Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Marcel Duchamp
French; 20th-century
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
99%/1%
Fountain. 1917-. Porcelain urinal
If there is art it is somewhere inside this. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Exhibition: Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930)
92%
Nude (Study), Sad Young Man in a Train. 1911-1912. Oil on canvas panel, mounted to pressboard, nailed to stretcher
This painting is self-consciously an object, but in a way that's nicely prepared by the picture Duchamp has made on its face — that is what makes it great. Namely, the way the nails creep here and there into the picture's space, the way this creeping accentuates the slight black border that outlines the image on three sides (but that also loses itself frequently within the black diegetic haze), how that black border within the picture points to and involves (but makes redundant) the textural brown edge provided by the stretcher, the way all of this provides for the nude a literal depth into which to piecemeal proceed... But all of that would be for naught except for the bizarre disconnect between Duchamp's paroxysmal cubist modeling and the decontextualizing haze (sepia-brown giving way to noncommittal darks) it's been set into. It's a picture that makes too much muck out of what a picture is not to have turned itself into a thing. (TFS, 2024)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
90%
Eternal Siesta (after a poem by Jules Laforgue). 1911. Pencil, watercolor, and crayon on light tan wove paper
Much as this may be a sketch, and much as it may be an early work, it still seems to lay out — and to do so as clearly as his contemporaneous paintings do, or more so — what Duchamp's project really was, and how, almost in spite of itself, this project relates ineluctably back to histories of looking and of the pictorial arts. The cubism which Duchamp got up to is easy (if deceptively so) to see as, well, cubism; this drawing can't be seen as much at all, except scribblings and maybe (maybe) a richly degenerate Symbolism. And yet, there's a distinctness to this assortment of pictorial signs — not as a registration of thought or a trace of the artist's hand or a representation of some worldly thing, but as itself alone, whatever it is. So what you see is a depicted object struggling to demonstrate, not its transcendent identity with the means through which it's been brought into pictorial being, but instead its distinctness from anything but itself: its essence, I guess. This is obscure, but it's there in the way the drawing hovers just above the abyssal empty space of the page; and in the openness of every form on its own, but the ultimate closure of their amalgamated whole; and in the refusal of any one portion of the arrangement to assert its position behind or before any other; and in the way the color seems neither to accent nor to indicate nor to model nor to mold. This is Duchamp demonstrating what pictures want to achieve but never possibly could; and so he moved on from pictures. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
90%
Bottle Rack. 1914-. Galvanized iron bottle rack
The bottle rack suffers for not being the urinal. This isn't Duchamp's fault, except to the degree that it is implicit in his attempt to transcend art's restrictions by completely embodying the artness of art that only a single eloquent gesture could ever take up the Readymade's mantle, with all other similar "moves" being subject to a greater or lesser degree of conventionalism. (This is the case not just within Duchamp's practice, but for the whole subsequent history of appropriation that flows from his work.) Whether because they're so spiky and cool-looking, or because there are many different (potential) versions with slight variations of "form," or simply because they don't quite have the cache of Fountain, the bottle racks demand to be taken as sculpture. Not just as sculpture, to be sure: the non-art aspect seems almost literally to flow through their negative spaces and to hang on their metal hooks, distancing these objects from facile recognizability, despite the resolute presence they possess. But as sculpture none the less: there's a prettiness the bottle racks can't evade, which is the fault of their reception and a mark (however faint) of their failure. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
87%
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 1). 1911. Oil on cardboard on board
First off, the black bands at either side of the canvas are like anti-Seurat, negating and relativizing the image rather than affirming (as do Seurat's painted frames) its self-sustaining liveliness and interiority. (It's too easy to read negativity, even hostility towards art's most basic methods into Duchamp's early work, but it's also probably foolish not to do so.) What's most interesting about this painting, however, is the way it "reads as" or "performs" cubism, while also deftly shirking cubist formal demands. This isn't the same thing as misunderstanding the style, à la someone like Severini. Instead, it's a matter of using this new mode against itself to reveal its own limitations. (And we're back again to Duchamp's flippant negativity.) Only the figure herself is fragmented; all the unarticulated ground around her, plus the rather unabstracted staircase behind, situates her in a space unaffected by her presence within it, which is almost the opposite of cubism. (There's a similar simplicity of the figure-ground relation in the more famous second version of this painting, though there it's a bit less plainly evident than it is here.) Additionally, there are many just-visible pockmarks on the surface of this painting — mostly in the upper left — that ever so delicately foreground its object-qualities, though in a much more literal-minded and anti-imagistic (i.e. less "painterly) way than, say, Picasso's chair caning. The upshot of all of this is that the painting points in the direction of an affirmation not of itself as a painting, but of the nude descending as an actual reality. Despite the debasements to which it has been subjected by the techniques of an increasingly critical modern art, this figure has a presence apart from that of the picture. The source of Duchamp's conservatism is here, but also the source of the promise he'll continue to hold for modernism until the day it dies. It seems strange to call Duchamp a realist, which is what I'm doing. But what are the readymades other than things that, once they've submitted themselves to every conceivable critical operation, assert some sort of inexplicable Being? (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
85%
Apropos of Little Sister. 1911. Oil on canvas
Duchamp's cubism-proper is so good as cubist painting that it can feel correct not to read it against this stylistic grain — but that would be a mistake. This painting, however, is not quite cubism-proper, and so it instructs us better than, say, Nude Descending in how best to consider Duchamp's picture-making practice. Though it occurs as a sequence of planes, the abstracting of this girl's body isn't measured and objectivizing in the way of Picasso or Braque, but rather plaintive and uncontrolled — almost sentimental. Though one third of the canvas is left untouched, things don't lead back inevitably to the picture plane and to "flatness," and so things here aren't ultimately about the painting or "painting" as such. Instead, it's all about the girl. According to a hamfisted modernism, this would spell kitsch, as would the blues in the upper left and the almost illustrational quality of the cutely crossed legs. But to make such a judgement would be to take this painting as a painting, and maybe it asks that we take it otherwise. There's a pervasive indistinction at play: in the colors lapsing into each other; in the broken fields of paint that hover somewhere between literal surface and illusionistic depth; in the bodyless body of the little sister. Rather than averring its picture-ness, this is a painting struggling to deny its status as a painting — a different (almost an opposite) sort of modernist negation. This impulse was better suited by non-mediums like the readymade than by the vaunted medium of painting. Still, Duchamp's ability to use his format against itself is spectacular. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
80%
Box in a Valise (from or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy). 1935-66. Leather valise containing miniature replicas and reproductions in various mediums
The series of all these boxes taken together is our proper critical object, not any one box in particular. These are machines for fixing the unfixable essences of artworks, or rather, they're jokes on the contingency that underlies our experience of all art. Their aesthetic substance is the gulf that exists between the total sum of their parts, and the actuality of any one of the individual "original" works they reproduce. Criticism of the boxes is therefore, by its nature and theirs, purely speculative, at least to a certain degree. At Duchamp's retrospective, however, MoMA's display of the series forced further speculation than was necessary: the display mystified and materialized the boxes, turning them into art-object fetishes rather than preserving their vastly interpenetrating conceptual mechanics. You can't have visitors pawing at the art, of course, but to display the cases as cheeky design work is to sap them of their potency. (This isn't to say that the way they assert themselves as sleekly made, slightly gauche keepsakes isn't part of what they're doing aesthetically. But what's important is how their odd, evasive connectedness negates the significance of their design for our experience.) Were I able to range out all the components and take my time going through them, I imagine Box in Valise would strike me as a masterpiece. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
56%
Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?. 1921. Painted metal birdcage, wood, marble, two glass dishes, thermometer, cuttlebone
As Greenberg was wont to point out, an artwork that founds some new style (or genre or medium or format or whatever) is usually going to be lower in quality than the works that build off what it proposes. The former will be unwittingly beholden to past forms, while the latter can reflect with more distance and clarity on the relationship between novelty and convention. This famous artwork is as good a contender for the title of "first Surrealist object" as anything. It therefore demonstrates the problem. It's caught between the conventions of sculpture and the frantic aesthetic possibilities of concepts. (The same could actually be said of much, if not most, later Surrealism.) The work's main effect results from a sudden collision: you recognize in a flash the collective unfitness of these objects — you may even recognize a vague poetic relation cultivated between them — but soon the shock morphs into an easy understanding facilitated by the sculptural qualities which the work has failed either to skirt or to transcend. The marble is a joke on sculpture that, to its aesthetic detriment, forces you to gauge the work at least in part against the history of carvings in marble; the formal openness of the birdcage (which Robert Morris would take up to better effect in his own, more successful non-sculptures) does not sufficiently negate the (sculptural) solidity of the assemblage overall. The title of the piece does a lot of the experiential heavy-lifting, which would be fine except that the connection between sneezing and the stuff in the cage is too oblique to reward sustained attention. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Marcel Duchamp)
1%/99%
Fountain. 1917-. Porcelain urinal
If there is art it is somewhere inside this. (TFS, 2026)