Marcel Duchamp

A blow-up of the Mona Lisa with a moustache owned by the French Communist Party and stored at the Centre Pompidou for the next 100 years is given the task of advertising yet another Duchamp funeral.

It is a strange fate that a sublime exercise in laziness by an anartist who managed to revolutionise 20th-century art processes is now being offered to the public as evidence against him.
This small picture picked up at a street market and signed would have sufficed to abort the charitable mission of taking Duchamp back to his ridiculous early daubs which – although collected by great museums – came (regrettably for him) at least 5 or 6 years too late for the cruel and ridiculous law on newness and, above all, for his epiphanies at the various Parisian Salons of 1905 and 1911.

Gone are his magnificent reactions to the dishonourable inclusions and removals from artistic celebrations of the times, when New York and Paris were still playing dice with each other, overshadowed by Mallarmé’s theoretic gamble, and in with the pre-eminence of a small rich avant-garde market still in the making. At that time, it was theoretical issues that relegated his paintings to a corner – although not exactly any old one – of New York’s high society, in the company of Primitivism and pieces by Brancusi.

Today, the ready-mades, assisted and non-, the urinal fountains and the bicycle wheels are all placed on stand-by or, like floral wallpaper, are scattered throughout a magnificent collection of second-rate and more or less precise examples of amateur painting. Unfortunately, his self-same minutiae for traces and notes has turned the curators’ heads, as has the great debunking of the portable museum. Was it not Duchamp who closed all his work in a suitcase, assisted by Joseph Cornell, and, with the aid of English Pop-artist Richard Hamilton, agreed to replicate the unmovable Large Glass?

The desire for visibility inflicted a tragicomic destiny on his chess game with the history of painting, won from the very outset because it had already been lost against the 20th-century giants – Matisse in particular. He was, after all, the one who advocated the most radical Dada expressions but, even more, he who – the Arensbergs’ parlour in the esoteric and Carbonaro New York of the early avant-gardes – welcomed the loudest voice of the century, Arthur Cravan, the intellectual boxer who had railed against the Salon’s policies. Today, the highly intellectual Duchamp pays the price of his middling-quality daubs. His A propos d’une jeune sœur, dated 1911, and Femme brune corsage vert, as too the MoMA’s 1907 portrait of Yvonne Duchamp are now given the status of masterpieces when they are none other than sad works aimed at de-theorising Cubism; they were even so for his early Cubist friends. Another beautiful and pointless exhibition informing us that Duchamp, a painter through family lineage like his older brother and his uncle, paid the price of Matisse, Cezanne and all else.

Yet another curatorial trick pulls pages and pages of recomposed notes out of the hat, ones created for the ultimate impossible picture The Bride Stripped Bare…, and relegates the Etant Donné mock-up to a secret and, basically, tireless denunciation of the voyeuristic qualities of value and merchandise. That female body, illuminated by gas lamp and glimpsed through a peephole in Philadelphia is the evidence of his perfect crime.

Edouard Manet was the only modern artist who had to be killed for entry to the Olympus of the greats and Duchamp did this by inventing machines, bachelors and non-, and smearing surfaces. He could not have been more conceptual but, remember, too much love can kill even the most iconoclastic artist.

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Until 5 January 2015
Marcel Duchamp – La peinture, même
Centre Pompidou, Galerie 2