Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Marcel Duchamp
French; 20th-century
New York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
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 all so 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. (2024)