Marcel Duchamp, La peinture, même
Marcel Duchamp was brilliant, but was he a great painter? He famously ceased painting with the Large Glass — La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme (1915-1923): ‘I wanted to get away from the physical act of painting. I was much more interested in recreating the ideas in paintings … I wanted to place painting again in the service of the spirit.’1 After that, Duchamp apparently became modern art’s most celebrated retiree.
Curator Cécile Debray’s opening line in the exhibition catalogue is ‘Marcel Duchamp’s break with painting is one of the foundational myths of twentieth century art…’. She notes, however, that in Europe Duchamp is known as a conceptual artist or a Dada iconoclast, so he is, in a sense, disembodied.2 That is why ‘Marcel Duchamp, la peinture, même’ was extraordinary: never have so many of Duchamp’s paintings been assembled. This is a tiny body of work: barely fifty oils, the majority made in a fury of experimentation during the years 1910-13. But as Debray is quick to point out, the aim here was not to re-evaluate the paintings themselves.3
Is it perverse to make an exhibition out of a negative — examining what did not make an artist famous? Not from the French point of view. This was the first major Duchamp exhibition in Paris since the Pompidou opened in 1977; it reclaimed the years before Duchamp left France in 1916, to live in the United States, as crucial for his oeuvre, arguing that the paintings enlighten both his ‘artistic, intellectual and aesthetic’ formation and the meaning of the Large Glass.4
In truth, this is a thin
Marcel Duchamp, Nu descendant l'escalier no2, 1912. © ADAGP, Paris 2014.
