BOOKS
A bit of a joke
Philip Hensher
MARCEL DUCHAMP by Calvin Tomkins Chatto, £25, pp. 550 As Calvin Tomkins' superb biography makes clear, the artist Marcel Duchamp was obviously an exceptionally nice man charming, flirtatious and brilliantly witty in company. Compared to the rest of the prickly tribe, he could always be relied on to be entertaining and, pleasant to have around, his personality exerted, more often than not, a force which gave the cliché `magnetic' new life. Beatrice Wood's account of her first meeting with the artist is typical. She had gone to visit the compos- er Edgard Varese in hospital — himself hardly a negligible character:
A cough made me turn to face a man sitting at the far side of the bed. With a slight shock, I became aware of a truly extraordinary face . . . his personality was luminous. Marcel smiled. I smiled. Varese faded away.
Even allowing for the esprit d'escalier which gives so many recalled encounters with the great such a glow, Duchamp clear- ly was quite remarkable in person. 'A young, decidedly boyish human with the quietest air and the most genial simplicity in the world,' one American journalist described him in 1915; and if you want to account for the bizarre emphasis of that word 'human', you have to turn to the art. The truth is that, by the time those Ameri- cans were encountering Duchamp in the first years of the war, his art had become so utterly peculiar, so completely unlike anything anyone had ever conceived of as art before, that it was probably only his complete personal amiability which made anyone take it seriously in the first place.
Duchamp created some of the most bizarre works of art ever imagined, and it is not easy, on reading his biography, to escape the conclusion that, however serious their consequences were for the history of art, and however intelligently and interest- ingly he talked about them subsequently, several of them were conceived in a partial spirit of fun. What proved his most imme- diately influential idea, for instance, the `ready-made' (he always used the English word), came about in a weird amalgam of serious endeavour and Duchamp's simply wanting to have a bit of a laugh. The first occasions on which he simply bought an object, signed it and declared it to be a work of art 'by' or 'from' (a formulation he sometimes preferred) Duchamp, were shortly before the first world war. The first `ready-made' was a bicycle wheel, mounted on a stool, which he kept in the studio for his own aesthetic pleasure; the second, the admittedly beautiful and fascinating object of the old French drying racks for wine bot- tles. The urge behind these is a complicat- ed one; Duchamp was following a feeling very much in the air at the time, that expressivity ought to be eliminated from art in favour of a machine- like toughness. There were plenty of others who, like Duchamp, produced drawings with rulers to reduce the human element; others, like the Futurists, who, again like Duchamp, produced paintings in which movement was carved up in a pseudo- scientific fashion into its constituent parts. Duchamp, though, was the first to think that the product of mechanical processes might be thought of as art without the direct physical intervention of the artist. `Painting is finished,' he said once to Bran- cusi, walking round the Paris Salon de l'Aviation. 'Who can do anything better than this propeller? Can you?'
So far he was in (more or less) perfect seriousness, but the most famous of the `ready-mades' began life as a bit of a joke. Shortly after Duchamp moved from Paris to New York, the Society of Independent Artists was formed. Its aim was to mount exhibitions in which anyone who paid their 'Frau Schmidt, we suspect that you are attempting to smu:4:le rare fossils from our country.' subscriptions could display whatever they chose. The weirdly heterogeneous result in 1917, Duchamp estimated there were more than two miles of art — was semi- abstract busts by Brancusi rubbing shoul- ders with Sunday painters. It didn't, however, include Duchamp's submission, his most famous work of art. A week before the exhibition opened, after what Calvin Tomkins calls, with admirable delicacy, a 'spirited' lunch, Duchamp went to the J. L. Mott iron works and bought 'a flat-back "Bedfordshire"-model porcelain urinal'.' He signed it 'R. Mutt, 1917' and submitted it as the work of Richard Mutt of Philadelphia, under the title of 'Foun- tain'.
The resulting brouhaha has, in a sense, not yet been resolved; the opinion of the president of the board of the society, William Glackens, who said that 'Fountain' was `by no definition a work of art', is cer- tainly not an opinion which belongs merely to the curiosities of art history. Since then there have been plenty of people willing to express doubt over whether any of this can be sensibly regarded as art at all. When Robert Rauschenberg, in Philadelphia in 1960, tried to lift Duchamp's sculpture `Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy?' — sugar- cube-sized blocks of marble in a bought bird-cage — to see how heavy it was, a museum guard wandered over, saying, `Don't you know you're not supposed to touch that crap?'
`That crap' is precisely the ordinary art- lover's response to much of his work, and it is only side-stepping the issue to say, as many writers on Duchamp do, that he per- ceived a weird beauty in these objects, that, as Tomkins writes, the 'flowing curves' of the urinal echo 'the veiled head of a classic Renaissance madonna or a seated Bud- dha'. But I think we would be right to trust Duchamp; much of his work has passed into the plain currency of almost every gallery-goer, and the parts of his work which still shock or alarm are so influential that they will, surely, be slowly assimilated. His great paintings 'Nude Descending a Staircase' and 'The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes' once seemed barely less appalling a gesture than the urinal, largely on the curiously Windmill Theatre grounds that a moving nude was by definition indecent. They aren't going to frighten the horses these days; nor are the near-surrealist 'glasses' Duchamp was pro- ducing between the wars, such as 'The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even', which to many people now seem his most complex and appealing work.
But if you want to gauge the degree to which Duchamp, who died 30 years ago, is still ahead of even fashionable avant-garde opinion, you only have to read the appalled responses to his last masterpiece, the assemblage he titled 'Etant donne's' in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is an utter- ly mysterious piece — even the museum's curators have no idea quite how parts of it are constructed — and, so far, it has elicit- ed a great deal of denunciation, a certain amount of routine praise and a small num- ber of appreciations. It is somewhere between an indecent peep-show and a sur- realist landscape; unlike almost everything else Duchamp created, it has exerted almost no influence so far on other artists. Duchamp's contemporaries were mostly rather disappointed by his wholehearted revival of what, in the 1960s, seemed a ter- ribly old-fashioned visual realism. But with every year, the Etant donne?, like the rest of Duchamp's work, seems both a little more understandable and a little more peculiar; and, in the end, it may come to seem one of the most fascinating works of the century. Duchamp thoroughly deserves this superb new biography. There has not been a detailed biography of him before, and Calvin Tomkins has quite brilliantly surfed the middle ground between an account of the bizarre New York and Paris art worlds in which Duchamp moved and a scrupu- lous critical account of the works. There is plenty here to entertain anyone with the slightest interest in any of the amazingly varied cast of patrons, dealers, Futurists, Conceptualists, Cubists, Surrealists and the whole shooting-match of everyone who mattered — and plenty who didn't — in art over the course of half a century; but Tomkins is to be congratulated on a series of readings of the sculptures and paintings which, even when Duchamp is at his most abstruse, manages to convey quite what fun they are. The admirable thing about this biography is that, writing about a man who, for much of his career, claimed to want to remove the human element from his art, it manages to establish the warm humanity, humour and sympathy from which the best of it sprang.
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