{"id":698258,"date":"2026-05-27T17:03:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T17:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/698258\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T17:03:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T17:03:12","slug":"art-death-duchamp-artreview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/698258\/","title":{"rendered":"Art, Death, Duchamp – ArtReview"},"content":{"rendered":"

For an artist who treated the material status of his works with striking nonchalance, Duchamp in his afterlife seems rather preoccupied with asserting control over the material world<\/p>\n

During a roundtable discussion in 1957, Marcel Duchamp argued that art emerges from its maker \u2018in a raw state\u2019, that it must be refined by the spectator, \u2018as pure sugar from molasses\u2019. In the same talk, he coined the term \u2018art coefficient\u2019 to describe the gap between what an artist intends and what is realised. His professed acceptance of contingency, his rejection of the notion of artistic genius, became the attitude for which he is remembered. The reputation suits him, seeing as he had a penchant for delegating aspects of the \u2018creative act\u2019 to spectators and collaborators alike. In 1916 he wrote his sister Suzanne from New York, asking her to locate and sign his name on a bottle rack in his Paris studio, so that he could turn it into a readymade \u2018from a distance\u2019. While such episodes suggest an artist willing to relinquish control, Duchamp\u2019s longer, more convoluted writings on the display and interpretation of his work suggest otherwise.<\/p>\n

He left, for instance, a four-ring binder of notes, photographs and diagrammes detailing how his secretly constructed sculptural environment \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (1946\u201366) \u2013 a painted plaster nude supine on a patch of grass before an image of a forest and waterfall, visible through peepholes in a wooden farmhouse door \u2013 should be transferred from his New York studio to an alcove off the Arensberg Collection galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This manual is on view in the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s current exhibition Marcel Duchamp. In the end, everything from the architectural dimensions to the wattage of the frosted lightbulb that was to illuminate the tableau\u00a0was specified for those carrying out the reinstallation: primarily his widow Alexina \u2018Teeny\u2019 Duchamp, his stepson Paul Matisse and PMA curator Anne d\u2019Harnoncourt. Documents dated after Duchamp\u2019s death in 1968 reveal an administrative whirlwind \u2013 including a dock strike that delayed a shipment of bricks that were to surround the wooden door. For roughly a year, the group carried out Duchamp\u2019s posthumous instructions as if executing a last will and testament, while the artwork remained suspended in a state of indeterminacy.<\/p>\n

\"\"In the Infinitive (The White Box) (detail), 1966, box of 79 facsimile notes (dating from 1914\u201323) contained in a Plexiglas case with a screenprint reproduction of the\u00a0Glider Containing a Water Mill\u00a0on the cover, 33 x 29 x 4 cm. Photo: Tim Tiebout. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/p>\n

Duchamp himself seemed to delight in arts administration, despite or because it involves both control and the loss thereof (anyone who\u2019s curated exhibitions or organised public programming knows how quickly contingency crops up in even the best-laid plans). Early in his career, the French-American artist cofounded the New York-based Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Anonyme, Inc. (1920\u201350), an organisation that called itself a \u2018museum of modern art\u2019 nearly a decade before MoMA existed. Duchamp headed its exhibitions committee and designed the space for its inaugural group show featuring himself, fellow cofounder Man Ray, Constantin Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i and other European modernists, adding oilcloth to the walls and ribbed rubber mats to the floors. He later selected Louis Eilshemius for the organisation\u2019s first solo presentation, even though the New York painter\u2019s romantic, nymph-filled landscapes couldn\u2019t be further from Duchamp\u2019s own artistic sensibility at the time. Alternately making his mark and ceding the floor to others, Duchamp remained involved with the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Anonyme throughout its 30-year run, working closely with its principal founder (and financier) Katherine Dreier, despite their differing views on modern art (Dreier\u2019s vision was more spiritual than his; she\u2019d also, unwittingly, rejected Fountain from the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition when it was submitted under the pseudonym \u2018R. Mutt\u2019).<\/p>\n

It seemed, too, that Duchamp was interested in curating the posthumous reception of his work. MoMA\u2019s exhibition is largely framed around the ways the artist entrenched himself socially and discursively \u2013 and with a good dose of irony \u2013 within a circuit of museums and institutions that were defining the twentieth-century avant-garde, so as to ultimately cement his own legacy. From the 1910s onward, he had a hand in the loaning, display, replication and dispersal of his oeuvre and liaised regularly between his collectors \u2013 including Dreier, as well as Walter and Louise Arensberg, who put him up in New York\u00a0and commissioned one of his best-known works, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915\u201323) \u2013 and institutions including MoMA and the PMA, which received the Arensbergs\u2019 collection in 1950.<\/p>\n

\"\"Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose S\u00e9lavy), 1935\u201341\/1943, leather valise containing sixty-nine miniature replicas and reproductions in various mediums and on various supports, with one hand-coloured collotype on celluloid, 41 \u00d7 38 \u00d7 10 cm (closed). \u00a9 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; ADAGP, Paris and Association Marcel Duchamp. Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York and James Thrall Soby Fund<\/p>\n

Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose S\u00e9lavy) (1935\u201341), which appears in the central gallery of the MoMA exhibition, can be read as a curious example of Duchampian estate management. Here, leather suitcases are filled with dozens of miniature reproductions of works the artist made between 1910 and 1936. This method of display was first prototyped when Duchamp, nearing fifty, was living in Paris at the onset of World War II. The suitcases were produced in seven series between 1941 and 1971 in collaboration with various assistants, including Joseph Cornell, and publishers such as the Milan gallerist Arturo Schwarz. When Duchamp relocated to the US in 1942, his \u2018primary mission\u2019, as MoMA\u2019s catalogue puts it, was to assemble and sell editions of these \u2018portable museums\u2019. These, like the many replicas of his readymades that he authorised Schwarz to make during the late 1950s and \u201960s, were commercial products. However, if we take to heart Theodor Adorno\u2019s comparison of the museum to the mausoleum in the German theorist\u2019s 1955 essay \u2018Val\u00e9ry Proust Museum\u2019, another way to read the rows of waist-high vitrines \u2013 filled with miniature paintings, doll-size cages and urinals and polished maquettes of The Large Glass no bigger than airplane windows \u2013 opens up. Miniatures appear in art throughout history and across cultures; in particular, miniature portraits, such as those made with watercolour on ivory in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, were used to commemorate the dead. In a sense, Duchamp\u2019s recursive representations of his past works, his premature mausoleums, resemble such trinkets, and the Box in a Valise mourns the artist himself.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915\u201323, oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire and dust on two glass panels, 278 x 176 cm. \u00a9 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; ADAGP, Paris; Association Marcel Duchamp. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/p>\n

It is surprising and somewhat contradictory to think that Duchamp, who, in his letters, reacted elegantly when his works were lost or damaged \u2013 and this occurred not infrequently to the likes of Bicycle Wheel (1913) and its subsequent replicas; Fountain (1917), shortly after Alfred Stieglitz took the photo of it that became its defining image; and The Large Glass, which cracked in 1926, en route from an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum to Dreier\u2019s home in Connecticut \u2013 was meanwhile persistently recreating his works in miniature, as if to stave off the impermanence of the world. For an artist whose output consisted more of writing, correspondences, instructions and ideas than of so-called retinal or plastic art, who treated the material status of his works with striking nonchalance, abandoning works like The Large Glass unfinished, Duchamp seems, when it came to the Box in a Valise, rather preoccupied with asserting control over the material world in microcosm.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00c9tant donn\u00e9s in Marcel Duchamp\u2019s New York studio photographed by Denise Brown Hare in 1968. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/p>\n

He did not shy away from the idea of mortality. Even a seemingly lighthearted work like Sculpture-morte (1959) \u2013 a mound of marzipan shaped to resemble a pile of cauliflower, tomatoes and potatoes \u2013 is a vanitas. It is crawling with fake flies, as is the sculpture Torture-morte (1959), a painted plaster cast of his foot. Denise Browne Hare\u2019s black-and-white photographs of \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s, also in the MoMA exhibition, reveal how utterly lifeless the splayed female body looks without the pastel hues of the artificially lit landscape. In a 2008 article titled \u2018Hanging the Work of Art: Love and Death in the Duchampian Readymades\u2019, art historian Sheldon Nodelman reads the image of the suspended form in Duchamp\u2019s oeuvre \u2013 such as the Bride in The Large Glass, who hovers above her helpless suitors \u2013 as a figure of death. Suspension, Nodelman observes, is \u2018a device of display\u2019 as well as \u2018a form of execution\u2019. But there is at play here another form of suspension, a temporal one:\u00a0the delay between signal and reception, between intention and realisation. What emerges from this gap is something less finite than death. Speaking to his spectators by way of his manuals and maquettes, Duchamp seems to urge us to approach his works as sites of shared labour, intervals of uncertainty in which artistic intent is continually refined and suspended between this world and the next.<\/p>\n

Marcel Duchamp\u00a0is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through 22 August<\/a><\/p>\n

Read next L.S. Lowry: \u2018I\u2019m Fed Up With Painting\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Jenny Wu<\/a>Features<\/a>May 27, 2026ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For an artist who treated the material status of his works with striking nonchalance, Duchamp in his afterlife…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-698258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}