Duchamp's Pipe, page 22
21 Irene E. Hofmann, “Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 131–197. www.jstor.org/stable/4104318. The plastic arts are the visual arts that use malleable materials such as paint, clay, or paper—materials that can be formed because one of their properties includes “plasticity.”
Chapter 17
1 Marcel Duchamp, interview by Georges Charbonnier for Chess Life, 1961, quoted and cited in Dalia Judovitz, Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 106n13. Note, the interview can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gNqeNNPkOs.
2 Bill Wall, “George Koltanowski.” California Chess History Archives, www.chessdryad.com/articles/wall/art_10.htm.
3 Caroline Cros, Marcel Duchamp (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 11; Marcel Duchamp, Affectionately Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, trans. Jill Taylor (Ghent, Belgium: Ludion Publishers, 2000), 44.
4 Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970), 65.
5 Francis M. Naumann, Bailey Bradley, and Jennifer Shahade, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (New York: Readymade Press, 2009), 27.
6 Marcel Duchamp, in Marcel Duchamp, Pontus Hultén, Jennifer Gough-Cooper, and Jacques Caumont, Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life; Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rose Sélavy: 1887–1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), unpaginated, entry for New York City, Thursday, March 23, 1944; letter to Man Ray, July 23, 1944.
7 Naumann, Bailey, and Shahade, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, 27, citing that “the text of the leaflet is reprinted in Schwarz, Complete Works, 777 [see note 4].”
8 In 1922 Henri-Pierre Roche commented on a colored set made in plaster of Paris, c. 1920, but no colored chess set exists today. This may have been a prototype showing Duchamp’s intent, as discussed in Naumann, Bailey, and Shahade, Marcel Duchamp, 17, citing Duchamp et al., Ephemerides, unpaginated, entry for October 17, 1922.
Chapter 18
1 I thank Larry List for our 2012 conversation concerning Duchamp and Koltanowski. Mr. List conducted substantial and significant research on this 1944–1945 exhibition, summarized in his book and exhibition The Imagery of Chess Revisited. Larry List, ed., The Imagery of Chess Revisited, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by the Noguchi Museum, October 20, 2005–March 5, 2006 (New York: Noguchi Museum and George Braziller, 2005). Exhibition brochure available at www.noguchi.org/sites/default/files/Exhibition%20Brochure-The%20Imagery%20of%20Chess%20Revisited-2005-06.pdf.
2 Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 91–92. Quoted on the “Chess Tournament at Julien Levy Gallery, January 6, 1945” page of her website, www.dorotheatanning.org/life-and-work/view/231.
3 Mildred Adkins and Berton Roueché, “Phonographic Mind,” Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, January 6, 1945, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1945/01/06/phonographic-mind/.
4 List, The Imagery of Chess Revisited, 24, 2. There are other interpretations of Duchamp’s choice of the glove as a part of his installation, as a response to other artists in the show. List suggests that Duchamp exhibited the Pocket Chess Set in the palm of a rubber glove pinned to a wall (see Ingrid Schaffner’s introduction, fig. 7). The addition of the glove may have been influenced by the cast of a mannequin hand that the designer and photographer Xanti Schawinsky included in his Chess Table Assemblage (see fig. 46). The rubber glove can be seen as the negative, or opposite, of Schawinsky’s positive cast hand. In addition, the implication that a player was trying to move the tiny, pinned-down chess pieces while wearing the rubber glove was Duchamp’s final gesture in transmuting the Pocket Chess Set from a functional real-world object into a useless work of art. Duchamp may have added the rubber glove to his Pocket Chess Set to make it a further-altered readymade; he had first shown the set at Levy’s gallery in the December 1943 exhibition Through the Big End of the Opera Glass.
5 California State Chess Association and United States Chess Federation, and Los Angeles Times, The Pan-American Chess Congress 1945, cover and advertisement on p. 7. See also www.chess-museum.com/collectors-news.html, W. T. Pinney—American Staunton sets.
6 Irving Chernev and Fred Reinfeld, Winning Chess (David McKay: New York, 1947), 7.
7 Early magnetic chess sets, Chess Pie, 1927, p. 40 (Wondersigns Ltd. advertisement); see the “8095. Early magnetic chess sets” section of Edward Winter’s Chess Notes, now located at chesshistory.com (www.chesshistory.com/winter/winter107.html). The Chess Pie brochure was the official souvenir booklet of the London 1927 International Team Chess Tournament, published by the Printing Craft for the British Chess Federation. Bill Wall, email correspondence with the author, August 2018.
8 American Chess Bulletin, July 28–August 12, 1945, Pan American Chess Congress Program, Hollywood, CA, www.chessdryad.com/articles/Hollywood1945/Hollywood1945.pdf. The Drueke ad is on (unnumbered) p. 6, followed by a Pinney ad on p. 7.
9 See ChessMate.com: Great Games & Gadgets, www.chessmate.com/duchamp.html.
10 Guillaume Apollinaire, Le gant rose, Paris-Journal, July 4, 1914 (http://obvil.sorbonne-universite.site/corpus/apollinaire/apollinaire_paris-journal#apo1914-07-04c), quoted in Roger Cardinal, “Giorgio de Chirico and Surrealist Mythology,” Papers of Surrealism 2 (Summer 2004): 2; English original of a text first published in French as “Giorgio de Chirico et la mythologie surréaliste” in Giorgio de Chirico et le mythe grec, Turin and London, 1995; www.mattesonart.com/giorgio-de-chirico--surrealist-mythology.aspx. See also Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (Boulder, CO, and Oxford, UK: Westview Press and Icon Editions, 2002), chapter 8: “And What Shall I Worship Save the Enigma?” 145–64.
11 Martin Smith, “He Might Not Have Been Amused IX …,” The Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog (2007–2016), March 16, 2013, http://streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.com/2013/03/he-might-not-have-been-amused-ix.html.
12 Katherine Robinson, art historian and scientific coordinator of the periodical Metaphysical Art—The de Chirico Journals, Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Rome; personal email correspondence with the author, December 1, 2018. See also the de Chirico biography at: www.fondazionedechirico.org/biografia/?lang=en.
13 Giorgio de Chirico, “Meditations of a Painter,” 1912. Though these manuscripts were read and circulated by Paul Éluard, they remained in the collection of Jean Paulhan. They are now known as the Parisian Manuscripts, copies of which reside at the Museum of Modern Art New York Archives. They were translated by art historian Robert Goldwater and reproduced in Appendix A of James Thrall Soby’s Giorgio de Chirico (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 244–50. The quotation used here appears on pp. 245–46.
14 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 12, 14.
15 de Chirico, “Meditations of a Painter,” in Soby’s Giorgio de Chirico, 248.
16 Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, xi.
17 See Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (Boulder, CO, and Oxford, UK: Westview Press and Icon Editions, 2002), chapter 8: “And What Shall I Worship Save the Enigma?” 145–64.
18 Marcel Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, by Pierre Cabanne, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 76, 77.
19 Susan Glover Godlewski, “Warm Ashes: The Life and Career of Mary Reynolds” (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001), 12.
20 J. H. Matthews, Andre Breton: Sketch for an Early Portrait, Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, vol. 52 (Amsterdam, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1986), 82–83, quoting Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), 202.
Chapter 19
1 Erik Satie, Mémoires d’un amnésique (Toulouse: Editions Ombres, 2010). Also cited and translated by Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France: 1885 to World War I (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 180.
2 See Rhonda Roland Shearer, “Marcel Duchamp: A Readymade Case for Collecting Objects of Our Cultural Heritage Along with Works of Art,” Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, December 1, 2000, last modified February 3, 2019, www.toutfait.com/marcel-duchamp-a-readymade-case-for-collecting-objects-of-our-cultural-heritage-along-with-works-of-art/.
3 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990), 4.
4 Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, Affectionately Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, trans. Jill Taylor (Ghent, Belgium: Ludion Publishers, 2000).
5 Marcel Mauss, “The Gift” (Essai sur le don) in Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1950), 15. Originally published in French, 1923–1924. English Edition: Marcel Mauss and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London:Cohen and West, 1966) 43.
6 Sir Richard Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), 130, 167.
7 A native spirituality guide designed to instruct the Royal Canadian Mounted Police notes: “Pipes are used during both private and group ceremonies, the prayer itself being wafted through the smoke of the burning plant material.… The pipe is disassembled into its component parts while being carried from one place to another. The pipe is never a ‘personal possession.’ It belongs to the community. The holder of the pipe is generally considered its custodian. The pipe is usually passed on to another custodian.” RCMP with contributions from Corrections Canada and Manitoba Native Elders Art Shofley, Angus Merrick, Charlie Nelson, and Velma Orvis, accessed September 2014, www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/native-spirituality-guide.
8 Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (Boulder, CO, and Oxford, UK: Westview Press and Icon Editions, 2002), 168.
9 Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred, 173.
10 Michel Foucault, This Is Not A Pipe (Berkeley: University of California, 1983).
11 In 1950, Einstein, age seventy-one, became a lifetime member of the Montréal Pipe Smokers Club. Rick Newcombe, “Put That in Your Pipe,” Reason.com, July 1994, http://reason.com/archives/1994/07/01/put-that-in-your-pipe.
Part IV
1 Marcel Duchamp, quoted in James Johnson Sweeney, “Interview with Marcel Duchamp, 1955,” edited version of “A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp,” television interview conducted by James Johnson Sweeney, NBC, January 1956, filmed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Printed in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 127–37; also printed in Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day, ed. James Nelson (New York: W. W. Norton: New York, 1958), 89–99.
Chapter 20
1 Giacomo Casanova, The Memoires of Casanova, Complete: The Rare Unabridged London Edition of 1894, trans. Arthur Machen (Project Gutenberg EBook, November 2, 2006, last modified August 9, 2016), www.gutenberg.org/files/2981/2981-h/2981-h.htm.
2 Alfred Gell, “Magic, Perfume, Dream …” in Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-cultural Studies in Symbolism, ed. Ioan Lewis (London: Academic Press, 1977), 28.
3 Kristina Seekamp, “Unmaking the Museum: Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades in Context,” An Online Exhibition, 2004, www.toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum/.
4 “50cc of Paris Air,” Philadelphia Museum, Permanent Collection, www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51617.html?mulR=1094720816%7C2.
5 This was followed by a replica in 1936 and editions in 1963 and 1972.
6 Jennifer Mundy, “Man Ray: Ce Qui manque à nous tous, 1927,” in Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/man-ray-ce-qui-manque-a-nous-tous-t07960, citing Arturo Schwarz, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 209.
7 Casanova, The Memoires of Casanova.
8 Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (New York: Badlands, 2013). See also Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 72. Duchamp told Calvin Tomkins, “I spend my time very easily, but wouldn’t know how to tell you what I do … I am a respirateur, a breather. I enjoy it tremendously.” Cited in Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 408.
9 Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp, Interview: Marcel Duchamp, The American Scholar, vol. 40, no. 2 (Spring 1971), 281.
Chapter 21
1 Marcel Duchamp, transcribed conversation with Julian Sanz-Martinez (1897–1988) Hameau de Sainte Trinide, Sanary-sur-Mer, Spring 1942. This four-page manuscript, a “conversation presented as a poem, was found together with Duchamp’s telegrams and photos in the project of a book Sanz-Martinez prepared after Duchamp left for America.… Sanz-Martinez … was an archeologist, historian, scholar, researcher, collector, mason, and republican who cultivated ties with the leading figures of the French intelligentsia. He went into exile in France in 1936; … he lived for a long time in Savary-sur-Mer, where Marcel Duchamp spent six months awaiting a visa.” Serge Plantureaux, Weekly Transmission No. 44, The Sanary Bottle Rack, November 3, 2016, Serge Plantureux—Photographies, Cabinet d’expertises et d’investigations (Research Office). https://plantureux.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/PWT-44-Marcel-Duchamp.pdf.
2 Kieran Lyons offers a brilliant exposition of Duchamp’s View cover, including how his military avoidance influenced his art. Kieran Lyons, “Military Avoidance: Marcel Duchamp and the Jura-Paris Road,” Tate Papers, accessed March 2014, www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/military-avoidance-marcel-duchamp-and-jura-paris-road.
3 This is admittedly a huge topic, one that intrigues me as just a layperson and as an artist and historian. I think simplified versions of Duchamp’s concept of the inframince are useful to understanding certain aspects of imagination and personal change; in fact, modified variations of chaos theory have been applied in in psychology, seeking the means to direct an unstable psychological state (such as flight, or fright) back to a stable one. See for example, among many other works, James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987).
4 These are my translations, seeking the nuances of the original French from p. 29 of Duchamp’s notes on the inframince in The Green Box (La Boîte verte), 1934. Duchamp published this collection of 94 documents to explain some of his thinking and to show some of the preliminary works relating to The Large Glass. The notes were left loose so that their relationships for the reader would be determined by chance. Marcel Duchamp, Notes (Paris: Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 1980). See “Le Possible est un inframince,” Centre Pompidou, www.centrepompidou.fr/id/cBAg7j9/rEnGq9p/fr. See also “Le Grand Verre ou la vision «poétique» de Marcel Duchamp,” August 30, 2014, Inframince Marcel Duchamp Blogspot, https://inframincemarcelduchamp.blogspot.com/2014/08/le-grand-verre-ou-la-vision-poetique-de.html.
5 Francis M. Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 64.
6 Henry M. Sayre, “Ready-Mades and Other Measures: The Poetics of Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams,” Journal of Modem Literature 8, no. 1 (1980): 4, www.jstor.org/stable/3831307; citing The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967), 137.
7 “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright ©1938 by William Carlos Williams and New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press, UK.
8 Sayre, “Ready-Mades and Other Measures,” 11–12.
9 William Carlos Williams, from Paterson, copyright ©1946 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press, UK.
10 Harriet Monroe, editor, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse 7, no. 2 (November 1915): 81–83.
11 “Sunday Morning,” from Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1971), 8.
12 Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 153–54. See also Andrew Clearfield, “Pound, Paris, and Dada,” Paideuma 7, nos. 1–2 (Spring and Fall 1978): 113–14.
13 Roxana Preda, “Constantin Brâncuși Vorticist: Sculpture, Art Criticism, Poetry,” 2013, www.academia.edu/4216181/Brâncuși_article_2013, from Roxana Preda, Ezra Pound’s (Post)modern Poetics and Politics: Logocentrism, Language and Truth (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 6.
14 Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” from Personae, copyright ©1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and Faber and Faber, London, UK.
15 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir by Ezra Pound Including the Published Writings of the Sculptor and a Selection from his Letters … (London and New York: John Lane, 1916), 103. See also Ezra Pound, “On ‘In a Station of the Metro,’” Modern American Poetry, www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/metro.htm.
16 There are various nuances of translation from French to English for this phrase. I have selected the ones that provide the most authentic understanding of Duchamp’s statement. See Manuela de Barros, Duchamp & Malevich: Art & Théories du Langage (Arts & Theories of Language) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 39. I thank artist and translator John Statham for his assistance in considering the possible translations for these phrases.
