Arts and Letters

One distinction that Marcel Duchamp could surely have claimed (as a matter of fact, he made very few outright claims in this or any other direction) was that he achieved the widest and most durable international fame on the basis of the most minuscule output of almost any artist that can be recalled. In this, of course, he revealed his basically Dadaist motivation; and although there were others who outranged him in the field of non-productivity (most notably, a man named Jacques Rigaud, the Dadaist poet who became famous in the nineteen-twenties as the poet who had never written a poem in his life) and though Duchamp's limited production was probably as much an expression of a kind of aristocratic reserve as of any other factor, he did in one way or another succeed in reducing his painting output drastically indeed.

This in spite of the fact that he was apparently naturally precocious. Born in 1887, he was by his early twenties a leader of the "Section d'Or," that short-lived but vigorous group of artists which included Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and so on; and he was only twenty-six when, in 1913, he sent to the now-famous New York Armory Show his "Nude Descending a Staircase," a picture which brought him an immediate success, of scandal if of nothing else.

The Armory Show, which was got together with the laudable purpose of introducing the newest in French contemporary modern art to the American public, was greeted with vociferous cries of outrage from the start, but Duchamp's "Nude" was the acknowledged storm center, and no one can still quite determine why. Duchamp himself once opined that it might have been the situation which set off the outcry. "Whoever heard of a nude coming down a staircase?" he asked. "In painting? A nude should be seen reclining or lying down, on a bed, on a sofa. But just walking around?" And though this seems more than a little far-fetched, it is as good an explanation as any other that has been offered, for the painting, with its cool flat linear geometry and mastery of technical facility, seems as remote from anything eruptive in the way of emotion as could be imagined.

He used much the same technique in his "La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires," his last major composition, done a few years later. But soon after that, Duchamp's interest in painting itself began to wane. To be sure, in the middle or late nineteen-thirties, he busied himself with the fabrication of a series of so-called "Valises"—the embodiment of a totally charming Duchampish concept, in which carefully reproduced miniature copies of all his works were stowed away in neatly subdivided compartments of a small flat leather suitcase, thus making them available for instant enjoyment by the connoisseur anywhere.

But here, probably, what intrigued him most was the sheer nicety of the manufacture. In a sense, there was a kind of portmanteau elegance about it, like that of the nineteenth-century voyagers who traveled with their own silver and dinner ware packed specially; and apart from this what chiefly occupied him was a rather casual return to such fundamentally Dada enterprises as the collection of what he called "ready-mades"—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, a urinal, a small boat propeller, which he presented as "natural" art objects in themselves—and which, despite his almost casual attitude toward them, served unquestionably as the taking-off point for the contemporary school of Pop Art. And, of course, there was always chess, possibly his only life-long preoccupation….

Whatever Duchamp did, he did with disarming tolerance, gravity, sound wit, and impeccable taste, and these qualities were with him till the last. He liked New York, and after several comings and goings after the Armory Show he settled here to stay in 1942, becoming an American citizen not long after. In his later years, though, he moved back to France, retiring to live in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine; there he died, October 1, 1968, at the age of eighty-one.