s feelings at the time, not only about painting but toward Katherine Dreier, who would nevertheless become one of his greatest admirers and patrons.
Duchamp felt a lot better about “Sculpture for Traveling,” a new readymade that appeared in his studio in July of 1918. He had bought some rubber bathing caps in various colors, cut them into strips, glued the strips together at random intervals, and attached the network with long strings to nails in his studio walls, making what he described in a letter to Jean Crotti, in Paris, as “a sort of multicolored cobweb.” The new readymade was indeterminate in shape, because it could be hung any number of different ways. It may have reflected his recent decision to leave for Argentina, a popular haven then for draft dodgers. (Duchamp had been rejected for military service once again, by a French military board in New York, but after America entered the war, in April, 1917, he faced the possibility of being drafted into the United States Army.) In the same letter to Crotti he said that he “and probably Yvonne too” were going to Buenos Aires, because “everything here has changed, atmosphere and all,” and he explained, “Constraints rule—I haven’t worked on my glass since you came here and I have no desire to. A different country will probably allow me to have more energy.”
In preparation for his departure, he moved the two panels of the “Large Glass” from his studio to a storage closet in the Arensbergs’ apartment. Most of his other works had been given away or sold. He wrote a note to Picabia, who was recovering from his nervous breakdown in the Swiss resort spa of Bex, and urged him to come to Argentina, saying, “The advantage is that it’s far away.”
The French film director Léonce Perret was shooting a war movie in New York that summer, called “Lafayette, We Come!” Duchamp was hired for a single scene, in which he played one of a group of blinded soldiers being read to by the film’s female star, Dolores Cassinelli. On August 14th, Duchamp and Yvonne Chastel boarded the S.S. Crofton Hall, a small, slow steamer, for a trip that would take thirty-six days to reach Buenos Aires. He had written to Jean Crotti, “I have a very vague intention of staying down there a long time; several years very likely—which is to say basically cutting completely with this part of the world.”
The Armistice was signed two months after the ship reached Buenos Aires. Yvonne Chastel, bored with life in what struck her as a cultural backwater, left for Paris early in 1919, and Duchamp sailed home the following June. Six months later, he returned to New York, where he spent a good part of the next three years. Long before, Walter Arensberg had agreed to pay the rent on Duchamp’s new studio. In exchange, Duchamp had promised to give him the “Large Glass” when it was finished. Early in 1923, Duchamp delivered the work, unfinished but complete enough to satisfy his own needs, to Katherine Dreier, who had bought it from the Arensbergs.
Duchamp never did cut his ties to New York. Although Paris had become the magnetic center of postwar culture—“the place where the twentieth century was,” in Gertrude Stein’s phrase—Duchamp seemed to prefer living in Manhattan. Although he went back to France in 1923 and lived there for the next twenty years, he kept in touch with Walter Arensberg, Beatrice Wood, Katherine Dreier, and other American friends, and he made several extended visits to the States. In 1942, with Europe engulfed in another world war, he came here for good. He married Alexina (Teeny) Sattler, an American woman who had previously been married to the dealer Pierre Matisse (Henri Matisse’s son), and in 1955 he became an American citizen. It was in this country, moreover, that Duchamp became recognized as the most influential artist of the twentieth century. Not until at least two generations of American artists had claimed him as their benign yet enigmatic idol did the French wake up to the profound shift that Duchamp, more than anyone else, had brought about in contemporary art—the shift from art as the fabrication of “retinal” objects to art as a conceptual idea. “After Duchamp,” the art historian Roger Shattuck wrote in 1972, “it is no longer possible to be an artist in the way it was before.”
Duchamp was not a bit surprised that New York, in the postwar years, took over Paris’s role as the vital center of modern art. “There is more freedom here, so it’s a better terrain for new developments,” he told me not long before his death, in 1968. “Also, people leave you alone. In my case, anyway, I’ve found in America a little better acceptance of my right to breathe.” ♦