Dressing and Undressing Duchamp 9781350236110, 9781350236158, 9781350236134

Citation preview

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

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Dressing and Undressing Duchamp Ingrid E. Mida

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Ingrid E. Mida, 2022 Ingrid E. Mida has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. 169–170 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image by Erwin Blumenfeld for Vogue, 1945. (© Condé Nast) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3611-0 ePDF: 978-1-3502-3613-4 eBook: 978-1-3502-3614-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to Irene Gammel

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Contents Introduction  1 1

Drawing Duchamp: Fashioning the Figure  21

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Dressing Duchamp: Unmasking the Dandy  47

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Dressing Up: Readymade Identities  73

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Made to Measure: Recalibrating the Readymade  109

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Reading the Readymade: The Thingly Nature of Fashion in the Museum  139

End-Game  165 Acknowledgements  169 Bibliography  171 Image Credits  182 Index  185

Introduction

All along, I had that search for what I had not thought of before.1 –Marcel Duchamp

Figure 0.1  Cover of Vogue (New York), July 1, 1945. Photograph by Erwin Blumenfeld, Vogue, © Condé Nast.

In July 1945, Marcel Duchamp’s masterwork The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même) was featured on the cover of the American fashion magazine Vogue (Figure 0.1). In the photograph by Erwin Blumenfeld (1897–1969), a beautiful model wearing an elegant Hattie Carnegie silk jersey dinner-dress appears through the shattered glass of Duchamp’s masterwork.2 Her slender body is aligned with the mullions of the glass, creating parallel structures between her figure and the artwork. Her eyes are cast downward and her gloved left hand, the arm bent at the elbow, seems almost to reach through the broken glass to beckon us within. In this image, art and fashion share the same space. The caption reads:

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

Vogue’s eye-view of the Museum of Modern Art is through Marcel Duchamp’s famed ‘Window’ … regarded as the ideal marriage of painting and sculpture. The shattered glass – ‘the Accidental’ arrested for permanent beauty. ‘First Night’ museum guest wears putty silk jersey short dinner-dress, with side-bound bodice, Hattie Carnegie original. The lipstick, fire for putty-grey, is Hattie Carnegie ‘Indus’. Jewels and woven steel surfaces, streaming natural light, the monochromatic walls, and the art … which is the Museum of Modern Art.3

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Duchamp’s fragile glass installation The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, otherwise known as The Large Glass, consists of two pieces of large glass stacked vertically like a double-hung window within a metal frame that is nearly three metres high and two metres wide.4 The artist’s use of transparent glass means that the work ‘can never be seen by itself, apart from its surroundings’, as Robert Lebel observed, ‘and is ceaselessly transformed by a background of reflections in which that of the spectator himself is included’.5 The design rendered on the glass incorporates non-traditional materials like lead foil, lead wire, dust, oil and varnish and depicts the abstracted forms of a bride being pursued by nine bachelors who are surrounded by a chocolate grinder and other mechanical devices. The bachelors’ efforts to achieve union with her are doomed to failure; the bride cannot be stripped bare by the bachelors ‘since the clockwork which was to have released the unhooking of the dress was not completed’.6 This work not only reveals Duchamp’s preoccupations with eros, gender difference, mechanical devices and movement but notably establishes the theme of dressing and undressing within this iconoclast’s oeuvre. The juxtaposition of Duchamp’s work within the frame of fashion for the cover is also remarkable since Vogue, like its older rival Harper’s Bazaar, served as a cultural arbiter of style and taste for its audience of middle- to upper-class Americans.7 As Mary Bergstein has observed, Vogue art director Alexander Liberman (1912–1999) made it his personal mission to include modernist art within the pages of Vogue and had at some point expressed his belief that ‘haute couture, with its basis in feminine seduction, had a place within the tradition of Western art “from Titian and Velazquez to Matisse”’.8 This placement of Duchamp’s work on the cover is notable since photographs of artists’ works were typically placed within the body of the magazine.9 When this issue of Vogue was published in July 1945, Duchamp’s installation had been seen by thousands of museum visitors during the course of its display at the museum in the preceding two years, and this presentation of The Large Glass on the Vogue cover extended Duchamp’s audience across the country.10 Although this Vogue cover is emblematic of the complex process by which Duchamp’s work came to be known outside of avant-garde circles, the cover has not attracted much critical

Introduction

engagement from art historians.11 In contrast, much attention has been given to the use of Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings from his Lavender Mist series at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1951 as backdrops to a Vogue fashion spread photographed by Cecil Beaton.12 A polemical critique by art historian T. J. Clark described the use of Pollock’s paintings in this way as a denigration of the work that served to ‘blacken the whole of abstract painting’.13 Unlike Clark’s impassioned response, Duchamp scholars have taken little notice of the cover, and even Duchamp’s biographer Calvin Tomkins, who otherwise carefully documented Duchamp’s interactions with Vogue art director Alexander Liberman in respect of the submission (and rejection) of Duchamp’s collage portrait of George Washington for the Americana issue of Vogue in February 1943, makes only a passing mention of this 1945 cover.14 This evocative Vogue cover signals a notable intersection of art and fashion from a period in history when artists like Salvador Dalí and fashion designers like Elsa Schiaparelli were engaging in collaborative projects.15 In 1938, Duchamp designed an exhibition for the Surrealists at the fashionable Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris that included a corridor of mannequins as well as ‘twelve hundred coal sacks hung over a coal grate’.16 Attended by notable figures from fashion and art, the exhibition, which was unlike anything seen before, upended the conventions of gallery display and confounded the spectator in immersive and multi-sensory experiences.17 Even though the exhibition received many negative reviews, the Surrealists asked Duchamp to act again as exhibition designer for their 1942 exhibition in New York titled First Papers of Surrealism (14 October – 7 November 1942). Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, one of the exhibition sponsors, asked Duchamp to organize a show that would be ‘completely modern and d’avant garde’ suggesting that she was not looking for a reprise of the 1938 installation, but something altogether new.18 For the 1942 exhibition, Duchamp radically transformed the Whitelaw Reid mansion in Manhattan with ‘sixteen miles’ of ordinary white string, winding the string from chandeliers and mantels and pillars in crisscrossing skeins that obscured the artwork on display.19 Although Duchamp did not attend the opening, it was this exhibition that brought the artist to the attention of Alexander Liberman, who was so impressed by Duchamp’s exhibition design that he invited the artist to submit ideas for the cover of the Americana issue of Vogue.20 And while Duchamp’s initial submission of a collage portrait of George Washington was rejected by Liberman in 1943,21 ultimately it was that connection that resulted in Duchamp’s masterwork The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre) appearing on the Vogue cover in 1945. Perhaps even more germane to my argument is the evidence that this Vogue cover exposes the documentation of Duchamp’s masterwork The Large Glass in a mass media context and also serves as a harbinger of the material traces of Duchamp’s entanglement with clothing and fashion in his life and his work. Duchamp knew and interacted with notable figures from the fashion world like Elsa Schiaparelli, Alexander Liberman, Jacques Doucet and Paul Poiret, and even briefly owned a fabricdyeing establishment with Leon Hartt in the early 1920s.22 Aside from the testimony of Duchamp’s friends and acquaintances that record the artist’s handsome features, elegant demeanour and predilection for pink shirts, the surfeit of photographs of Duchamp serve to document the artist’s sartorial strategy over the course of his lifetime and reveal his attention to the fashioned body and articulation of identity.23 And as we shall see, Duchamp also harnessed the intellectual and sensory qualities of clothing in his body-aware art practice.

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Dressing and Undressing Duchamp 4

Within the annals of twentieth- and even twenty-first-century art, Duchamp stands out for the vast scholarly attention devoted to his work. Aside from numerous biographies, interviews and exhibition catalogues, there are countless scholarly works on Duchamp, many of which have been published since his death, that are concerned with the artist’s revolutionary understanding of the readymade and of modern art itself, or that consider the themes of chess, movement, eros and gender.24 In differentiating this book from the plethora that have come before, I offer a critical analysis of Duchamp’s works related to clothing and the fashioning of his body. Underpinning my study of Duchamp is a desire to illuminate how clothing and fashion are underexplored threads of connection within this influential artist’s oeuvre. During the course of my research, two key facts emerged that are central to my argument: first, the etymology of the word readymade can be linked to the production of clothing; second, towards the latter part of his career Duchamp created a series of readymade waistcoats that were documented in his unpublished notes. These facts raise a number of pertinent research questions: How is Duchamp’s readymade linked to the actual production of clothing? And what is the deeper relationship between clothing and Duchamp’s art practice? What ultimately is the difference between a Duchamp readymade and an object of fashion exhibited in a museum? The answers, I argue, emerge by bringing the concepts of fashion studies into a dialogue with Duchamp’s art practice. In other words, by revealing how the readymade is imbricated in the very production of clothing and by also revealing the purposeful engagement of the spectator in the creative act, Duchamp’s oeuvre emerges in a new light. Such an investigation is all the more relevant since a significant number of Duchamp’s works are linked to clothing and the acts of dressing and undressing. Works by Duchamp that explicitly reference clothing include: a readymade typewriter cover that is displayed in a parody of a woman’s skirt Traveler’s Folding Item (1916); the coat rack Trébuchet (1917); the hat rack Porte-Chapeau (1917); a sculpture made of rubber bathing caps called Sculpture for Traveling (1918); the drawing of a tailcoat Jacquette (1956); the modified potholder readymades Couple of Laundress’ Aprons (1959); and the waistcoat readymade series Made to Measure (1957–1961). There are several works that incorporate thread, including Chocolate Grinder No. 2 (1914) and 3 Standard Stoppages (1914). The now-lost work Pulled at Four Pins (1915) makes reference to dressmakers’ pins while the French title Tiré à Quatre Épingles is equivalent in meaning to the English expression ‘dressed to the nines’, a notable choice of phrase given that ‘Duchamp was known to be a sharp dresser, always looking his Sunday best whatever the occasion or day of the week’.25 Clothing was used to explore androgyny in early drawings, including Young Man (1909) and Young Man Standing (1909–1910), as well as in the series of photographs associated with the modified perfume bottle Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921). Duchamp utilized female mannequins in several installations, using his own clothing to dress a mannequin as Rrose Sélavy for the 1938 Exhibition of Surrealists (for which he was exhibition designer, as mentioned earlier) and also in dressing a mannequin in a maid’s apron for his shop window installation Lazy Hardware for the Gotham Book Mart in New York in 1945. His preoccupation with the nude female body is exposed in works like In the Manner of Delvaux (1942), Female Fig Leaf (1950), Object-Dard (1951) and Wedge of Chastity (1954). Notably, the theme of dressing and undressing is most prominent in his masterworks with the undressing of the bride in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), and in the installation Given 1° The Waterfall, 2° The Illuminating Gas (1946–1966).

Introduction

I am not the first to point out the importance of clothing in the study of Duchamp’s art practice. In October 1987, art historians Eric Cameron and Carol P. James both noted separately at a colloquium that clothing is a significant theme within Duchamp’s work but neither of these two scholars engaged with this idea in depth.26 Eric Cameron expressed his surprise that this thread of analysis in relation to clothing ‘is not taken up in the studies of Duchamp, when so much of his art has to do with dressing up (as Rrose Sélavy) or stripping bare (like the bride in The Large Glass)’.27 Carole P. James referenced the waistcoat series, noting that it is one of several items of clothing that are conceptually missing from the Boîte-en-valise (Box-in-a-Valise), and she also noted that these vests ‘were storebought, the first readymade to really be readymade in the common American sense’.28 However, she did not explore this idea further and instead her essay largely focused on the linguistic games of Duchamp in relation to the readymade. And although both Cameron and James mentioned Duchamp’s waistcoats in their essays, the index to the volume in which their essays appear – Thierry de Duve’s volume of essays The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp – did not include an entry for this readymade.29 The waistcoat series is listed in the catalogue raisonné on Duchamp but has not been subjected to sustained scholarly analysis. And yet, the waistcoat readymades are provocative gestures that challenge the notion that art cannot be worn and that predate clothing as art such as Andy Warhol’s The Souper Dress (1966) or Joseph Beuys’ Felt Suit (1970).30 There is no other artist as much linked to the blurring of the boundaries of life and art than Marcel Duchamp. In reflecting on why Duchamp scholars have largely overlooked aspects of the artist’s oeuvre relating to clothing, it seems to me that the baggage of fashion’s association with the frivolous and the feminine has shaped the discourse of this iconoclast, since fashion is generally understood to be ‘antithetical to the concerns of great artists’, as Nancy J. Troy has observed.31 Like all other discursive practices, art history is subject to gaps, omissions and the problem of ‘its own limits, its divisions, its transformations’ and ‘the specific modes of its temporality’.32 In neglecting to fully engage with the waistcoat readymade series and other works by Duchamp that are related to clothing in the analysis of his oeuvre, art history has written the story of this artist to perpetuate the myth of male genius that creates ART and is indifferent to fashion. In Amelia Jones’ book Postmodernism and the Engendering of Duchamp (1994), she traces and exposes the masculine bias within the author-function of Duchamp, and indeed within art history itself. Her comprehensive and meticulous analysis excavates the discourse that situates Duchamp as the paternal origin of postmodernism and lays the groundwork for my argument in that she exposes the gendered bias that has impacted the writing of art history. This omission is relevant to a full appreciation of Duchamp’s oeuvre. In Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (1993), he observes that it is discourse that establishes the significance of the work when he writes: ‘The production of discourse (critical, historical, etcetera) about the work of art is one of the conditions of the production of the work’.33 Bourdieu’s writings on the disputes over boundaries in a field of cultural production are relevant here, since it is at the boundary that struggles over power are witnessed. He writes: ‘The most disputed frontier of all is the one which separates the field of cultural production and the field of power’.34 Both art and fashion are implicated in capitalism, whereas art history tends to underplay this link, seeing the act of creation by the artist as originating from a genius that is unmotivated by capitalistic motivations, a myth that Duchamp himself perpetuated. However, it is the blurring of boundaries – between commerce and culture,

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between fashion and art, between museum and retail shop – that are, to my mind, emblematic of the profound ambiguities that permeate all aspects of contemporary life. The theoretical understanding of the word fashion has undergone a considerable shift in recent years, even though the concepts of fashion, clothing, dress and costume may have discrete meanings in certain contexts.35 Cultural scholar Elizabeth Wilson’s seminal work Adorned in Dreams (first published in 1985) has been pivotal in this shift in articulating fashion as a cultural phenomenon in which the intersection of capitalism, identity and art becomes visible.36 I use the term fashion in the broader sense theorized by Wilson and other scholars to refer to the manner in which a person dresses and presents his or her body, rather than describing only the selection of the latest and most stylish clothing. This more all-encompassing definition facilitates a more inclusive and nuanced look at the relevance of fashion. As Christopher Breward notes, fashion is ‘an important conduit for the expression of social identity, political ideas, and aesthetic taste, and this model of interpretation has arguably influenced a re-evaluation of all creative practices, including art’.37 It is for this reason that I harness the term fashion in its broader sense, consonant with fashion studies, to describe not only items of clothing or dress, but to signal the cultural construction of embodied identity through clothing. In doing so, I recognize that fashion fulfils a variety of functions, not only in providing adornment and protection for the body but more importantly in the articulation of identity. Unravelling the significance of the recurrent themes of dressing and undressing within Duchamp’s oeuvre requires the methods and concepts of fashion studies that specifically address the fashioning of the body. Joanne Entwistle’s book The Fashioned Body articulates the significance of the dressed body to the construction of identity, since a dressed body is a reflection of culture, societal norms and expectations. Entwistle argues that the act of dressing the body is ‘both an intimate experience of the body and a public presentation of it’ that adheres to or deliberately subverts the historical and social constraints of culture at a particular moment in time.38 Integrating the work of sociological scholars like Erving Goffman on the presentation of the self within the bounds of cultural norms, Marcel Mauss on the techniques of the body, Pierre Bourdieu on the body as a bearer of social status and Michel Foucault on the body as an object of culture, Entwistle convincingly argues that dress is a valid ‘theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the complex dynamic relationship between body, dress and culture’.39 Entwistle’s work identifies clothing as an embodied daily practice that requires the individual to negotiate cultural norms and expectations in dressing, and in so doing make visible their management of the visual codes that articulate gender and identity on their body. Her insights align with Duchamp’s experimentations with clothing, in that Entwistle’s framework helps to reveal Duchamp’s dynamic working at the intersection of fashion and art, especially when he harnessed his own body as a readymade in dressing in the masquerade of Rrose Sélavy or in the uniform of a suit for photographs published in the mass media, as we shall see in the chapters to come. In embracing an interdisciplinary approach that bridges art history and fashion studies, fashion serves as an organizing principle to highlight those aspects of Duchamp’s oeuvre that are linked in some way to the fashioning of the body. Fashion studies, a relatively new field in comparison to art history, encompasses the broad range of intersections between fashion and dress with the fields of art history, museum studies, sociology, anthropology, history, business, the arts and cultural studies.40 In

borrowing from these disciplines to consider fashion and dress, fashion studies embraces the notion of intertextuality in order to locate the product of research efforts in relation to dress within accepted theoretical frameworks. In a book that encompasses art and fashion, the concept of intertextuality is particularly relevant in acknowledging the ‘interconnectedness and interdependence’ that exists in all aspects of ‘modern cultural life’.41 Adopting intertextuality as a way of making meaning is like the making of cloth by the weaving of, as fashion theorist Roland Barthes writes, ‘the threads of the “already written” and the “already read”’.42

A Brief History of Marcel Duchamp

Introduction

Duchamp had a pivotal role in shifting understanding of what art can be when he posed the question: ‘Can one make works of art that are not art?’43 Not only has Duchamp’s modernist influence resonated across disciplines, but his work continues to inspire new exhibitions and publications, especially on notable anniversaries like the centenary of Fountain in 2017. Newspaper journalist Russell Smith described the legacy of the readymade urinal in 2017 as ‘That action opened up the “but is it art?” conversation that we have been grappling with ever since’.44 And yet Fountain is only one of Duchamp’s many provocative gestures that challenged what art can be. Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 at home in a small village in rural Normandy, France. He was the third of six children born to Eugène Duchamp, a notary, and his wife Lucie Duchamp (née Nicolle). He grew up in a family of professional artists that included his maternal grandfather Emile-Frédéric Nicolle (1830–1894), a painter and engraver; two older brothers, Jacques Villon (1875–1963), a Cubist painter, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918), a sculptor who died in the First World War; and a younger sister, Suzanne (1889–1963), who was a Dadaist painter keenly interested in issues of gender, sexuality and experimental artistic expression. According to his biographer Calvin Tomkins, ‘Duchamp rarely talked about his childhood’, but ‘when he did, he gave the impression that it had been a happy one’.45 Like his much-admired older brothers, Duchamp took drawing lessons and later followed his brothers to Paris in the hope of becoming an artist. A pivotal moment in his life took place in March 1912 when his oil painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), which depicted the movement of an abstracted figure descending a staircase, was rejected by the jury of the Salon des Indépendants. As he later recalled, the bad news was delivered by his brothers who dressed ‘as if for a funeral’ in formal suits and asked: ‘Couldn’t you at least change the title?’ explaining that ‘The Cubists think it’s a little off beam’.46 Although Duchamp’s painting was subsequently shown in Barcelona and Paris, he must have felt the rejection very deeply since he abandoned painting not long after; he later commented: ‘It was a real turning point in my life’.47 In the exhibition of Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York in 1913, the painting attracted huge numbers of visitors to the Armory venue, who waited for thirty to forty minutes ‘just to stand momentarily in her presence, venting their shocked gasps of disbelief, their rage, or their raucous laughter before giving way to the next in line, already elbowing and shoving for their turn’.48 Although Duchamp sold four paintings at the Armory Show, the artist ‘didn’t attach much importance to it’.49 Nonetheless, the notoriety of his work led to an invitation for

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Duchamp to come to New York and he arrived in America in June 1915 as a celebrity. Although he might have harnessed this notoriety to earn his living as a painter, he decided to reject what he called ‘retinal art’ – art that appealed to the eye – and instead created works that challenged the mind. Duchamp was befriended by prominent members of avant-garde art circles, including art patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg and artists Beatrice Wood, Francis Picabia and Man Ray. Always seeking to avoid repeating himself, Duchamp shocked the artworld in 1917 with his submission of the urinal readymade known as Fountain. In 1918 Duchamp became restless, travelling to Buenos Aires for a time and then to Paris before returning to New York in 1920. Passionate about the game of chess, he would soon make the claim that he had given up art for chess. Duchamp would continue to beguile and surprise the artworld many times over the course of his life and especially in 1969, one year after his death, when it was revealed that Duchamp had been working in secret on his installation Étant donnés for two decades (1946–1966).50 Over much of the twentieth century, art historians have credited Duchamp with having shaped not just the avant-garde art movements of his era, but the conceptual art of the twentieth century. Francis Naumann has argued that ‘we would have to place Duchamp’s name above all the others, for the directness, purity and precedence of his example are a matter of historical record’.51 In contrast, Amelia Jones has critiqued Duchamp’s status as a quasi-god-like figure in the world of contemporary art since the 1960s and argues against the pervasive myth of originality associated with Duchamp and other members of the (predominantly male) avant-garde.52 Indeed, other feminist scholars have revealed Duchamp’s imbrication within a larger network of artists, including several female artists and collaborators, many of whom created visual or verbal portraits of Duchamp, including Dada artist Beatrice Wood (1893–1998), New York painter Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) and the German Dada artist the Baroness Elsa Freytag von Loringhoven (1874–1927). Many of these artistic engagements include elements of collaboration in which authorship itself is being playfully queried, such that Duchamp’s notorious urinal presented as Fountain in 1917 has been proposed as a more collaborative work than formerly assumed.53 As well, it is important to note that Duchamp was not the first to use the term ‘ready-made’ in the context of art, since Oscar Wilde had used this term in his lecture to art students at the Royal Academy Club in London in 1883.54 Nonetheless, the term ‘readymade’ is a term that is strongly associated with Duchamp’s art practices and thus its usage and meaning are central to the analysis of what difference there is, if any, between a readymade and an object of fashion in the museum. It took several decades before Duchamp’s readymades attained their iconic status as a consequence of dynamic responses and critical engagement, insights that will be discussed in the chapters that follow. Two recent texts that explore unique aspects of Duchamp’s oeuvre are worthy of mention as evidence of the continuing interest and relevance of this artist’s legacy. In her book The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (2016), Elena Filipovic focuses on Duchamp’s non-art-related work, including his active involvement in numerous exhibitions, his work as an art dealer and his efforts to publicize not just his own artistic outputs but also the work of others, including Constantin Brâncuși. Instead of dismissing this curatorial and administrative work as inconsequential, Filipovic argues that it was a central part of Duchamp’s art practice and instrumental to the acceptance of his work within the institutional apparatus that constitutes the museum. Likewise, Adina Kamien-Kazhdan’s Remaking

the Readymade (2018) is also concerned with non-art, namely the replication and sale of Duchamp’s readymades many years after the originals had been lost. Kamien-Kazhdan finds that in the meticulous process of reproduction, these limited edition readymades sharpened the aesthetic qualities of the originals but also complicated the notions of authorship and originality since they were no longer singular objects of art. As Filipovic and Kamien-Kazhdan so aptly demonstrated, there are still aspects of Duchamp’s legacy that have yet to be fully appreciated.

Fashion and Art

Introduction

Duchamp’s readymades shifted the meaning of art, such that ‘anything is art, if an artist says it is’, as Lucy Lippard noted in 1970.55 When the artist chose to sign a waistcoat purchased at a department store as a readymade, was he testing the boundaries of the readymade? This question does not seem to have been asked before, but it is the question that inspired this book, which concerns itself with the multifarious relationship between fashion and art. Scholars have adopted a variety of approaches to the analysis of the complicated relationship between fashion and art. In a 1998 article based on her dissertation, Sung Bok Kim summarized her discursive analysis of articles published in American art journals between 1980 and 1995 in order to make a quantitative assessment of whether scholars were writing about fashion as an art form. In identifying postmodernism as the dominant style model used in locating fashion within the canon of art history, she observed that fashion shares the characteristics of postmodern art as an aesthetic medium. Her conclusion was tentative: ‘it seems that fashion has become a recognizable subject within the postmodern art world as a result of broadened conceptions of fashion and art’.56 Sandra Miller revisited Kim’s conclusion in her article ‘Fashion as Art; is Fashion Art?’, but took a radically different approach, invoking concepts of classical aesthetics in her analysis. Her arguments deconstructed the philosophy of aesthetics in the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and others; Miller concluded that it was valid to ignore the functional dimension of clothing and view it as ‘beautiful objects of aesthetic contemplation’.57 Charlene Lau argued that the terms of art could be used to investigate fashion in her dissertation on the Belgian contemporary fashion label Bernhard Willhelm; Lau noted that the two disciplines overlap and are ‘in tension with each other’ and at some points intersect or overlap, such that there is ‘friction and opposition between art, commerce and mass culture’.58 Although these art historians acknowledge the collapsing of boundaries in postmodern capitalist structures, all three scholars were careful not to directly engage with the question of whether an object of clothing might be considered art, and this is worthy of emphasis here since Duchamp’s waistcoat readymades seem to directly interrogate that question. In her book, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, Nancy J. Troy identifies the absence of robust explanations that explore the deeper structural relations between the two domains of fashion and art. To remedy that gap, Troy compared the commercial practices of French designer Paul Poiret to that of the marketing strategies used by art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in selling the easily reproducible Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. She argued that in both domains the fundamental issues at stake were ‘the originality, authenticity, and aesthetic aura of the

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individual object, which are essential to the establishment of any fashion, whether in dresses or in vanguard art production’.59 Troy incorporates Duchamp’s readymades (as a category of works) into her analysis, noting that a readymade and an haute couture dress are both imbued with the aura of their creators through ‘the addition of their creator’s signature – the couturier’s authentic label or the name of the artist – to an object of serial if not mass production’.60 I acknowledge Troy’s work as foundational and will revisit her arguments later, but note here that she does not identify nor discuss Duchamp’s readymade waistcoat series in her comprehensive analysis of the readymade. In their introduction to the anthology Fashion and Art (2015), editors Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas observed that there is no overarching discourse or field related to the intersections of fashion and art. As a result, their compilation of essays by leading fashion scholars and art historians aimed to be ‘additive and supplementary’.61 Valerie Steele used Bourdieu’s notion of the cultural field to argue that fashion has not yet attained sufficient acceptance to be recognized as an art form.62 Nancy J. Troy used the example of Yves Saint Laurent’s appropriation of Mondrian’s little-known paintings in creating his 1965/66 Fall–Winter collection to argue that fashion and its dissemination in mass media were critical in the ultimate popularity of Mondrian’s modernist artworks.63 These and other essays in the book articulate some of the intersection points, overlaps and divergences between fashion and art. Although Geczy and Karaminas note that the definition of art has expanded since ‘the so-called Duchampian revolution’64 to embrace a broader range of objects and meanings about consumption, popular culture and the everyday, a very significant point of intersection that is not covered in their comprehensive survey is Duchamp’s waistcoat readymade series and other works by Duchamp that deal with clothing and the fashioned body. If Duchamp’s readymades reveal that indeed art can be anything, then an analysis of Duchamp’s waistcoat readymades is essential also to help unravel fashion’s role as an ideological construct that mirrors the paradoxical ambiguities of capitalism. As we shall see, Duchamp’s readymade waistcoat series represents a significant artistic gesture that reveals the frictions and oppositions that exist between art and fashion. It is when fashion enters the art museum that the question of whether fashion is art has aroused polemical critique, perhaps because the museum represents a cultural arbiter of taste in collecting what is considered valuable and unique.65 The museum as an institution strips objects of their original function, as Pierre Bourdieu observed in The Rules of Art, and reduces things to their essentially ‘artistic function’.66 This is what Duchamp did when he ignored the original function of the bottle rack, snow shovel, comb, typewriter cover and waistcoats in assigning them the status of readymade, and indeed such objects are presented as artworks within museums today. Although Lucy Lippard noted that art might be anything in 1970, this expansion of the boundaries of art did not forestall the vitriolic criticism that arose in 1983 upon The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first career retrospective of a living fashion designer in an exhibition called Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design. Such an exhibition had never been offered to a living fashion designer before.67 Much debate arose over whether fashion belonged in the museum in light of its connections to commerce, with art critic Robert Storr suggesting that The Met may as well have turned their ‘gallery space over to General Motors for a display of Cadillacs’.68 In response to the scathing criticism, The Met prohibited other exhibitions of living fashion designers’ work – a ban that remained in force until 2017.69 But as fashion exhibitions increased in popularity, the hostility of

critics was further aroused,70 and Michael Boodro voiced his disdain about this incursion of fashion into the museum when he wrote in Artnews: ‘There is a longstanding, genteel tradition – an ideal, at least – that art is the creation of individuals burning bright with lofty inspiration, that art is above commerce, that art, for its own sake or for any other reason, is the big, important thing … Fashion is not art. Fashion is frivolous and unimportant’.71 Although boundaries between mediums have largely disappeared since Boodro’s vitriolic comments, suspicion about fashion in the museum has not vanished altogether. In art critic David Carrier’s critique of The Met’s Heavenly Bodies exhibition in the summer of 2018, he argued that the exhibition highlighted the vast difference between an exhibition of fashion and one of art, since fashion exhibitions do not provide ‘the scholarly apparatus associated with art history writing’.72 This comment indicates that he is unfamiliar with the field of fashion studies in academia and he further reveals his belief that fashion is a frivolous pursuit by suggesting that fashion is merely an expression of the wearer’s ‘desire to be worshiped’.73 In a subsequent review, Carrier was more careful to address the difficulties for an art critic in writing about fashion in the museum, acknowledging the ‘lengthy tradition of Duchampian works that raise questions about the very nature of art’. He observed that visitors to a museum take for granted that something must be art if it is in a museum, but asked ‘Is fashion itself art? If so, what kind of art is it?’74 Carrier also observed that most art criticism ‘has barely touched upon these issues’.75 I will return to these questions later in revealing the waistcoat readymade series as a provocative gesture by Duchamp that anticipates the presentation of fashion in the art museum.

Chapter Overview

Introduction

This book focuses on an underexplored corpus of Duchamp’s oeuvre related to clothing and the fashioned body. In the course of my research, I have excavated the many references that document Duchamp’s entanglement with clothing scattered in archives, interviews, biographies, exhibition catalogues, interpretive texts and collection databases in order to weave them together to present an argument of his lifelong engagement with clothing in his works of art as well as in the fashioning of his body and identity. The structure of what follows thus begins with his earliest explorations of dress and uniforms in his figurative drawings, and each chapter further develops the argument to provide evidence that Duchamp recognized and harnessed the transformative power of clothing within his oeuvre. While themes of chess, movement and eros were admittedly important preoccupations for the artist, I contend that Duchamp was not only aware of the visual codes of dress but integrated this knowledge in his work and in his presentation of self. Therefore, the chapters are organized as follows. Chapter 1, ‘Drawing Duchamp: Fashioning the Figure’, brings attention to a selection of underexplored drawings by Duchamp in which he represented or altered the dressed and undressed body. More generally, drawings have recently come to be appreciated as material evidence of the artist’s hand, temperament and modes of thinking, and in undertaking a close analysis of Duchamp’s underexplored drawings from 1904 to 1910, most of them revealing fashionable dress, or uniforms,

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which would also become central in the artist’s oeuvre, I argue that the artist reveals his artistic engagement with the nuances of fashion, gender norms and bourgeois codes of behaviour. And while drawing became an infrequent mode of artistic expression for Duchamp after 1913, this chapter uses drawings that span his lifetime to provide evidence of his ongoing artistic engagement with the role of clothing in the fashioning of the body and identity. In Chapter 2, ‘Dressing Duchamp: Unmasking the Dandy’, Duchamp is unmasked as a Baudelairian dandy who not only projected an air of elegant indifference but who also attended to his body, image and selection of clothing. It is in dressing for the camera that we become acutely aware of our clothing choices, so that we can appear in a manner that we want the world to see and remember. This chapter offers evidence that Duchamp was engaged with sartorial codes in dressing for formal portraits commissioned for publication in mainstream print media. In such cases, Duchamp presented himself as an elegant gentleman in wearing the uniform of masculine power – the suit – an image that sharply contrasts with his presentation of self within avant-garde circles. Duchamp cultivated an appearance of nonchalance but used his body as a readymade, altering it with readymade clothing to create a work of art, namely himself. In Chapter 3, ‘Dressing Up: Readymade Identities’, I paint a picture of a man who was fully aware of the power of clothing to reveal or conceal gender identity. Duchamp took much pleasure in engaging in masquerade and adopted various guises in his experiments to create works of art that were not art in the traditional sense. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to these images, I offer an alternative reading that focuses on Duchamp’s pleasurable engagement with masquerade as well as his use of parody to subvert the notion of the readymade. I argue that Duchamp used his body as a self-representational readymade to reveal contrasting aspects of his identity constructions, revealing the multiplicity of selves he cultivated at the borders of life and art. Chapter 4, ‘Made to Measure: Recalibrating the Readymade’, explores Duchamp’s waistcoat readymade series Made to Measure (1957–1961) as part of his late oeuvre. Although this series is only one of many works by Duchamp that relate to clothing as was noted earlier, the significance of these waistcoat readymades has yet to be fully interrogated in scholarship and thus merits close attention here. The waistcoat readymades are the most personal of Duchamp’s readymades and the only works that require a body to animate them. Not only do these readymades disrupt Martin Heidegger’s argument that art cannot be worn, this series also interrogates the relationship of fashion to art, especially in terms of issues of authenticity and originality. This chapter first revisits the etymology and gendered history of the readymade, reconnecting the word to garment production before undertaking a thorough study of Duchamp’s Made to Measure series, including an analysis of the documentation of the series within Duchamp’s final set of notes. Ultimately, I argue that the Made to Measure series not only alludes to the origin of the word readymade in clothing manufacture but also serves to recalibrate the parameters of the readymade to include clothing. Chapter 5, ‘Reading the Readymade: The Thingly Nature of Fashion in the Museum’, focuses on the question of how the spectator knows how to read the readymade as a work of art. Following an analysis of the interconnected roles of author, spectator, curator and institution, the significance of Duchamp’s Made to Measure series is revealed through a direct comparison of Duchamp’s waistcoat readymades and Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dresses. As we shall see, in

making a direct comparison of these museum objects using the enunciative conditions of the readymade, the difference between them becomes ‘infrathin’, to borrow a Duchampian turn of phrase. As a consequence, if we accept Duchamp’s creative act as an equal partnership with the spectator, the decision as to whether or not the snow shovel, the waistcoat or a ‘Mondrian’ dress viewed within the institutional frame of the museum or gallery is a work of art is ultimately a deeply personal one. In the ‘End-Game’, I argue that Marcel Duchamp – the man considered by many one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century – was not only cognizant of the intellectual, affective and sensory qualities of clothing in fashioning the body, but centrally involved the body in articulating identity in and through art, thereby also disrupting long-held mind/body binaries in Western art. In tracing the many references to clothing in his artworks, including his early drawings and the fashioning of his public self and alter ego, I argue that these works are equally deserving of scholarly attention in revealing a more nuanced understanding of Duchamp’s body-aware art practice. Most significantly, the waistcoat readymade series established a notable precedent for the presentation of fashion in the museum. In sum, Duchamp not only harnessed the transformative power of clothing in blurring the boundaries between art and life, but he also provocatively and deliberately recalibrated the definition of the readymade to include clothing, such that articles of clothing can achieve the status of art. Ultimately, it is in considering the thingly nature of the readymade that the hierarchies of art fall away, allowing for a more expansive and personal experience of art.

Notes 1 2

3 4

Introduction

5

Marcel Duchamp quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (New York: Artbook, 2013), 64. The German-born Erwin Blumenfeld immigrated to the United States in 1941 and secured a contract with Condé Nast in 1944. Over the course of his career, he photographed many covers for Vogue and other publications. In 1960, Blumenfeld created a montage of his favourite 100 cover photographs titled Some of My 100 Covers; the Vogue (New York) 1945 cover with Duchamp’s Large Glass was included in his selection of favourite covers. See Helen Adkins, Erwin Blumenfeld: Dada Montages 1916–1933 (Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), 205. ‘July Contents’, Vogue (New York) 106, no. 1 (July 1, 1945): 55. Ellipses in original. Duchamp worked on this project for approximately eight years (1915–1923) but he also created various preparatory drawings related to this work during 1913–1915. These drawings will be discussed in Chapter 1. The shattering of the glass was unintentional and occurred during the transfer of the work from the Brooklyn Museum (where it had been on display in the International Exhibition of Modern Art) back to the home of collector Katherine Dreier. Duchamp was delighted by the visual effect created by this chance occurrence since it served to complete his masterpiece. See Francis M. Naumann, ‘Precise and Not So Controlled: The Large Glass and Related Works on Glass’, in The Recurrent Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life, and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Readymade Press, 2012), 30–37. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 68.

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6 Ibid., 67. 7 Vogue magazine was launched in the United States in 1892. Although both Vogue and its older rival Harper’s Bazaar (launched in 1867) focused on fashion, these magazines also routinely included articles on art and all aspects of contemporary culture. See Alison Matthews David, ‘Vogue’s New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style’, Fashion Theory 10, no.1 (2006): 13–38. 8 Alexander Liberman quoted by Mary Bergstein, ‘The Artist in His Studio: Photography, Art, and the Masculine Mystique’, Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 45. See also Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tomkins, ‘In the Right Circles’, Vogue (New York) 183, no. 8 (August 1, 1993): 270–277, 310–311. 9 Listings of art exhibitions appear in the earliest issues of Vogue and feature articles on artists routinely appeared within the pages of the publication. Duchamp’s name is first mentioned in Vogue in a review of the infamous New York Armory Show by painter and art critic Guy Pène du Bois, ‘From One Extremist to Another’, Vogue (New York) 41, no. 7 (April 1, 1913): 66–67, 122. Many of Duchamp’s contemporaries and friends were featured in the pages of Vogue, including Wassily Kandinsky (May 1, 1924), Constantin Brâncuşi (June 1, 1926), Henri Matisse (December 15, 1937), Marc Chagall (March 2, 1929) and Alberto Giacometti (February 15, 1951), as well as Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp’s older brother (February 15, 1955). 10 The July 1945 issue of Vogue included several features on the museum. The Museum of Modern Art had Duchamp’s work The Large Glass on display from 1943 to 1946. Another notable exhibition that took place during this time about the relationship between fashion, the body and clothing was called Are Clothes Modern? (29 November 1944 to 4 March 1945) curated and designed by architect Bernard Rudofsky. 11 Blumenfeld’s photograph of Duchamp’s masterwork for the Vogue cover has been included in various exhibition catalogues and several texts on photography but has not been analysed in the context of Duchamp’s oeuvre. For example, Terri Weissman notes that this photograph by Blumenfeld ‘brings together the language of the avant-garde with that of commercial fashion’ but her discussion of the work is focused on its meaning relative to the history of fashion photography rather than on its significance in relation to Duchamp. See Terri Weissman, ‘Celebrity Style, The Publicity Shot, and The Maverick Language of Fashion’, in Global Photography: A Critical History, ed. Erina Duganne, Heather Diack and Terri Weissman (New York: Routledge, 2020), 259–260. 12 In this fashion spread, models wore the latest spring ball gowns and stood in front of Pollock’s paintings Number 27 (1950) and Number 28 (1950). See ‘Fashion: Spring Ball Gowns’, Vogue (New York) 117, no. 4 (March 1, 1951): 156–159. For scholarly engagement of Pollock’s work used in the context of fashion photography, see, for example, Richard Martin, ‘The New Soft Look: Jackson Pollock, Cecil Beaton, and American Fashion in 1951’, Dress 7 (1981): 1–8; Timothy J. Clark, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’, in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1954–1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 172–243; and Änne Söll, ‘Pollock in Vogue: American Fashion and Avant-garde Art in Cecil Beaton’s 1951 Photographs’, Fashion Theory 13, no. 1 (2009): 29–50. 13 Clark, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’, 219. 14 Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 344. 15 Salvador Dalí’s collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli in designing clothing in 1937 included The Shoe Hat, The Tear Dress and The Lobster Dress. See Richard Martin, Fashion and Surrealism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996). 16 Marcel Duchamp quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 81.

Introduction

17 Duchamp’s provocative and radical exhibition design for the Exhibition of Surrealists at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris (17 January – 24 February 1938) received many negative reviews. Bettina Wilson likened her experience to a bad dream where nothing quite makes sense in her review of the exhibition for Vogue. See Bettina Wilson, ‘Surrealism in Paris’, Vogue (New York) 91, no. 5 (March 1, 1938): 106, 107, 144. Art critic Raymond Lecuyer complained that ‘the display apparatus that (in the shadows) accompanies the presentation of several canvases and panels is so voluminous and so provocative that painting plays no more than the vague role of accessory’. Raymond Lecuyer quoted in Adam Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-Garde 1925–1941: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 177. 18 Elsa Schiaparelli, Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 135. 19 See also Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 20 Tomkins, Duchamp, 336. Tomkins identifies the Americana issue as being intended for publication on 15 February 1943; however, this particular issue features a model wearing ‘a spring suit for nimble needles to make’ from Vogue Suit pattern 9609. The Vogue Americana issue was published on 1 February 1943 with a stylized colour photograph by Liberman of an eagle with its wings spread and standing on top of a pillar. 21 Duchamp’s mixed media collage portrait is titled Allégorie de genre (George Washington), 1943. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Object #AM 1987-632. In this work, American President George Washington is represented in profile in stained bandage gauze, pinned down by thirteen gold-headed stars. When the collage portrait is turned on its side, the portrait’s outline is transformed into a map of the United States. Duchamp never revealed his reasons for his unusual choice of materials for this project; however, in 1943, America had been involved in the Second World War for two years, and the bandages may have been intended as an allusion to the bloodshed of the war. In Duchamp’s account of the incident in his interview with Cabanne, he said: ‘they [Vogue] refused my project. They sent me forty dollars for my trouble and it never appeared [in the magazine]. André Breton bought it for three hundred dollars’. See Duchamp quoted in Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, 85. 22 Duchamp was particularly pleased with a ‘bottle-green shirt’ from this fabric-dying operation. Anne d’Harnoncourt, ‘Introduction’, Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: The Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), 43. 23 It was Pierre Cabanne who observed that ‘Marcel Duchamp always wore a pink shirt, with fine green stripes; he smoked Havana cigars incessantly (about ten a day); went out very little; saw few friends; and went neither to exhibitions nor to museums’. Pierre Cabanne quoted in Robert Motherwell, ‘Introduction’, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne, 8. 24 Many scholars have adopted a thematic approach to studying Duchamp’s legacy. Thierry de Duve has written extensively on Duchamp, reflecting on the influence of the readymade across disciplines in Résonances du readymade: Duchamp entre avant-garde et tradition (1989) and analysing the shift in aesthetic judgement from a classical focus on beauty to a declarative statement about art in Kant after Duchamp (1996). Francis M. Naumann has devoted his life to writing about Duchamp and his contemporaries, including New York Dada: 1915–1923 (1994); Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1999); and The Recurrent Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (2012). In investigating the borders of Duchamp’s art practice, Naumann and Bradley Bailey explored chess as both a theme and a

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preoccupation in Duchamp’s life and work in Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (2009), observing that Duchamp used the game as a source for images in his art, especially in the uniformed figures of The Large Glass. Other scholars have considered Duchamp’s attention to eros and gender, noting his gender ambivalence, especially in photographs taken in collaboration with American photographer Man Ray in which he poses as Rrose Sélavy; see, for example, David Hopkins, ‘Men Before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity’, Art History 21, no. 3 (September 1998): 303–323; Deborah Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray: Reconsidering the Alter Ego of Marcel Duchamp’, artjournal (Spring 2013): 81–94; Susan Fillin-Yeh, ‘Dandies, Marginality and Modernism: Georgia O’Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and other Cross-dressers’, Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (January 1995): 33–44. 25 See ‘Pulled at Four Pins’, Toutfait.com: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 26 The scholarly products of this colloquium were compiled into the book The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 27 Eric Cameron, ‘Given’, in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 19. 28 Carol P. James, ‘An Original Revolutionary Messagerie Rrose’, in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, 285. 29 The index lists Duchamp’s works by title but does not include references for PERET (1958) or the series Made to Measure (1957–1961). See index in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, 485–488. However, the index notably includes Duchamp’s Pair of Aprons (1959), which is discussed only once in the text by James who includes it in her list of items missing from Duchamp’s valise. The index also lists Traveler’s Folding Item (1916 remade 1964) which is discussed by numerous authors in the book, including William Camfield who offers evidence that this readymade relates to the clothing for the bride in Duchamp’s The Large Glass. See William Camfield, ‘Duchamp’s Fountain: Aesthetic Object, Icon or Anti-Art?’, in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, 166–167. 30 These clothing-inspired artworks are often cited as examples of twentieth-century artists who used clothing as part of their artistic practice. See Aileen Ribeiro, Clothing in Art: The Visual Culture of Fashion, 1600–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 29–30. 31 Nancy J. Troy, ‘Art’, in Fashion and Art, ed. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (London: Berg, 2012), 29. Like Troy, other scholars have prefaced their work with arguments that address this long-standing prejudice against fashion as a lens of analysis. In Gilles Lipovetsky’s book The Empire of Fashion, the philosopher observed that fashion is typically ‘seen as an ontologically and socially inferior domain’. See Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. Similarly, Ulrich Lehmann, in his philosophical treatise on fashion and modernity, observed that ‘Fashion as a topic remains embroiled and disputed because of its alleged lack of substance – in artistic as well as metaphysical terms’ and for that reason, this subject ‘will nearly always be equated consciously or unconsciously with the facile and futile’. Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 4. 32 Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2002), 62. 33 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and introduced by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 35. 34 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 42. 35 The term ‘fashion’ can describe different things and be employed in a variety of contexts. Used as a verb, ‘to fashion’ means to make or alter, and can be used to describe the fashioning of clothing or the body. Used as a noun, the term ‘fashion’ can be used to describe clothing, accessories, ideas and imagery, as

Introduction

well as the underlying systems and institutions that produce and disseminate such products. Fashion in relation to clothing generally describes the prevailing or preferred manner in which the body is dressed, accessorized and presented at any given time. Recognizing that a garment may or may not be ‘in fashion’ at a particular moment, the term ‘dress’ includes clothing, accessories and body modifications that may or may not be fashionable. The term ‘costume’ is generally used to describe clothing worn in the theatre or for masquerade. For a thorough documentation of the distinction between the terms, see Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communication (New York: Routledge, 2002), 8–12. 36 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 14–15. 37 Christopher Breward, Fashion (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. 38 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 7–11. 39 Ibid., 11. 40 Although Elizabeth Wilson’s seminal work Adorned in Dreams was first published in 1985, the field is generally considered to have originated after the founding of the scholarly journal Fashion Theory by Valerie Steele in 1997. There are now many more journals of this type, but for more than a decade Fashion Theory stood virtually alone in its efforts to theorize fashion. For a full documentation of the history of the field of fashion studies, see Lou Taylor, ‘Fashion and Dress History: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches’, in The Handbook of Fashion Studies, ed. Sandy Black et al. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 23–43. 41 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), 5. 42 Roland Barthes quoted in Allen, Intertextuality, 6. 43 Marcel Duchamp quoted in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), 38. 44 Russell Smith, ‘A century later, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain continues to beguile the art world’, Globe and Mail (online), December 27, 2017, updated December 28, 2017. It is also interesting to note that in 2004, a survey of 500 art experts in the United Kingdom voted Duchamp’s Fountain to be the ‘most influential work of modern art’ ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse. See ‘Duchamp’s urinal tops art survey’, BBC News (online), 3 December 2004, accessed 14 April 2021 at http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm 45 Tomkins, Duchamp, 17. 46 Ibid., 78. 47 Ibid., 80. 48 Rudi Blesh quoted by Francis M. Naumann, The Recurrent Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Readymade Press, 2012), 13. In a review of the exhibition published in Vogue, the art critic noted that the room that displayed Duchamp’s painting was the ‘most crowded one of the eighteen into which the drill floor was divided’. See Guy Pène Du Bois, ‘From One Extremist to the Other’, Vogue (New York) 41, no. 7 (April 1, 1913): 122. 49 Tomkins, Duchamp, 115. 50 Étant donnés (1946–1966) is installed in a room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and can be viewed by only one person at a time through a peephole of a wooden door. The viewer sees a landscape in which a headless naked female figure lies on her back with her legs spread apart, exposing a shaved pubic area. As Francis M. Naumann noted, ‘Even if they knew about Duchamp and his work – as I did when seeing this work for the first time – they would likely find this bizarre scene aesthetically and conceptually incomprehensible’. See Francis M. Naumann, The Recurrent Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Readymade Press, 2012), 179.

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51 Naumann, The Recurrent Haunting Ghost, 403. 52 See Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 53 See Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 219–226. 54 Joseph Masheck (ed.), Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (New Jersey: Da Capo Press, 2002), xvii. 55 Lucy Lippard, Surrealists on Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 111. 56 Sung Bok Kim, ‘Is Fashion Art?’ Fashion Theory 2, no. 1 (1998): 70. 57 Sandra Miller, ‘Fashion as Art; Is Fashion Art?’ Fashion Theory 11, no.1 (2007): 39. 58 Charlene Lau, Total Work of Fashion: Bernhard Wilhelm and the Contemporary Avant-Garde (PhD Dissertation, York University, 2016), 40. 59 Nancy J. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 8. 60 Troy, Couture Culture, 9. 61 Adam Geczy and Vicky Karaminas, ‘Fashion and Art: Critical Crossovers’, in Fashion and Art, ed. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (London: Berg, 2012), 11. Italics in original text. 62 Steele, ‘Fashion’, in Fashion and Art, 13–27. 63 Troy, ‘Art’, in Fashion and Art, 29–41. 64 Geczy and Karaminas, Fashion and Art, 5. 65 See Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–6. See also Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 89. 66 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 294. 67 Fashion has had a relatively short history as a collectable object within public museums. See Julia Petrov, Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019). In Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye’s Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), the authors identify 1971 as a pivotal year in the history of fashion in the museum with Cecil Beaton’s exhibition Fashion: An Anthology at the Victoria & Albert Museum since it was the first time that contemporary fashion was presented in a museum. Beaton borrowed garments from his large social circle to create this exhibition, notably from his friend Diana Vreeland who loaned a Chanel pantsuit, which she later donated to the museum. In 1972, Vreeland began work as the Special Consultant to the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she organized eleven exhibitions of fashion, including the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983, bringing enormous crowds into the museum but also attracting significant controversy. 68 Robert Storr quoted in Valerie Steele, ‘Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition’, Fashion Theory 12, no. 1 (2008): 12. 69 In 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons – a thematic career retrospective that examined Kawakubo’s body of work. See The Metropolitan Museum of Art press release announcing the exhibition: ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the InBetween’, updated May 1, 2017. Accessed 15 August 2018 at https://www.metmuseum.org/press/ exhibitions/2016/rei-kawakubo. 70 See for example Debra Silverman’s book Selling Culture in which she expresses a vitriolic critique of Diana Vreeland’s exhibitions at The Met: Debra Silverman, Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

For a concise summary of the history and critique of retrospective museum exhibitions of fashion designers, see N. J. Stevenson, ‘The Fashion Retrospective’, Fashion Theory 12, no. 2 (2008): 219–235. Valerie Steele also discusses the hostility of critics to exhibitions of fashion in ‘Museum Quality’, Fashion Theory 12, no.1 (2008): 7–30. 71 Michael Boodro quoted by Sung Bok Kim, ‘Is Fashion Art?’ Fashion Theory 2, no. 1 (1998): 54. Ellipsis in original. 72 David Carrier, ‘The Divergence of Art and Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum’, in Hyperallergic, July 14, 2018. Accessed 15 August 2018 at https://hyperallergic.com/450868/heavenly-bodies-fashionand-the-catholic-imagination-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art/. The Heavenly Bodies exhibition was the ‘most visited exhibition’ in The Met’s history, bringing in 1,659,647 people. The previous show record was the 1978 exhibition Treasures of Tutankhamun, which was seen by 1,360,957 people. See The Met’s press release dated October 11, 2018. Accessed 17 December 2018 at https:// www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2018/heavenly-bodies-most-visited-exhibition. 73 Ibid. 74 David Carrier, ‘The Challenges of Fashion in a Museum’, in Hyperallergic, November 17, 2018. Accessed 17 December 2018 at https://hyperallergic.com/471639/contemporary-muslim-fashionsde-young-museum/. 75 Ibid.

Introduction 19

Drawing Duchamp: Fashioning the Figure

1

You had to have a sketchbook in your pocket all the time, ready for action at any provocation from the physical world.1 –Marcel Duchamp

Figure 1.1  Marcel Duchamp, Singer in Evening Dress, 1908. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Germany. Art ­Resource, New York. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp 22

Drawings capture the physical gestures of the artist in inscribing marks on a planar surface to create mimetic representations or abstractions born in the imagination. With a few measured strokes of his pen in 1908, Marcel Duchamp captured the elegant posture and distinct silhouette of a performer wearing formal evening dress in Singer in Evening Dress (Figure 1.1). The drawing is spare but rendered with a confident hand. But more importantly, this drawing is one of many that serve to signal Duchamp’s lifelong preoccupation with clothing and the body, particularly the way that dress signals gender, class and identity. As we shall see, he will return to the tailcoat as a symbol of masculine identity in the drawing Jacquette (1956), rendered many years after he had claimed to have given up art for chess. In light of Duchamp’s professed disdain for what he called ‘retinal art’ (art that pleases the eye), it is not surprising that his drawings are infrequently mentioned in the analysis of his artistic production. Duchamp’s early drawings are usually examined in the context of his efforts to become a practising artist – a period that he later described as ‘swimming lessons’, in his interview with Cabanne.2 Although some of the later drawings, particularly the preparatory drawings and notes (1913–1915) for his seminal work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), have been subjected to close scrutiny, his lifelong drawing practice and the evidence of his attention to clothing and the body have been less considered. And yet drawings facilitate the reading of the artist’s intention in providing material evidence of the artist’s hand, temperament and modes of thinking, and thus can provide meaningful insight into the unexplored theme of dressing and undressing within Duchamp’s oeuvre. Like his older brothers, Marcel received academic drawing lessons from Philippe Zacharie at the Lycée Corneille, but his real mentor was his brother Gaston, ‘whose fluid and incisive drawing style he admired tremendously’.3 In 1903, Marcel won a prize for drawing and, at his graduation the following year, he was awarded the medal of the Sociéte des Amis des Arts.4 Duchamp hoped to become an artist and went to live with his brother Gaston, following him to Paris in 1904. After failing the examination for the École des Beaux-Arts, he enrolled at the Académie Julian, but was an infrequent attendee at life-drawing classes, preferring instead to use his sketchbook to record his impressions of the people he saw on the streets in Paris. Upon completion of his military service in 1906, he returned to Paris and then sought to become an illustrator. Several of his drawings were accepted for exhibition and at least seventeen illustrations were published in satirical journals between 1908 and 1910.5 After the rejection and notoriety that arose from his infamous painting Nude Descending a Staircase no. 2 (1912), Duchamp chose to mostly abandon traditional forms of art making, but would continue to draw in various media, often as preparatory studies, throughout his life. Drawing has long been viewed as an ‘intermediate or secondary’ artistic medium and for that reason has remained largely absent from the critical discourse of art history.6 However, recent scholarly attention has recast drawing from its marginalized position in the hierarchy of art, such that drawing is now perceived as ‘performance, as a tool, as a place of production, as a discursive exploration, a site of conception and as a cognitive process’.7 This has resulted in a broader consideration of what drawing encompasses and what it represents. Deanna Petherbridge argues that drawings are ‘as much the contained sites of meaning as any other cultural production’.8 Drawing – a term that is difficult to define but generally understood to mean the making of marks with an instrument such as a pencil or stylus in a linear manner on a two-dimensional support like paper – can encompass

Drawing Duchamp

both mimetic and abstracted work. With this definition, an analysis of Duchamp’s drawings might embrace everything from his earliest pencil sketches (1902–1906); his published and unpublished illustrations (1907–1910); his studies of nudes, chess pieces and machine forms in 1911–1912; his preparatory sketches and notes for The Bride Stripped Bare (1913–1915); his scribbled moustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa called L.H.O.O.Q. (1919); his signature on the Tzanck Check (1919); his doodles in friends’ guestbooks such as Au George V (1937); his notes for Box in a Valise (1938–1942); his studies of chess figures like The King Checked by the Queen (1932) and Study for the Knight, Queen, and King of the ‘Pocket Chess Set’ (1943); as well as his late-in-life pen-and-ink drawings of a man’s tailcoat (Jacquette, 1956); his notes on the working drawings for the reproduction of the readymade replicas by Schwarz in 1964; to the series of etchings of nude men and women in erotic encounters (1967– 1968); and Sketch of ‘Door for Gradiva’ (1968).9 In the context of Duchamp’s overall achievements, his underexplored drawings reveal aspects of the artist and his craft, since it is in drawing that the artist ‘leaves his mark, signing himself’ and, in doing so, reaches out as ‘an extension of the self’.10 The marks made by an artist in drawing serve as primary evidence of the body and mind at work. This evidence of the artist’s ‘autographical imagination’ is, as Peter Crowther writes, ‘physically discontinuous from the existence of the artist’, such that we as the viewers can ‘determine what is distinctive to the artist, and what has been based simply on generally available rules and techniques’.11 In interpreting a drawing, Crowther cautions readers that the work exists ‘in the form of an invitation to the viewer’ to ‘share in the vision’ as a way of seeing, allowing us to ‘inhabit the artist’s style on their own terms’.12 In replicating several drawings by Duchamp to more closely understand the nuances, speed and weight of Duchamp’s gestures, I harnessed what I have theorized elsewhere as The Slow Approach to Seeing as an adjunct to visual analysis.13 I also capitalized upon my knowledge of dress history to reveal and interpret the subtle details of the fashioned body that demarcate notions of gender, identity and class in Duchamp’s drawings. Duchamp’s drawings reveal an astonishing focus on the way clothing defines identity, especially gender identity. This chapter brings attention to drawings by Duchamp in which he has represented or altered the dressed and undressed body as evidence that the artist reveals himself as being aware of and sensitive to the nuances of fashion, gender norms and bourgeois codes of behaviour. In making this claim, I remind the reader that I am using the term ‘fashion’ to mean an aesthetic medium that conveys the prevailing ideas, desires and beliefs of contemporary culture, as discussed in the Introduction. The following analysis argues that it is in Duchamp’s early sketchbook studies that he first takes notice of the importance of clothing in signalling gender and identity. It is his illustrations for French satirical journals that offer evidence of his skill in mimetic representation, his burgeoning interest in language and text, his sense of irony and, most importantly, his knowledge of fashionable dress and shifting gender roles and expectations. This time period also includes several drawings for friends that are early explorations of androgyny. In his later drawings, there is further evidence of his imagination at work and an ongoing lifelong interest in the dressed and undressed body. By establishing that Duchamp’s drawings reveal a profound awareness of the fashioned body, this chapter will be helpful in unmasking Duchamp as a Baudelairian dandy in Chapter 2, in unravelling his masquerades in Chapter 3, in linking the readymade to the etymology of the word in clothing manufacture in Chapter 4, and in contextualizing his waistcoat readymade series in Chapter 5.

23

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

Sketchbook Studies

24

Duchamp’s sketchbook drawings from 1904–1905 record his efforts to capture the essence of a moving figure in pencil and ink. These drawings typically document his quick impressions of men, women and animals on the streets. Many of the drawings are of working-class men distinguished by the dress associated with their occupations, including a government official, a policeman, a knifegrinder with his grinding machine, a gardener, a gasman, a vegetable peddler, an undertaker and two types of coachman.14 Duchamp also rendered at least five studies of women in hats, including Woman’s Head with Large Hat (1904–1905), taking notice of how this fashion accessory sits on the face and shields the eyes at a time when hats were very large and ornate.15 It is through practice that artists develop their skills and work out ideas, and in these rapid drawings Duchamp captures the general silhouette and distinguishing elements of men’s and women’s dress. Although Duchamp was ‘not precocious in his artistic abilities’, as Tomkins noted in his biography of the artist,16 the artist signalled his self-confidence in taking the time to sign ‘Marcel Duchamp’ or write his initials ‘M.D’. on most of his sketches. These early studies provide evidence that Duchamp took notice that a man’s dress or uniform distinguished his class and profession, a topic to which he returns in his later works. As Barbara Vinken observes: ‘uniforms, owing to their massive presence in bourgeois society, assume a unique status by representing the only place where masculinity is literally on display’.17 In his quick sketches of men on the streets of Paris in 1904–1905, Duchamp has taken care to include something distinctive about the figure, by articulating the idiosyncratic clothing and/or equipment that is appropriate to their work.18 The gendarme/policeman wears the kepi, a hat with a flat circular top. The knife-grinder wears a homburg, a heavy coat and high boots, while standing leaning into the rotating machine of his profession. The gasman is dressed in a humble cap and coat. The vegetable peddler wears a bowler hat and a long bulky coat. The funeral coachman wears a distinctive tall peaked hat like a bishop’s mitre as well as an expansive cloak with shoulder cape. The driver coachman wears a top hat, warm scarf and thick cloak. The articulation of these subtle details in dress when making sketches of moving figures is evidence of Duchamp’s focus and discerning eye. As I have argued elsewhere, the hand and eye work in tandem in creating a drawing, such that there is a tacit or embodied form of knowledge that is learned from drawing.19 In the process of translating a three-dimensional object onto a two-dimensional support through mark making, an artist must slow down to look carefully to discern and make marks that record relative proportions of parts of the thing, subtle differences in patterns of light and dark, as well as shape and texture. Drawing is distinctly different from painting, where a brush facilitates quick translation of form onto canvas, and also from photography, where light is transformed into images through digital or chemical processes. As the artist looks at the object, the hand, eye and brain are processing visual information about the object, and this type of looking can be equated to a form of touching.20 In the course of looking, the artist may be thinking about and learning about the qualities of their subject in order to meaningfully translate what they see into a work of art. As Petherbridge observed, when drawing, ‘making and thinking are inextricably linked’.21

An artist embarks on a journey of discovery in drawing in being forced to look at the object to mediate the discrepancies between the representation on paper and the object itself. John Berger reflected that ‘It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see’.22 This was my experience as I replicated several of Duchamp’s drawings (including Figures 1.8 and 1.9) – putting myself in his place in an effort to match his confident lines and strokes. In doing so, I felt that innate connection between the hand and brain in the work of drawing that led me to appreciate Duchamp’s attentiveness to the unique elements of clothing that distinguished one figure from another. Knowledge can be gained through the work of drawing. In his philosophical treatise Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger used the term handling to describe a form of theoretical knowledge and understanding that is gained through the active use and engagement with things like a hammer, and, I would argue by extension, a pencil. As Heidegger noted in his later work The Task of Thinking (1964), there is a special relationship between the work of the hand and the brain, since ‘Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking’.23 It is in drawing that the hand is in motion, making marks on a surface that originate in the thinking brain, such that the mind and body become one. My position that the drawing hand is rooted in thinking is also underpinned by the work of others who have interpreted Heidegger before me and argue for the tacit knowledge gained through creative arts practice. Barbara Bolt observed that Heidegger’s notion of handling can be understood to encompass the work of the hands, eyes and mind of the artist, since it takes careful engagement with the object in order to translate that thing into a work of art.24 Deanna Petherbridge harnessed Heidegger’s notion of handling to describe the thinking hand of the artist and argues that drawing, whether it is with traditional mediums or with a computer drawing program, requires a ‘focused acuity of looking’ that is reinforced by the ‘bodily responses of touch and handling and memories of bodily experiences’.25 Petherbridge argues against theoretical positions that have de-centred the artist or author and undermined their creative responsibility for the artwork, instead maintaining that ‘artists know what they are doing’.26 She opines that the reading of a drawing ‘requires an empathetic response’ as well as consideration of ‘other possibilities of meaning construction’.27 As Duchamp made these drawings, he was practising the focused looking required to make mimetic drawings, and his hand and brain were working in concert in the manner of Heidegger’s handling. In the process of creating these drawings, especially those of men in uniforms, Duchamp took notice of the subtle differences in the dress of each profession and the significance of dress in relation to identity, such that these themes manifested in his later work.

Between 1907 and 1910, Marcel Duchamp followed his brothers in creating comic illustrations for Parisian satirical journals like Le Rire and Le Courrier Français. Unlike his early sketchbook drawings, most of these finished works are rendered with exacting precision and a careful modulation of

Drawing Duchamp

Illustrations

25

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

tones. Rendered in conté, graphite and ink, these drawings capture imagined scenes, many of which involve encounters taking place in public places, including an atelier, a bar and an ice cream parlour. In these comic illustrations, Duchamp created focal points in each image with measured placement of the figures and delineation of areas of high contrast with the rendering of deep blacks in ink. Handwritten titles and captions towards the bottom of the images illuminate the irony depicted in the scenes and reveal Duchamp’s sense of wit and attentiveness to language. Many of the original illustrations have been lost, offering another possible reason why these drawings have been little explored. Schwarz links the illustrations to ‘analogous themes in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’.28 Naumann reads the theme of sexual opposition into these illustrations, noting that they are ‘guises that are meant to emphasize their opposing sexual and sociological identities’, but he does not read further into the significance of this.29 Indeed the erotic subtext of this work is both evident and significant. However, these works also provide crucial evidence that Duchamp took close notice of how dress is linked to identity as well as the shifting codes of behaviour for women in society during the early part of the twentieth century. There are also several images from this period that suggest an early exploration of androgyny (including Figures 1.7–1.9) which I will return to later. What is also distinct about this series of illustrations is that Duchamp created them in anticipation of publication, and therefore he must have known he needed to be observant of the tastes (and dress) of the bourgeois audience for these journals. Although other scholars have focused on the text in this series as evidence of Duchamp’s taste for visual and verbal puns, it is also worth noting that Duchamp’s depiction of stylish bourgeois couples catered to this audience. A close reading of the illustrations created in 1907–1909 shows that Duchamp observed the subtle nuances of fashionable dress during the period called la belle époque, a time of lavish excess defined as ‘the last good time of the upper classes’ prior to the upheaval of the First World War.30 For men, the principle of discretion in dress was paramount and demonstrated in sober dress of dark colour: typically, a three-piece suit, and for formal occasions, top hat and tails (Figure 1.2).31 For women, the fashionable S-shaped silhouette gave emphasis to the bust. The tailor-made or readymade suit for women also grew in importance as daywear, reflecting the emergence of women in public spaces like department stores, bars and cafés, as well as the increasing number of middleclass women entering the workforce as typists, shop assistants and governesses.32 These readymade suits consisted of jacket and skirt; the long skirt fitted smoothly over the hips, flaring out towards the bottom, and the semi-fitted jacket was worn over a blouse or shirtwaist (Figure 1.3).33 The adoption of readymades by women several decades after men had embraced this trend reflects the gendered aspect to the history of readymade clothing and will be discussed at length in Chapter 4. The manner in which Duchamp fashioned the figures for these comic illustrations yields evidence of his careful observation of the articulation of gender by the dressed body.

Figure 1.2  Fashion illustration of Men’s Formal Wear, 1909–1910. Costume Institute Library at the M ­ etropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image in public domain.

26

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

Figure 1.3  Fashion illustration published in Journal des Demoiselles, 1 May 1908. Costume Institute Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image in public domain.

28

Figure 1.4  Marcel Duchamp, Mid-Lent, 1909. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

Drawing Duchamp

In the 1909 illustration Mi-Carême / Mid-Lent (Figure 1.4), Duchamp’s drawing has evolved into a measured and precise rendering of form. Two dressmakers are working on an evening gown mounted on a dress form. The text reads ‘Mi-Carême / Naturellement qu’on va sans chapeau au bal’ which translates to ‘It is mid-Lent. Naturally, one can go to the ball without a hat’. Duchamp conveys a sense of irony in this discussion about the appropriate accessories for an upcoming social event taking place during Lent. Although observants typically abstained from luxuries during this forty-day religious period that precedes Easter, there was a one-day break, on the Thursday of the third week, during which balls and masquerades could take place.34 In creating this illustration, Duchamp has paid close attention to the attire of the dressmakers, who are wearing shirtwaists and long skirts, as a type of uniform befitting their profession. Dressmakers would be versed in what was in fashion so that they could guide their clients accordingly, and their choice of clothing signifies their knowledge of the fashionable bust-heavy silhouette of the period. The black sleeveless evening gown on the stand is unfinished but is clearly being made for a full-figured mature woman, adding another degree of visual irony to the scene in that the wearer has not abstained from her love of food during Lent. Other comic illustrations by Duchamp from this series expose his knowledge of women’s burgeoning efforts to make a place for themselves in public spaces, notably in the cafés and bars of

29

Figure 1.5  Marcel Duchamp, At the Bar, 1909. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource.

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

© Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

30

Paris, where he might have sat to observe and record the scenes he encountered in his sketchbook. In Au Bar / At the Bar (Figure 1.5), a young woman dressed in a readymade skirt suit is engaged in a conversation with a man seated at the bar. The man, a slender, androgynous figure dressed in an evening suit and top hat, sits passively while the woman appears to be the aggressor. Her posture is assertive; one hand rests on her hip, the other elbow leans on the bar and her hand covers his. Her tailored jacket is long, extending to mid-thigh like the frock coat of a man, and her expansive plumed hat shields her face, making her head larger than that of the man. The text reads: ‘Grève des P.T.T. / T’as pas reçu mon pneu … alors? ___’. This roughly translates to: ‘Strike of the Paris Postal Service / You did not get my message … so?’ This alludes to an erotic encounter, but also conveys a situation in which traditional gender roles have been reversed. It is interesting to note that Duchamp published another version of this same cartoon in Le Rire (Paris) in October 1910.35 In this version, La Mode Ample / In Ample Fashion, Duchamp modified the woman’s ensemble, taking into account the shift in women’s fashions to a slimmer silhouette. He altered her skirt, making it narrower, and he similarly altered her tailored jacket, adding decorative back buttons, making it longer and fitting closer to her body. As well, he changed her accessories to a wide-brimmed hat with a large bow and the addition of a handbag. The caption has also been

Figure 1.6  Marcel Duchamp, La Mère / The Mother, 1908. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Germany / Art ­Resource. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

Drawing Duchamp

modified to read ‘I say sonny, when will you stop wearing your father’s hats?’ These modifications provide clear evidence that Duchamp took care to notice what was in fashion in creating these illustrations. In the drawing La Mère / The Mother (Figure 1.6) a young woman energetically steps into a carriage without assistance as her mother hovers just behind nervously and asks: ‘Est-ce que je monte avec toi aujourd’hui?’ which translates to ‘Should I come with you today?’ This scene marks the shifting notions of bourgeois propriety in allowing an unmarried woman to appear in public without a chaperone.36 The daughter wears a tailored day dress with an expansive skirt and cinched waist. A lush dark fur wrap hangs from her shoulders, and a large hat trimmed with ostrich feathers tops her head. The details of her dress, including the accessories, mark her as a member of fashionable society. Her fullfigured mother wears a tailored day suit with long jacket over a full skirt, accessorized with a small feather-trimmed hat, an outfit befitting a mature married woman. Her anxiety about the propriety of allowing her pretty daughter to go out alone is reflected in her question about whether or not she should accompany her as chaperone. With this caption, Duchamp again signals his knowledge of the

31

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp 32

gendered codes of behaviour for the bourgeoisie and uses it as part of his toolkit in creating these illustrations for satirical journals. In these and many other comic illustrations by Duchamp, there is an emphasis on the shifting roles of women in society. Like Baudelaire’s artist-flâneur Monsieur G., who is at home in the crowd and rejoices in his anonymity, Duchamp was an astute observer, absorbing the scenes he witnessed in the cafés, bars and streets of Paris and harnessing them as inspiration for his work.37 While doing so, he took care to reflect the nuances of fashionable dress during la belle époque, moulding the women’s bodies into the bust-heavy silhouette of the period that emphasizes their gender. Many of the women are shown wearing stylish tailored readymade suits accessorized with large hats and furs as appropriate. And notably, as women’s fashion evolved into a slimmer silhouette in 1909–1910, this shift in style was incorporated into his works, as was noted earlier.38 The men in his illustrations are garbed in elegant and fashionable formal evening dress or in lounge suits with bowler hats as appropriate. This attention to the details of dress communicates Duchamp’s awareness of the significance of dress as a marker of gender and class. These illustrations also mark his burgeoning interest in incorporating text into his artworks, and this acute sensitivity to language will be significant in the naming of the readymade, as we shall see in Chapter 4. Michel Sanouillet places Duchamp within the French oral tradition of the average Parisian, noting that, in the early years of his career, he was inclined to spend more time ‘with the journalists, cartoonists and artisans [in the cafés] of Paris’ than with ‘fashionable painters and men of letters’.39 Sanouillet argues that the puns and linguistic games found in Duchamp’s works are ‘the most directly communicable and understandable kind of humour’.40 Humour aside, these drawings are notable in that they provide clear evidence that Duchamp was cognizant of dress codes for bourgeois society in the first decade of the twentieth century, since in each case, he has carefully rendered the dress in sufficient detail to mark it as appropriate for the situation. And while many, if not most, of the works contain an erotic subtext, this is not connoted by undressed figures; instead, satire is created through word play. There are several other drawings from this period in which the androgyny of the central figure is worthy of further exploration. In the drawing News (1908) (Figure 1.7), Duchamp depicts an androgynous figure dressed in suit and tie, absorbed in reading a newspaper while lounging on a wicker settee with legs crossed at the knee, one elbow leaning against the armrest. There is another very similar drawing of this same figure titled Informations (1908) with a different background.41 The figure in both works has been identified by Schwarz as Georges Azaguer.42 He is dressed in a blue wool suit with a waistcoat, striped shirt and bow tie (notably similar to what Duchamp wears in 1915 for his Vanity Fair portrait announcing his arrival in New York which will be discussed in the next chapter). Although Schwarz observes that Duchamp’s rendition was influenced by ‘one of the most boring artists [Duchamp] ever knew’, what has gone unnoticed is the androgynous appearance of this figure. Especially notable is the rendering of the figure’s footwear; the shoes are drawn with a large fabric bow and a raised heel. These shoes are distinctly feminine in style at a time when men would have worn lace-up dress boots or ankle-high lace-up Oxfords during the day and patent leather slippers for formal occasions in the evening.43

Figure 1.7  Marcel Duchamp, News, 1908. Bridgeman Images, New York. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

Drawing Duchamp

In the drawing Young Man dated 1909 from the autograph book of Duchamp’s friend Suzanne Blocman, Duchamp presents an androgynous figure with fair hair formally dressed in a man’s tailcoat and trousers (Figure 1.8).44 The handwritten text to this illustration reads: Mademoiselle / Voulez vous doubler? / Nouvelles paroles / d’une vieille chanson or Mademoiselle, do you want to do it a second time? New words for an old song. This figure is slender, with feminine curves and facial features that suggest androgyny. Similarly, in Duchamp’s drawing Young Man Standing dated 1909–1910 (Figure 1.9), the ‘young man’ is depicted with soft hairless cheeks, wide eyes, full lips, curled hair and tilted head.45 He or she is dressed in a suit and tie, giving emphasis to relatively wide hips and a soft and rounded chest. This drawing is inscribed on the lower right with: ‘Sur commande / de ce vieux Léo / Bien cordialement Duchamp’ which translates to ‘By order / of this old Léo / Sincerely Duchamp’. According to d’Harnoncourt and McShine, Léo Tribout was the wife of Duchamp’s oldest friend in Rouen.46 In this work, Léo, a woman, is dressed as a man, adopting the signifier of masculinity – the suit – a transgressive act with erotic overtones at a time when laws in France prohibited women from wearing trousers unless riding a horse or a bicycle.47 At this time, if a woman wore trousers at home, others would assume that she was ‘expecting a lover’ by wearing ‘the most shocking clothing imaginable’.48 In writing ‘by order’ on this drawing, there is a suggestion that Duchamp is inviting the couple to partake in such pleasures.

33

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

Figure 1.8  Ingrid Mida, Young Man 1909 after Marcel Duchamp, 2018.

Figure 1.9  Ingrid Mida, Young Man Standing 1909–1910 after Marcel Duchamp, 2018. 34

In several of the drawings discussed here (and in others from this period), Duchamp presents us with drawings of androgynous bodies. In each case, the figure is dressed as a man – in a traditional suit and tie – but the body is slender, and the facial features are soft with no visible facial hair. Subtle suggestions of femininity are present, but not readily apparent, unless the drawing is considered closely. While Duchamp’s rendering of the androgynous bodies in these drawings seems prescient in terms of his explorations in gender play that came later, these images also reveal something about the artist’s beliefs. In Bodies of Modernity (1998), Tamar Garb suggests that in confronting the male body the male artist confronts himself: ‘For in this context, the encounter with the other is always simultaneously (and explicitly) an encounter with the self, in the recognizable arena of the present’.49 In other words, Duchamp would be forced to confront his beliefs on masculinity in order to translate his ideas onto the page during the process of making these comic illustrations. The bodies of the men in this series look different from the muscular vigorous masculine ideal of the time which embraced the ‘gymnasium, as much as the museum’ and was promoted as a man’s patriotic duty in French journals like La Culture Physique.50 Garb describes the honourable bourgeois male ideal of this period as being ‘assertively masculine both in his secondary sexual characteristics and in his capacity to reproduce’ that was manifested in ‘deep voices, a developed musculature, a ruddy complexion and a beard’, like the man in Gustave Caillebotte’s painting Young Man at his Window (1875) with his wide-legged stance and ‘strutting, spread-legged solid foundations’.51 In contrast, Duchamp’s illustrations of men were the antithesis of the fin-de-siècle ideal and more closely resembled his own slender body, somewhat pale and placid, and lacking in facial hair. While the intent and meaning of Duchamp’s depiction of androgynous figures are unclear, they can be viewed as prescient works given his later photographic experiments in depicting his alter ego Rose/Rrose Sélavy (the subject of Chapter 3). I also note here that Schwarz recalled that Duchamp ‘liked to assume an androgynous appearance’ and perhaps that inclination was first expressed in this series. 52

Abstracted Figures and Malic Forms

Drawing Duchamp

In 1910, Duchamp continued to sketch men and women in public and in the studio, probably using them as practice for his paintings. These sketches are similarly rendered with relatively few lines that seek out the form and that mark the areas of dark and light. While the men are dressed in suits, the women are in various states of dress and undress, ranging from a study of a woman in a large hat, long coat and muff (Study of a Woman) to a semi-nude woman in the act of dressing (Woman Fastening Her Garter).53 These drawings underpin his lifelong preoccupation with dressing and undressing, even though in 1911 Duchamp largely abandoned mimetic drawing as the tide turned in favour of abstraction. Like many of his peers, he began to create works that translated the figure into abstracted forms. In The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes (1912), it is challenging to discern which form represents male or female, king or queen.54 The machinelike forms are heavily abstracted and block-like, with shading that creates depth and a sense of

35

movement but does not serve to articulate specific forms or facilitate interpretation. In a 1962 interview, Duchamp explained:

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

Personally, I find The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes just as interesting as the Nude Descending a Staircase, even though the public evidently doesn’t. You know this was a chess King and Queen – and the picture became a combination of many ironic implications connected with the words ‘king and queen’. Here ‘the Swift Nudes,’ instead of descending were included to suggest a different kind of speed, of movement – a kind of flowing around and between the two central figures. The use of nudes completely removed any chance of suggesting an actual scene or an actual king and queen.55

36

In creating such a work, we see Duchamp’s capacity to harness his imagination in his art practice. This drawing is not a sketchbook study from life, but a scenario constructed entirely in his mind. Imagination, according to Nigel J. T. Thomas, is a mental act that produces ‘mental imagery, visual and otherwise, which is what makes it possible for us to think outside the confines of our present perceptual reality, to consider memories of the past and possibilities for the future, and to weight alternatives against one another’.56 Thomas concludes that imagination ‘makes possible all our thinking, about what is, what has been, and perhaps most important, what might be’.57 This description is similar to that articulated by the nineteenth-century poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire in describing imagination as ‘an almost divine faculty which perceives … the intimate and secret relations of things, the correspondences and the analogies’.58 Invoking one’s imagination to produce a drawing or illustration is a deliberate activity that draws on experience and memory, but there is an interpretative element that reconstitutes the object as a projection of ‘who we are now’.59 The imagined picture thus becomes ‘an autograph of the imaginer’s personal style’.60 In making these images, Duchamp documented the processes of his imagination and made it accessible to us, revealing something of himself – including the continuation of his explorations of gender identity and its expression through clothing (a topic that will be discussed at length in Chapter 3). In 1913–1915, Duchamp created many preparatory drawings for what would become his masterwork The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923). Several of these studies specifically reference clothing, including The Necktie (1913) and The Chocolate Grinder’s Necktie (1913).61 Although his drawings are imaginative rather than mimetic, his choices of titles are notable since the necktie is a long-standing symbol of social standing and male sexuality. For both studies, Duchamp wrote related notes describing these elements which were later reproduced in facsimile in the Green Box (1934), signalling their importance within his oeuvre. In his notes, he not only references the ‘elegance’ of the necktie but also describes it as: ‘1st resplendent in color/ 2nd provided at the 4 corners with / very sharp points (like all/neckties)’.62 With this statement, Duchamp signals his familiarity with the material and symbolic qualities of this gendered accessory. In the drawing Cimetière des uniformes et livrées, No. 1 / Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries No. 1 (1913), we see further evidence of Duchamp’s preoccupation with clothing and continuing interest in uniforms, albeit in abstracted forms.63 In this preparatory drawing for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp articulates silhouettes of uniforms using ruled lines and connected dots

in a manner that resembles a technical pattern for a dress. He included annotations (numbered 1–8) written in French in the left corner that read and translate into: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Prêtre / Priest Livreur des grands magasins / Delivery boy for a grand department store Gendarme / Policeman Cuirassier / Cavalryman Agent de la paix / Law enforcement officer Croque mort / Undertaker Larbin / Stooge or flunky (liveried servant) Chasseur du café / Busboy

Drawing Duchamp

Bradley Bailey notes that these men are mostly sketched from behind or the side, making their facial features indistinguishable, and that Duchamp paid close attention to ‘the principal details of the various costumes rather than the individuals themselves’.64 In my close examination of this drawing, I observed a linear progression of forms from left to right, with the uniforms overlapping each other in some cases. Many of the abstracted shapes of the uniforms resembled those of dress forms or hangers, especially those seen in the figures of gendarme, cuirassier and larbin.65 This work in many ways brings to mind the intersecting forms of the tissue papers included in dressmaking journals with the dots, numbering system and layout of connecting lines. There was also evidence that Duchamp erased one part of this work in the upper-right-hand corner so vigorously that it made a hole in the paper, suggesting that he laboured for some time over this work. These marks are not visible in reproductions of this work in books or on the museum’s online catalogue and reflect the material traces of his hand that are only visible when studying this drawing in person. In the 1914 version of this work, Cimetière des uniformes et livrées, No. 2 / Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, No. 2 [The Bachelors and Nine Malic Moulds], the uniforms are blocked in as shapes with the addition of watercolour that recalls the colour of pattern paper (Figure 1.10). White lines run horizontally and vertically through the malic moulds like the markings for seam lines. In this version, Duchamp has added the uniform for a stationmaster to the grouping. Uniforms mark group identity with visual codes that signal membership within that group through subtle differences in cut, colour and embellishment that demarcate differences in role, authority and status. Duchamp’s uniforms convey the professions of the average man rather than that of doctor, lawyer or gentleman. However, the choice of professions is not as significant as the fact that, in this work, the artist continues his exploration of uniforms as a signifier of male identity. In Jennifer Craik’s survey and analysis of the history and cultural politics of the uniform, she traces the origin of the uniform to the battlefields of the seventeenth century and notes this symbol of collective military presence evolved to define norms of masculinity, in that there is ‘a close fit between the attributes of masculinity as inscribed by uniform conduct and normative masculine roles and attributes’.66 Craik asserts that men’s uniforms serve not only to convey ‘authority, status, and

37

Figure 1.10  Marcel Duchamp, Cimetière des uniformes et livrées, No. 2 / Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (No. 2) [The Bachelors and Nine Malic Moulds], 1914. Yale University Art Gallery. Image in public domain.

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power’ through a unified visual aesthetic, but also present men as sex objects in a ‘heady alignment of heroism, muscularity, sexual prowess, and titillation’.67 An example of this type of erotic titillation is the tight white doeskin trousers worn as part of the French naval and military uniforms of the early 1800s, which served to draw attention to the crotch, creating a ‘sexually explicit display of men’s bodies’.68 Quentin Bell reiterates the undeniable eroticism of a man in uniform in his comment that ‘There is a good deal of evidence to show that a handsome uniform exerts a devastating effect upon the opposite sex’69 and, by extension, also sometimes upon the same sex. With the man in uniform a recognizable symbol of sexual allure, Duchamp does not need to include details that would distinguish one uniform from another in his erotic machine for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. The uniforms are rendered as abstracted shapes like lifeless empty skins or moulds. Many years later, Duchamp indicated that these shapes ‘represent nine moulds or nine external containers of the mouldings of nine different uniforms or liveries. In other words, you can’t see the actual form of the policeman or the bellboy or the undertaker because each of these precise forms of uniforms is inside its particular mould’.70 With this statement, Duchamp acknowledges the subtle markers of difference in uniform for the professions but admits that he made a deliberate artistic choice in not including such details. Duchamp scholars have previously taken notice of the links to clothing in the preparatory drawings for The Bride Stripped Bare, Even, but these statements are made as passing references in discussing other aspects of the artist’s work. Lebel noted the visual resemblance of these forms to clothes hanging on a laundry line, reading them as representations of bridegrooms ‘whom you see stuffed into their wedding garments’ before being ‘inflated with illuminating gas’.71 Sanouillet commented on the ‘eerie appearance’ of the empty uniforms and notes their visual resemblance to a retail display of sportswear mounted on dress forms.72 Joseph Maschek interpreted Duchamp’s figures in uniform in this work as a form of readymade, since a man wearing a uniform is an abstracted figure and thus ‘an interchangeable representative of a type, a man with a ready-made identity’.73 While there has been some recognition of the fact that Duchamp took notice of the dressed body within the visual culture of the period, I offer a further observation. By harnessing the power of his imagination to reinterpret the ways that the clothed body was presented in the real world into abstracted forms within his artwork as well as co-opting the meaning of readymade clothing into the lexicon of art, Duchamp was beginning the process by which he would come to redefine the notion of art itself.

Jacquette and Other Mimetic Works Drawing Duchamp

The marks or scribbles made by Duchamp on a reproduction postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to create his rectified readymade L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) are the hallmarks of drawing.74 In adding a moustache and goatee onto this iconic portrait, Duchamp transformed a woman into a man with a few strokes of his pencil. These marks serve as evidence of his continuing preoccupation with the markers of gender, even though he claimed to have not realized it at the time. He later noted, ‘The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at it the Mona Lisa becomes a man. It is not a woman as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery’.75

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Dressing and Undressing Duchamp 40

Despite his repeated assertion that he had given up art for chess, Duchamp continued to draw, making preparatory studies, portraits and other works.76 In 1956, Duchamp was invited by Alfred A. Knopf to submit an illustration for the cover of Modern Art US, a book written by music and art critic Rudi Blesh (1899–1985) that would feature Duchamp’s infamous 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) in its survey of America’s contemporary painting scene. Duchamp’s proposed book cover illustration Jacquette / Jacket (1956) consisted of pen-and-ink drawings on translucent paper, illustrating the front, back and lining of a man’s tailcoat.77 In the drawing, the tailcoat is shown with one side open as if the coat were being put on, making visible the checked pattern of the lining and the tailor’s label ‘Marcel Duchamp’ at the neckline. Unlike the shapeless, abstracted uniforms in Nine Malic Moulds and The Bride Stripped Bare, this tailcoat is rendered with a high degree of precision and includes the details of the seams that shape the coat.78 The drawing illustrates close knowledge of how this type of garment would have been constructed and the work might even be read like a technical drawing for construction in its conception as three separate sheets of transparent paper. Intended by Duchamp as a pun on the similarity between English ‘jacket’ (dust-wrapper) and the French ‘jacquette’ (tailcoat), the submission was turned down by publisher Alfred A. Knopf who considered it ‘a bad joke’.79 In the drawing Jacquette, like his drawing Singer in Evening Dress (see Figure 1.1), Duchamp signalled his intimate knowledge of the codes of men’s formal dress. A tailcoat such as this would have been worn with a wing-collared shirt, white bow tie and corresponding white waistcoat.80 In the 1950s, this white-tie ensemble was reserved for the most formal of occasions like society weddings, balls or state funerals.81 However, in Duchamp’s drawing of the tailcoat in Jacquette, the waist is markedly tapered in a manner that would draw attention to the figure, perhaps suggesting that Duchamp wanted to signal that this tailcoat could be worn by either man or woman, as Marlene Dietrich did for the film Morocco in 1930. In creating a drawing from his imagination, Duchamp reveals something of himself – not only his knowledge of the nuances of dress codes but also the power of clothing to conceal or reveal gender. In the last two years of his life, Duchamp turned to etching and made a series published by Arturo Schwarz called The Lovers (1967–1968).82 The nine etchings in the series are erotic in content, illustrating nude females and heterosexual nude couples before, during and after coitus. With titles and imagery that reference works by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), Auguste Rodin (1840– 1917), Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) and Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), Duchamp placed himself amongst these canonical figures of art history by including in this series of nine at least two explicit references to his works The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and also The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes. The figures are rendered in relatively few lines, which show the artist’s self-assurance and consummate skill, but which also serve to heighten the sense of poignancy. Drawing, ‘with each stroke, re-enacts desire and loss’, as Michael Newman observes, since its ‘peculiar mode of being lies between the withdrawal of the trace in the mark and the presence of the idea that it prefigures’.83 The bodies in this series are undressed and reaffirm Duchamp’s lifelong interest in representing the body and in articulating gender. The women in this series have soft curves and the men are trim and angular, like Duchamp himself. In her study of the relationship between nudity and pictorial representations in Western art, Anne Hollander argues that artists have throughout history depicted

Figure 1.11  Marcel Duchamp, Morceaux choisis d’après Cranach et ‘Relâche’, 1968, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Alexina Duchamp, 1969, 1969-97-1(1). © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

Drawing Duchamp

the nude body in a manner that conforms to the beauty ideals of the time, such that ‘Clothes, even when omitted cannot be escaped’.84 She provides numerous examples of artworks to show that the ‘erotic awareness of the body always contains an awareness of clothing’.85 In Morceaux choisis d’après Cranach et ‘Relâche’ (1968) illustrated in Figure 1.11, Duchamp recalls his performance in 1924 when he and actress Bronja Perlmutter posed in the nude as Adam and Eve.86 In this etching and in others like Selected Pieces from Rodin, Selected Details after Ingres I, Selected Details after Ingres II and Après l’amour, Duchamp draws his own body as lean, angular and youthful. In these works, Duchamp’s rendering of the male body seems to be an encounter with his idealized (and younger) self, signalling a desire to capture what has been lost. When he created these drawings, he was an old man. As Sarah Casey notes, drawing is not only ‘enmeshed with desire’ but is also an attempt to mitigate loss, a material effort to capture ‘something that feels beyond, in an attempt to preserve the ephemeral’.87 In these final works in the last years of his life, Duchamp returns to figurative imagery to articulate ideas of love and loss. In this chapter, as I have shown, it is in his drawings that Duchamp reveals a sustained and lifelong focus on the fashioned body. In Duchamp’s early mimetic drawings, he exposes himself as a

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perceptive observer of the fashioned body, social norms and dress codes. In his early abstracted works of uniforms and liveries, the processes of his imagination are revealed in his ongoing exploration of identity, including gender crossing. In his later life drawings, he revisits the tailcoat and exposes his desire to be included amongst the leading figures of art history. Although Duchamp dismissed what he called ‘retinal art’ in his artistic career, his drawings reveal his hand and imagination at work and provide significant evidence of his fascination with the body as well as a profound cognizance of the role of dress in signifying or disguising gender. The significance of this will become apparent in the chapters that follow.

Notes

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

1 2 3 4 5

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Duchamp quoted in Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, 30. Duchamp quoted in Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 22. Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, 22–23. Ibid., 27. Schwarz notes that between 1908 and 1910 Duchamp published at least thirteen drawings in Le Courrier Français, three drawings in Le Rire, and one drawing in Le Témoin. Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenbridge Editions, 2000), 4. 6 Adrianna Ionascu and Doris Rohr, ‘Drawing Now’, Drawing Research, Theory, Practice 1 (2016): 3. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 Deanna Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 10. 9 This is not meant to be a comprehensive listing of Duchamp’s drawings, but rather a representative sample documenting the artist’s sustained use of drawing as a medium of expression throughout his lifetime. 10 David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 330. 11 Peter Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture (New York: Routledge, 2017), 27. 12 Ibid., 28. 13 Ingrid Mida, ‘The Curator’s Sketchbook: Reflections on Learning to See’, Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice 2, no. 2 (2017): 275–285. See also Ingrid E. Mida, ‘The Slow Approach to Seeing’, in Reading Fashion in Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 40–53. 14 Schwarz, The Complete Works, 462–488. 15 See Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp: 66 Creative Years. From the First Painting to the Last Drawing (Milan: Gallery Schwarz, 1972), 11–13. This catalogue includes five studies of women’s hats dated to 1904–1905: Study of Woman’s Hat; Woman’s Head with Hat; Woman’s Silhouette with Hat; Woman with Hat over the Eye; Woman’s Head with Large Hat. Like the drawings of men in uniform, these sketches are rendered quickly in conté pencil with relatively few lines. All are signed with the initials M.D. 16 Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, 24. 17 Barbara Vinken, ‘Tranvesty – Travesty: Fashion and Gender’, Fashion Theory 3, no.1 (1999): 36. 18 These drawings can be seen in Schwarz, The Complete Works, 472–486.

Drawing Duchamp

19 Mida, ‘The Curator’s Sketchbook: Reflections on Learning to See’, 283. 20 For a philosophical analysis of the process of touching-not touching when drawing, see Sarah Casey, ‘A Delicate Presence: The Queer Intimacy of Drawing’, Tracey | Journal Drawing in-Situ (July 2016): 1–9. 21 Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing, 4. 22 John Berger, ‘Drawing is Discovery’, New Statesman and Nation 46 (August 29, 1953): 232. 23 Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2008), 381. 24 Barbara Bolt, ‘Materializing Pedagogies’, Working Papers in Art and Design 4 (2006): 5. 25 Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing,12. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 The analysis by Schwarz quotes heavily from the unpublished PhD dissertation by Michel DurandDessert, Duchamp m’harcèle: Contribution à une archéologie de Marcel Duchamp (1975). In the extracts included in Schwarz’s catalogue raisonné, it is evident that Durand-Dessert focused on the theme of eroticism in the drawings. See Schwarz, The Complete Works, 4–7. 29 Francis M. Naumann, ‘Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites’, in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 46. 30 James Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 220. 31 François Baudot, Fashion, The Twentieth Century, trans. Jane Brenton (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 56. 32 Laver, Costume and Fashion, 220. 33 As James Laver notes in his analysis of this period, this silhouette began to be less pronounced in the latter part of 1908 and, while the bust was still prominent, it was no longer ‘thrust quite so far forward, nor the hips so far back’. Although some designers like Poiret experimented with highwaisted gowns for evening wear, it would take about two years before the marked shift to a much narrower silhouette in women’s fashions would be widely adopted. See Laver, Costume and Fashion, 213–253. 34 Schwarz, The Complete Works, 510. 35 See ibid., 541. 36 For a detailed accounting of the changes in rituals of chaperonage as they relate to class during this period, see Cas Woulters, Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West 1890–2000 (London: Sage Publications, 2004). 37 In his essay The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire identified the perfect flâneur as a man who wandered the streets as an acute observer of modern life. See Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2010), 9. Walter Benjamin extended this idea in his writings to identify the flâneur as an archetype of modernity. 38 See Untitled with the caption ‘Ce que t’es long à te peigner. / – La critique est aisé, mais la raie difficile’ [It always takes you so long to comb your hair – It’s easy to criticize but parting hair is difficult], 1909 published in Le Rire (Paris), no. 392 (6 August 1910). In this image, the woman wears a walking suit with a narrow skirt, reflecting this shift in fashion. Although the illustration has been lost, an image is included in Schwarz, The Complete Works, 521. 39 Michel Sanouillet, ‘Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition’, in Marcel Duchamp, ed. d’Harnoncourt and McShine, 53.

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Dressing and Undressing Duchamp 44

40 Ibid., 54. 41 The main difference between the two drawings is in the orientation (horizontal/vertical) and in the specificity of the background. The orientation of Informations is horizontal and the background of this drawing is more abstracted. 42 These drawings are held in private collections. See Schwarz, The Complete Works, 497. 43 The type of footwear rendered by Duchamp is very much like a woman’s Oxford shoe with its distinctly feminine bow illustrated in an ad printed in Vogue in June 1908 for women’s summer Oxfords made by the Regal Shoe Company (See Advertisement: Regal Shoe Company, Vogue (New York) 31, no. 23 (June 4, 1908): C4. 44 See Schwarz, The Complete Works, 509. Duchamp’s drawing includes an inscription and signature. Duchamp’s drawing Young Man is held in a private collection. 45 See Schwarz, The Complete Works, 523. Duchamp’s drawing includes an inscription and signature. Duchamp’s drawing Young Man Standing is held in a private collection. 46 D’Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 243. 47 This law, which had been in place since the French Revolution, was modified in 1909 to allow women to wear trousers if riding a bicycle or a horse but was not repealed until 31 January 2013. See Devorah Lauter, ‘Women in Paris finally allowed to wear trousers’, The Telegraph, 3 February 2013. 48 Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion (New York: Berg, 2006), 165. 49 Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 29. 50 Ibid., 56–57. 51 Ibid., 33. 52 Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1975), 13. 53 See Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp: 66 Creative Years. From the First Painting to the Last Drawing (Milan: Gallery Schwarz, 1972), 16–18. Other sketches rendered by Duchamp in 1910 include: Man Standing; Woman Bending Forward; Woman Fastening her Garter; Study of a Woman; Man Sitting and Smoking; Seated Woman, in Profile; Woman in Profile; Seated Man; Germaine, Posing; Standing Nude. 54 This drawing can be accessed online. See Marcel Duchamp, The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes (1912), Graphite on Japanese Laid Paper. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object #1950-134-61. 55 Duchamp quoted in Katherine Kuh, ‘Marcel Duchamp’, in The Artist’s Voice, Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 83. 56 Nigel Thomas quoted in Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean, 17. 57 Ibid. 58 Charles Baudelaire quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 285. Ellipses added. 59 Crowther, What Drawing and Painting Really Mean, 23. 60 Ibid., 27. 61 Schwarz, The Complete Works, 574–575. 62 Ibid., 574. 63 This drawing is accessible online; see Marcel Duchamp, Cimetière des uniformes et livrées, No. 1 / Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries No. 1 (1913), Graphite on Tracing Paper. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object #1950-134-66. See also Schwarz, The Complete Works, 583. 64 Bradley Bailey, ‘The Bachelors: Pawns in Duchamp’s Great Game’, Toutfait.com: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal.

Drawing Duchamp

65 The shapes rendered by Duchamp in his Studies for the Bachelors in the Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries No. 7 (1913) resemble headless dress forms used to drape clothing. This study, which is in a private collection, can be seen in Schwarz, The Complete Works, 590. 66 Jennifer Craik, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Uniform’, Fashion Theory 7, no. 2 (2003): 130. 67 Ibid., 134. 68 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 228. 69 Quentin Bell, On Human Finery (New York: Shocken Books, 1976), 43. 70 Marcel Duchamp quoted in d’Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 277. 71 Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 31. 72 Sanouillet, ‘Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition’, 53. 73 In his essay ‘Chance is Zee Fool’s Name for Fait’, Maschek takes notice of, but does not analyse, the link between the origin of the word readymade and off-the-rack clothing. Joseph Masheck (ed.), Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1975), 16. 74 The original of this work was lost and a replica was made in 1930. The replica is in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (Inv. AM2005-DEP2). Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. has been reproduced in many exhibition catalogues including the cover of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (The Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973). 75 Schwarz, The Complete Works, 670. 76 Figurative drawings by Duchamp from this period include, for example: Portrait of Florine Stettheimer (1926), The King Checked by the Queen (1932), Study for the Knight, Queen, and King of the ‘Pocket Chess Set’ (1943), Étant donnés: Maria, la chute d’eau et le gaz d’eclairage (1947), Reflection à Main (1948), L’Ombre sans Cavalier (1949), Drawing for the Bookplate of the Mary Reynolds Collection (1951). 77 This work is typically printed as if it were a single image, but it is actually made up of three separate sheets of transparent paper. This pen-and-ink drawing is in a private collection. See Schwarz, The Complete Works, 807. See also Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 176 for a large and clear image of this work. 78 There is a preliminary study of this tailcoat that includes numbered grid lines in pencil, indicating the degree of care and precision with which Duchamp rendered this illustration. See Schwarz, The Complete Works, 806. 79 Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 176. The cover was illustrated by Paul Rand. 80 See a similar ensemble from 1927 by Jeanne Lanvin in the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Object #2009.300.906 A-F. 81 Unless an occasion demanded white tie, by 1955 most men were wearing black tie or the tuxedo to formal occasions. See Robin Dutt, ‘Formal Wear, Men’s’, in The Berg Companion to Fashion, ed. Valerie Steele (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 349–351. 82 Schwarz, The Complete Works, 872–886. 83 Michael Newman quoted in Emma Dexler, ‘Introduction: To Draw is to be Human’, in Vitamin D: New Perspectives on Drawing (New York: Phaidon Press, 2005), 7. 84 Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, 87. 85 Ibid. 86 Man Ray took a photo of the pair titled Ciné-Sketch: Adam Eve which can be seen in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object #2001-62-784. 87 Casey, ‘A Delicate Presence’, 3–4.

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Dressing Duchamp: Unmasking the Dandy

2

You’re on stage, you show off your goods; right then you become an actor. –Marcel Duchamp1

Figure 2.1  Irving Penn, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1948. © The Irving Penn Foundation.

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp 48

Clothing is a form of non-verbal communication that communicates aspects of our identity to the outside world. What we choose to wear on any given day acts as a visual metaphor for our identity and also signals our desire to belong to ‘particular communities and expresses shared values, ideas and lifestyle’.2 Even if we profess to have no interest in clothing or fashion, no one can escape its parameters. As Georg Simmel points out: ‘The man who consciously pays no heed to fashion accepts its form just as much as the dude does, only he embodies it in another category, the former in that of exaggeration, the latter in that of negation’.3 Fashion is manifest to the social experience, such that ‘the cloak of fashion’ can serve as ‘a sort of mask’ that can be manipulated to conceal or reveal one’s self.4 In the ordinary act of dressing, we negotiate the self we wish to present to the world in aesthetic terms, signalling clues to our identity through choices of clothing, accessories, makeup, scent and the styling of hair and the body. And although these clues are often subtle and sometimes ambiguous, the codes and signals of class, gender and cultural identity are articulated by social agreement as well as the workings of power and ideology, such that dressing becomes, as Joanne Finkelstein writes, ‘a way of producing ourselves; it is a symbolic replay of the birth of subjectivity’.5 Clothing becomes a boundary between the inner and outer self that must be navigated in relation to the particular social circumstances in which we find ourselves. And when dressing for the camera, we become acutely aware of our clothing choices, so that we can appear in a manner that we want the world to see and remember. Marcel Duchamp was the subject of many portraits during the course of his life, allowing us to reflect on his presentation of self in dressing for the camera. We can call up many such images on a screen and easily magnify details that might not have been evident when the images were first printed or published in the pages of a newspaper or magazine.6 Although much attention has been devoted to Duchamp’s dressing as his alter ego Rose/Rrose Sélavy in the images that were circulated within his avant-garde circle, little notice has been given to his manner of dressing for portraits that circulated in the public realm. For many of these formal portraits, including his portrait by Irving Penn in 1948 (Figure 2.1), Duchamp adopted the uniform of masculine power – the tailored suit. In this chapter, I explore Marcel Duchamp’s selection of clothing in his presentation of self through the medium of photography with a close reading of the formal portraits created for publication in magazines like Vanity Fair and Time Magazine; this analysis is supplemented with other material including traces of his wardrobe practices collected by the artist Joseph Cornell in Duchamp Dossier (1942–1953). I will paint a picture of a man who was fully aware of the transformative power of clothing. In Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes observes that the photograph comes into being through a collaborative process between the photographer in concert with the person being photographed, since the knowledge that the camera lens is directed their way changes the experience and makes them an active participant in the construction of the image. Barthes is self-reflective about his experience and notes that ‘once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’.7 In performing for the camera, Barthes observes that this process serves to make the photograph a type of mirror that can reveal multiple selves; he writes: For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. … In front of the lens, I am the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.8

Barthes describes the work of being photographed as a form of negotiation – between sitter and self and also between sitter and photographer. In analysing photographs of Duchamp published in the mass media, it becomes evident that Duchamp was not only aware of performing for the camera but also fashioned his body to convey a persona that he wished to present to the public. And although Duchamp might not have had control over the setting, lighting, printing and circulation of portraits taken by photographers for publication in newspapers or periodicals, he would certainly have had agency over his clothing choices. For that reason, I argue that what the artist offered to the camera was what he wanted the viewer to see at that moment in time. In the portrait sittings with photographers working for Vanity Fair and other publications, Duchamp did not fashion himself as a ‘bohemian’ artist with dishevelled hair and unkempt beard, wearing an artist’s smock or rumpled jacket; instead, he typically dressed conservatively in a tailored suit and tie, with neat hair and a clean-shaven visage. As we shall see, in these formal portrait sittings, his selection of suit and tie emulated the fashionable codes of dress for American businessmen. This chapter takes a close look at photographic portraits of Duchamp that span the period 1915– 1965 and that were commissioned as formal portraits for publication in mainstream print media.9 The images, considered representative of the artist’s public persona, include a portrait by the Pach Brothers celebrating Duchamp’s first trip to New York in 1915 and published in Vanity Fair; a newspaper photograph taken dockside in 1927 before Duchamp embarked on a trans-Atlantic crossing; a formal portrait taken by Lusha Nelson and published in Vanity Fair in 1934; a photograph taken in 1948 by celebrated Vogue fashion photographer Irving Penn; and a portrait photograph taken by David Gahr and published in Time Magazine in 1965. These selections, which are emblematic of the public persona of the artist circulating in magazines and newspapers over the course of his life, contradict, in part, Duchamp’s claim that he was not interested in fame or celebrity. It is clear that he posed for the camera, constructing his image and perhaps hoping that he would, to apply the words of Barthes, ‘metaphorically derive his existence from the making of the image with the photographer’.10 In doing so, Duchamp would also have had to negotiate which persona he wanted to display to the camera in the manner that Barthes suggests: ‘the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art’.11 As we shall see with this selection of images, Duchamp’s face ages over the span of fifty years, but his slender body, erect posture and elegant countenance remain the same. In this chapter, Duchamp is unmasked as a dandy.

Duchamp as Dandy Dressing Duchamp

Not long after he arrived in New York in 1915, the journal Arts and Decoration observed that Duchamp had ‘a figure that would seem American even among Americans’ and that he ‘neither talks, nor looks, nor acts like an artist’.12 Duchamp’s elegant figure, manner and attitude of indifference are the hallmarks of the Baudelairian dandy who has a ‘burning need’ to present himself as an original.13 The French novelist and critic Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–1889) observed that dandyism is ‘almost as difficult a thing to describe as it is to define’ and although it encompasses the art of dress, it is more

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Dressing and Undressing Duchamp 50

than that in encompassing ‘a complete theory of life’.14 In contemporary lexicon, the word ‘dandy’ is often used to describe a man who is zealously devoted to sartorial matters, including the careful management of his wardrobe, attention to his body and presentation of self.15 Duchamp’s obsessive focus on his body is little remarked upon, even though he was known to epilate his entire body and insist that his partners do the same.16 He maintained a slender physique throughout his life, and evidence of his weight consciousness appears in several letters to friends and family where he comments on his weight gain.17 The acute attention to dress and management of the body by a male has often been linked to themes of gender play and a queering of identity, such that ‘dandyism may even be perceived as a queer style, one that resists definition, blurs boundaries and specifically plays with gender and its association with sexuality’.18 Such gender play and fluid expressions of gender do not necessarily equate to homosexual identity or homosexual desire, although, as Karlie Cerankowski cautions: ‘today, the sexuality of genderqueer dandies is often speculated on and interpreted as gay’ even though the ‘dandy male can be heterosexual’.19 Duchamp’s affinity for gender play asks us to revisit the figure of the dandy.20 Although the British socialite Beau Brummel (1778–1840) is credited as the originator of the philosophy of dandyism,21 it was the nineteenth-century poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), sometimes referred to as ‘Monseigneur Brummel’ by his friends,22 who fully articulated the characteristics of the dandy in his 1863 manifesto on modernity The Painter of Modern Life.23 In Baudelaire’s essay, the ideal dandy ‘did not aspire to money’ and seemed to have no other profession than the pursuit of elegance.24 Baudelaire’s dandy acknowledged the communicative power of clothing in conveying elegance, while presenting an attitude of being blasé about his perceptive attention to such details. In this way, the dandy would perform this act of feigning indifference to fashion, while actually paying supreme attention to it. Baudelaire recommended that dandies seek perfection in appearance through ‘absolute simplicity’ as a means of achieving distinction.25 In 1863, when Baudelaire penned his treatise for publication in Le Figaro, simplicity in men’s dress reflected a shift in attitude at the end of the eighteenth century when men cast off the wearing of highly ornamented and colourful garments, makeup and high heels, and instead adopted a sober look characterized by the tailored two-piece or three-piece suit rendered in dark coloured wool.26 As Barbara Vinken explains, this renunciation aligned with the rise of the bourgeois in that ‘the boundary that constitutes society no longer divides the noble from the non-noble, but rather the feminine from the masculine’, such that masculinity became associated with authenticity and femininity became associated with frivolity and artifice.27 Vinken further argues that this association is paradoxical in that the aesthetic representation of ideal femininity actually signifies man in its binary opposition and it is in this way that the dandy disrupts this binary and offers a ‘protest against the authenticity of the bourgeois collective of men’.28 Her analysis suggests a subversive element to the dandy’s guise that is independent of his gender identity. In ‘“Clothes Make the Man”: The Male Artist as a Performative Function’, Amelia Jones looks at the clothing choices of nine male artists/dandies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: namely, Théophile Gautier, Eugène Delacroix, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, Chris Burden and Jeff Koons.29 In her essay, Jones identifies two primary strategies of dressing in the performance of the male artist/dandy: the ‘messy creative’ artist

The admirable beauty of the face imposes itself through no striking detail, and likewise, anything one can say to the man is shattered against a polished plaque that discloses nothing of what takes place in the depths; and those laughing eyes, without irony, without indulgence, that dispel the slightest

Dressing Duchamp

embraced wild hair, a scruffy beard and the painter’s smock or rumpled jacket as visible signifiers of creativity, while the ‘aristocrat of culture’ donned the impeccably tailored dark suit that concealed their creative labour in a more refined manner.30 This distinction is useful and one that I will borrow in analysing Duchamp’s strategy in dressing for portraits that circulated in the mass media. In identifying Duchamp as a dandy, I use the term to describe a man who did not aspire to money but conveyed an attitude of elegant indifference while harnessing clothing as a tool of identity construction. In focusing on clothing as an aesthetic manifestation of identity and in identifying specific garments worn by Duchamp for formal portraits, I take up an unexplored line of inquiry. These images, which are in sharp contrast to his alter ego Rose/Rrose Sélavy, have been little explored, even though they have been used to illustrate some of the covers of books dedicated to Duchamp. In the formal portraits of Duchamp dressed in a tailored suit, he embodies Baudelaire’s dandy in ‘his lightness of step, his social aplomb, the simplicity in his air of authority, his way of wearing a coat … his bodily attitudes which are always relaxed but betray an inner energy’.31 For this man, this dandy, the ‘graceful and the formidable are so mysteriously blended’ that one cannot help but ‘think: “A rich man perhaps, but more likely an out-of-work Hercules!”’32 In wearing the uniform of masculine power, a tailored suit, Duchamp could pass for a businessman and thereby conceal his artistic endeavours to perpetuate the myth that he had given up art for chess.33 In the 1959 catalogue Marcel Duchamp, Robert Lebel comments on Duchamp’s unusual physical beauty as well as his demeanour of detachment, taking note that he ‘does not like to be called an artist’.34 Lebel also notes that this air of indifference was often commented upon by Duchamp’s friends and colleagues, and writes: ‘One of his contemporaries, still under his spell, applied to him these lines from La Princesse de Clèves: “such an air about him that he alone was looked at wherever he appeared.”’35 In analysing Duchamp’s professed ambivalence, Lebel reads his attitude as a performance: ‘Duchamp has always been keenly sensitive to what underlies his attitude and he even seems to have had access to a superior form of consciousness’.36 Others have also remarked on Duchamp’s attitude of detachment, including Pierre de Massot who described Duchamp as possessing ‘that admirable profile of a purity without equal, that sovereign elegance in clothing, gestures and speaking, that kind of haughty dandyism that tempered the most exquisite politeness’.37 Kynaston McShine observed that Duchamp projected the elegant indifference of the Baudelairian dandy that served his ‘striving for a higher freedom, questioning the very purpose of art – the ultimate in artistic ambition’.38 Duchamp’s physical beauty appealed to both men and women and was often remarked upon.39 Although he was described in the ship manifest from 1915 as: ‘Marcel Henri Duchamp, age 28 [sic], single, artist painter, 5' 10" tall, fair complexion, brown hair, chestnut eyes, citizen of France’, Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann notes that this report does not include the ‘two words that inevitably came to mind when people met the man himself: “handsome” and “charming.”’40 André Breton (1896–1966), the temperamental leader of the Surrealist movement, described Duchamp’s elegant detachment and physical beauty thus:

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shadow of concentration and reveal the solicitude of the man to preserve a perfectly amiable exterior; elegance in its most fatal quality, that goes beyond elegance, a truly supreme ease.41

This air of detachment in concert with physical beauty is the hallmark of Baudelaire’s dandy, in that ‘The distinguishing characteristic of the dandy’s beauty consists above all in an air of coldness which comes from an unshakeable determination not to be moved’.42 And while Duchamp repeatedly expressed indifference to the opinions of others, he took care in how he dressed for public appearances. In the myriad images of Duchamp that can be found in museum collections, in books and on the internet, his gaze is direct and confident. If he smiles, it is with the smallest upturn of his lips. In every case, there is the feeling that he is holding back with no desire to share his real self. Joanne Finkelstein equates the construction of identity to a performance and writes: Identity then is a fiction insofar as it does not exist as a stable category but is better thought of as a manner of thinking. We are actors, good actors, and we learn how to convince others of specific interpretations. Identity is a performance, a mask and role that can be executed with self-conscious purpose. It is not the case that the mask conceals a true identity within. Rather all social activities involve us in the production of an identity that fits the occasion.43

In his public persona, Duchamp performed the role of the elegant gentleman, donning the uniform of masculine power, while embodying the indifference of Baudelaire’s dandy. Although this aspect of his persona markedly differs from the gender crossing and other masquerades that he adopted within avant-garde circles (the focus of the next chapter), it also reveals his simultaneous engagement with sartorial self-performance. Duchamp is thus unmasked as a dandy.

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

The 1915 Studio Portrait by the Pach Brothers

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Not long after Duchamp arrived in New York for the first time on 15 June 1915, the artist was photographed for the September issue of Vanity Fair. The magazine had been launched the previous year under the stewardship of editor Frank Crowninshield, who had helped organize the landmark Armory Show that included Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase.44 Aimed at the fashionable elite of American society, Vanity Fair described itself as several magazines in one, in that it covered the theatre, sport, books and contemporary art as well as fashion.45 The tone of the magazine is ‘cheerful’ in watching ‘the procession’ and ‘tendencies of American life good-naturedly, tolerantly and amusingly’.46 For his formal studio portrait by the Pach Brothers (Figure 2.2), Duchamp dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark three-piece suit with a fashionable polka-dot bow tie and matching pocket square. Notably, Duchamp’s choice of shirt and bow tie in 1915 are very similar to those shown elsewhere in the magazine that year.47 As Naumann observes, Duchamp is ‘exceptionally well dressed’ in this photo, appearing more ‘like a serious scientist rather than the disheveled painter’.48

Figure 2.2  Pach Brothers, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1915. Courtesy of Condé Nast.

The article about Duchamp in Vanity Fair begins with the wry statement: ‘MARCEL DUCHAMP has arrived in New York! You don’t know him? Impossible! Why, he painted the “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a painting which made such a turmoil here a couple of years ago’.49 In the accompanying photo, Duchamp’s gaze is direct, and he is unsmiling. Juxtaposed against the ironic text, his countenance suggests an air of elegant detachment. The text reads:

This passage clearly conveys Duchamp’s lack of interest in the opinions of others, a notable characteristic of Baudelaire’s dandy who used his indifference as evidence of ‘his aristocratic superiority of mind’.51 Duchamp does not care to be labelled as a follower of Cubism or any other

Dressing Duchamp

He [Duchamp] speaks English like an Englishman; has an insatiable curiosity about everything in New York, from Coney Island to the Metropolitan Museum; is completely without affectation and is much more interested in hearing the opinions of other people than in expressing his own … When you ask him if he is a Cubist, or a This, or a That, he says simply that he is a painter, trying to express his ideas in his own way. The tags and definitions, and names of schools, have, he says, all been invented and applied by outsiders, and the poor artists are not to be blamed if they are card indexed and thrust into pigeonholes by those who talk about them.50

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Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

stylistic path; he forges his own path by expressing his ideas ‘in his own way’.52 And yet his dress conforms to fashionable norms, thus allowing him to aesthetically blend in with the readers of the magazine, the elite of New York society. As a reporter for Arts and Decoration observed about Duchamp after his arrival in New York, the artist did not dress in clothing that would mark him as an ‘artist’ or as ‘foreign’.53 Rather than wearing an artist’s smock to signify ‘painter’ or a beret to signify ‘French’, he chose instead to wear a tailored dark suit suitable for a businessman. His fashionable dress was also noticed by a reporter for the New York Tribune who wrote that Duchamp ‘dresses most correctly in the mode and is quite handsome … One would take him for a well-groomed Englishman rather than a Frenchman’.54 In sitting for this photographic portrait, Duchamp presented himself as a gentleman, using his choice of dress as a signal of conformity to the era’s ideals of masculinity. By coincidence, the September 1915 issue of Vanity Fair also included an article on portrait likeness and Baudelaire. The author, Arthur Symons, wrote: ‘When we talk, currently, of a “good likeness,” we mean, for the most part, that a single, habitual expression, with which we are familiar, as we are familiar with a frequently worn suit of clothes has been rendered; that we see a man as we imagine ourselves ordinarily to see him’.55 Symons did not comment on Duchamp’s portrait printed in the issue but, as we shall see, the artist’s elegant dress and air of indifference would become Duchamp’s ‘single, habitual expression’. Duchamp’s good looks and elegant demeanour are consistent with an earlier portrait taken in 1912 by H. Hoffman, as well as a portrait of Duchamp taken several years later in 1917 by Edward Steichen.56 In a studio portrait photographed at the Broadway Photo Shop in New York City on 21 June 1917, Duchamp posed with his friends Francis Picabia and Beatrice Wood with a forest scene backdrop (Figure 2.3).57 While Picabia wore a light-coloured jacket suitable for summer weather, Duchamp dressed more formally in a dark jacket worn with grey trousers and a white waistcoat. Although it is possible that Duchamp borrowed this ensemble for the sitting, he chose to project a more formal countenance for this occasion, signalling his desire to be seen and remembered as an elegant man about town.58

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Figure 2.3  Photographer unknown, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Beatrice Wood, 1917. Getty I­mages / Photo12 / Universal Images Group.

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Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

1927 Portrait Dockside On 26 February 1927, Duchamp was photographed dockside (Figure 2.4). The next day the New York Times reported that Duchamp had sailed to Europe with fifteen sculptures by his friend Constantin Brâncuși that were ‘the subject of controversy when customs officials decided they were not art’.59 The controversy had arisen the previous fall, when Duchamp had arrived in New York with Brâncuși’s bronze sculptures for exhibitions in Chicago and New York;60 the sculptor’s abstracted sculptures of birds had been denied the status of artworks by federal customs officials since they did not closely resemble the natural form of a bird. Duchamp enlisted the aid of art critic Henry McBride (1867– 1962), and the authorities allowed the sculptures to pass ‘just so long as it was clear that those pieces remaining in the United States would be subject to a duty of 40%’ as utilitarian objects.61 Duchamp told the New York Times reporter that his leaving did ‘not mean that Brâncuși had abandoned his efforts to have his works admitted without duty. An appeal has been made which will ultimately be carried to Washington. To say that the sculpture of Brâncuși is not art is like saying an egg is not an egg’.62 In the 1928 trial of Brâncuși v. United States, Justice Waite heard the testimony of expert witnesses like Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield and photographer Alfred Stieglitz and ruled that the Bird in Space sculpture was a work of art.63 In sending a photographer to document Duchamp’s leaving, the newspaper signalled the importance of that trial and Duchamp’s role in it. As Susan Sontag observes, ‘picture-taking is an event in itself’ that marks an event as being worthy of record and confers a ‘kind of immortality (and importance) that it would never otherwise have enjoyed’.64 The photo of Duchamp in a fur coat was Joseph Masheck’s choice for the cover of the updated edition of Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (2002), a collection of essays by the likes of Jasper Johns, Clement Greenberg and John Cage on the topic of Duchamp. Although art historian Masheck, who served as editor, does not specifically comment on the photo, this usage underlines the historical significance of this particular construction of Duchamp. For this photo, Duchamp donned a luxurious fur coat with a deep shawl collar over his formal suit. He carried a homburg hat in his left hand while the other was thrust deep into the coat pocket. He leaned slightly to rest his body against the rail, with the weight of his body shifted onto one leg in a casual pose that conveys a confidently relaxed posture. His suit was made of fine wool, woven in a twill design overlaid with a windowpane accent colour, often sky blue, called glen plaid or glen check. This subtle and muted pattern was a favourite of the Duke of Windsor and also came to be known as the Prince of Wales check. This ensemble, the suit in Prince of Wales check topped with a lustrous fur coat, marks Duchamp as a highly fashionable man of the time, whose dress aligns with the affluent and intellectual elite. Both the fur coat and the suit were expensive garments to purchase, contradicting Duchamp’s claim of relative poverty throughout his career.65 Raccoon fur coats were wildly popular in the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, especially on Ivy League college campuses, but they were also worn by affluent men able to afford a price tag that equated to the cost of ‘a factory Figure 2.4  Photographer unknown, Artist Marcel Duchamp Wearing Fur Coat, New York City, February 26, 1927. Getty Images.

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new Ford roadster of 1927’.66 In this image, Duchamp posed for the photographer like a celebrity and conveyed swagger in his artful pose of nonchalance. He has a direct and confident gaze, with his brow slightly furrowed and his jaw set as if he is bored at the thought of embarking on yet another trans-Atlantic crossing.67 A few months later in June, Duchamp married French heiress Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor (1902–1988) after a whirlwind courtship orchestrated by his friend Germaine Everling (wife of Francis Picabia). During the church ceremony, Duchamp was photographed wearing an elegant and formal ensemble consisting of a morning coat, pin-striped trousers, a white shirt with light-coloured cravat, white gloves and highly polished shoes.68 Although the marriage was short and unhappy, SarazinLevassor gave a fulsome account of her relationship with Duchamp in her book A Marriage in Check. The Heart of the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor, Even. She recalled that in their initial meeting, she thought him ‘handsome, friendly, elegant’ but was struck by his ‘sober apparel: navy blue suit, pink-striped silk shirt, dark tie’.69 She wrote that she expected that he might have worn something more flamboyant: ‘I did not exactly expect him to turn up in a black velvet jacket with a looselytied bow and a hat like Aristide Bruant, but still … A little idiosyncrasy would not have surprised me’.70 In her account of the church and civil ceremony, Sarazin-Levassor provides fascinating insight into Duchamp’s sartorial preparations for the event in ordering suits and a morning coat from Auld Baillee, a Paris tailor also patronized by other members of the bride’s family: Marcel, wanting to do things properly, had ordered for the wedding one or two suits as well as the morning coat at Auld Baillee’s, a tailor of Scottish extraction who for a long time had had something of an industrial approach to his business. His clients would choose the material and style in Paris where measurements were taken. The suits were then cut and sewn in Scotland, and any adjustments would be made when they arrived in Paris. As soon as Marcel mentioned the name of his tailor, it was greeted with whoops of laughter, for it appeared that Auld Baillee must have made artists a specialty: my grandfather, the painter Léon Olivié, had patronized the establishment, as had my godfather, Wilhem Van Kempen, the perpetual student at the Grande Chaumiere Academy, and the sculptor Emmanual Moncel de Perrin, a cousin of mine by marriage, who has lots of pieces in Paris.71

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

This exceptionally rare account of Duchamp’s sartorial practices makes it clear that, despite his claims to indifference and relative poverty, he not only paid close attention to his dress when the occasion demanded it but clearly preferred bespoke suits over ready-to-wear.

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1934 Portrait of Duchamp by Lusha Nelson In July 1934, Duchamp made his third appearance in the pages of Vanity Fair.72 This time he was photographed by Lusha Nelson (1907–1938), a Condé Nast staff photographer who was known for his striking portraits of public figures for Vanity Fair and Vogue.73 Nelson’s black and white portraits of actors like Katherine Hepburn, athletes like Jesse Owens, artists like Edward Hopper and public figures like New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia create drama with bold interplays of light and shadow. Nelson utilized few props but gave thoughtful attention to what was needed to convey

the personality of the sitter in noting that ‘In the setting for a photograph, one tries to suggest the character of the person and a prepared background waiting for the sitter is a bit of flattery everybody appreciates’.74 In dealing with celebrities, Nelson observed that their public persona allowed him to prepare for the portrait sitting, since: ‘You know a great deal about a celebrity before he even enters the studio. You have some idea of what expression to try and get’.75 This sensitivity to his sitters’ needs and moods was useful in convincing ‘reluctant celebrities to visit his studio to have their portraits made’.76 Marcel Duchamp attended Nelson’s studio in late 1933 or early 1934 for this portrait.77 The sitting would have been orchestrated by Frank Crowninshield, the long-time editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. In Nelson’s portrait of the artist, Duchamp stands facing the camera, but his head is turned to the side. His arms are crossed over his chest and a lit cigarette pokes through the fingers of his right hand. The dark background – suggestive of a doorway – is slightly out of focus; the lighting is strong, angled downwards, creating distinct shadows and highlighting Duchamp’s head and neck. The portrait presents Duchamp as a distant and preoccupied figure. For this portrait, Duchamp dressed in a finely tailored dark wool suit with a crisp, light-coloured shirt and a plain, dark tie.78 His tailored suit fits close to his body and emphasizes his still-lean physique at age 47. Duchamp’s neatly trimmed hair is combed back from his forehead in a manner similar to that of actor Gary Cooper (seen in a portrait taken by Nelson and published in Vanity Fair the following year).79 A cropped version of Duchamp’s portrait appeared in Vanity Fair in July 1934 in a feature titled ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’ that also included author Patterson Dial, conductor Robert Russel Bennett, and economic adviser to the Secretary of Agriculture Mordecai Ezekiel. The caption about Duchamp reads: Marcel Duchamp, because his ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ exhibited first at the famous Armory show in 1913, centered popular American attention on modern art; because that painting still draws puzzled crowds at Chicago’s fair; because as an intimate friend of Brancusi’s he recently came to the United States to arrange an exhibition of that sculptor’s work; because his brother, Guillaume, was a noted sculptor; and because he himself, though still an artist, is now a ranking professional chess player.80

Although Duchamp is described in this caption as ‘still an artist’, he appears to be dressed as smartly as his fellow nominee for the Vanity Fair Hall of Fame, the economist Mordecai Ezekiel. These two men evoke the fashion advice offered to male readers of Vanity Fair that month, recommending suits of ‘a fine, pure wool, tropical worsted’ costing eighty-five dollars or a smart summer suit of gabardine costing eighty dollars.81 In Nelson’s portrait, Duchamp is dressed like a New York businessman.

On 30 April 1948, Irving Penn (1917–2009), a renowned American fashion photographer who worked for Vogue, photographed Duchamp in his studio (Figure 2.1). This was one of many black and white portraits photographed by Penn in 1947–1948 at the behest of Alexander Liberman, the art director of Vogue, as a body of work to ‘be drawn on for current and future publications’.82 Penn

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1948 Portrait of Duchamp by Irving Penn

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built a stark studio set that created a sharply angled corner that helped him keep ‘the picture’s space from running off at the edges’ of the magazine, but this confined corner also made some subjects, including Georgia O’Keeffe, somewhat uncomfortable.83 Nonetheless, Penn encouraged his sitters to improvise, allowing them to use props and pose as they wished, anticipating that this forced encounter would reveal something of the sitter ‘as they tried to accommodate their bodies, egos, and expectations to the structure’.84 Penn photographed notable figures from the arts for this series, including Truman Capote, Salvador Dalí, Oscar Hammerstein, Charles James, Georgia O’Keeffe, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jerome Robbins, Igor Stravinsky, Spencer Tracy and Marcel Duchamp. An invitation to Penn’s studio to partake in ‘these somber, soul-searching portraits’ was, according to Vogue editor Bettina Ballard, a ‘badge of success for the sitter, like going to the most fashionable analyst’.85 Each sitter negotiated the set their own way, with some bringing props like a chair, bench or carpet into the corner. For example, in posing for his portrait, Salvador Dalí sits on a bench covered in a carpet, leaning forward slightly with his elbows in the air and hands on his knees in a wide-legged seated posture, while fashion designer Charles James lay down on the floor beside a dress form draped in fabric.86 In his formal portrait by Penn, Duchamp casually leans against the two walls that create the narrow corner. He does not appear uncomfortable in this awkward space, but instead seems to emote wry amusement. He is dressed much like film star Spencer Tracy who was also photographed by Penn in 1948; they both wear a tailored dark grey wool double-breasted suit with a white shirt and dark tie.87 Duchamp adds a waistcoat and a wool scarf with grey horizontal stripes that is casually and unevenly draped around his shoulders as if he had just thrown on the scarf in the moments before the photo was taken. His black leather shoes are highly polished and the toe cap gleams. He holds a pipe in his hand, and he smiles ever so slightly with a direct gaze that expresses poise and self-assurance. He is one of the ‘chosen’ and, in dressing much like Spencer Tracy, aligns himself with the glamour of a celebrity. By this point in his life, it was at least several decades since he had claimed that he had given up art for chess, and in dressing this way, Duchamp perpetuates the myth that he is rich and idle. This photo also appeared on the cover of Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne (1971); given that Cabanne was someone who spent a great deal of time with the artist and observed his preference for pink shirts (as mentioned earlier), this placement suggests that the author recognized it as a portrait that represented the man in a manner that Sontag articulated as ‘the disclosure of the subject’s essence’.88 As both John Berger and Susan Sontag have argued, meaning in photographs is discovered over time and through the making of connections. The reading of this image by Penn is enhanced by traces of Duchamp’s careful attention to his dress that have survived in Joseph Cornell’s collection of objects and ephemera known as the Duchamp Dossier held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.89 Duchamp and Cornell were close friends, having met in 1933 at an exhibit of Brâncuși’s work organized by Duchamp and, as noted earlier, Cornell assisted Duchamp with the serial preparation of Box in a Valise. Walter Hopps, who knew both artists, argues that ‘no other artists in the first half of the twentieth century were as involved with employing or assembling everyday objects for the purposes of art’.90 After Cornell’s death in 1972, Hopps found a lavender-blue cardboard box with Duchamp written on the lid in pencil in Cornell’s studio and remarks that it is one of many boxed collections

of ephemera and other objects sorted by name or subject that Cornell made in his lifetime. Hopps suspects that Duchamp knew about the box since it contains things that Duchamp would have given to Cornell, but he also indicates that some items were likely rescued from the wastebasket. As Hopps observes, Cornell had an acute attention to detail, and that sensibility has provided several pieces of material evidence that are relevant to my argument. The Duchamp Dossier includes two copies of the 1945 Vogue cover featuring Duchamp’s masterwork, as well as items that provide clues as to Duchamp’s management of his wardrobe. One is a claim tag dated 9 September 1942 from Bloomingdales, a department store in New York at 59th Street and Lexington in Manhattan.91 Although there is no information about what garment Duchamp purchased that day, the fact that he shopped there and left something for alteration is telling; perhaps it was one of the suits that Katherine Drier purchased for him.92 This claim tag reveals that Duchamp had bought clothing at an upscale retailer and evidently took care in selecting his items of dress by ensuring that they fitted him well. Similarly, several receipts related to laundry indicate that he was ensuring that his clothing was laundered and pressed. A laundry receipt for Duchamp dated 13 February 1943 from Mrs. Freeman’s Private Hand Laundry at 73 Seventh Avenue indicates that he left eight shirts, one wool undershirt, four drawers, three Union Suits and four handkerchiefs to be laundered.93 Another hand laundry receipt dated 22 August 1942 from Delmonico Hand Laundry at 835 Second Avenue shows that Duchamp used a laundry service more than once.94 Related to these laundry receipts is a blue strip of paper that reads ‘Your Shirt, Sir! Finely Finished’ that would have been used by the laundry service to wrap a package of laundered shirts.95 Another object that Cornell saved was the bottom half of Duchamp’s red and blue silk necktie stuffed into a cardboard box for Bond Street Pipe Tobacco, a brand of tobacco smoked by Duchamp.96 The silk tie is a red and blue diagonal stripe – a classic tie in an elegant gentleman’s wardrobe. It is notably similar to the tie he wore in the photo taken by Penn and also the photos of Duchamp taken by Arnold Newman for the 1942 Surrealist exhibition ‘Sixteen Miles of String’ which he had organized. Although it is unclear as to why the tie was cut and folded into a box, this small piece of Duchamp’s wardrobe is a clue to his conformity to the masculine standards for dress at the time. While only a handful of the 118 items included in the Duchamp Dossier relate to clothing, these small bits of paper and the necktie provide material evidence that Duchamp was taking care of his wardrobe and attending to his appearance, even though some have suggested otherwise.97 If he never cared how he looked, he would not have made the effort to have his clothing altered or pressed, nor would he have bothered to wear a tie. When Marcel Duchamp knew the occasion demanded it, he took great care in how he dressed.

1965 Portrait by David Gahr Dressing Duchamp

In January 1965, Duchamp posed for a portrait in New York City by American photographer David Gahr (1922–2008). Well known for his studio portraits of musicians, rock stars and artists for album covers, books and magazines like Time Magazine, Life Magazine and People, Gahr was ‘popular among his subjects for what they saw as a desire to elevate rather than merely capture them’.98 In

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the mid-1960s, Duchamp was one of many artists photographed by Gahr for Time Magazine.99 Gahr took a series of photos of Duchamp in 1965, including a half-length portrait in which the artist gazes directly at the camera while leaning slightly against a window (Figure 2.5). When this photo was taken, Duchamp was 78 years old and, although his hair and eyebrows had greyed and his skin was deeply wrinkled, his body was still slender, and his posture erect. In another image from this sitting that focuses on the face of the artist, the marks of age are even more apparent.100 In both images, there is a twinkle in his eye and his lips are slightly upturned with the hint of a smile, as if he is letting us in on a joke. For this sitting, Duchamp was formally dressed in a very finely tailored dark wool suit worn with a striped shirt and patterned silk tie. Even though the photograph was taken inside, Duchamp wears a dark fine wool or cashmere double-breasted coat with deep cuffs of lavish fur, accessorized with a grey scarf around his neck. The finely made coat, especially with its lustrous fur cuffs, adds a layer of luxurious elegance. Even as an old man, Duchamp conveys poise and refinement and presents himself in the public realm as an elegant gentleman.

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The Suit as an Emblem of Masculine Power

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As sociologist Herbert Blumer noted in 1969, the process of creating a public persona is a very deliberate gesture: ‘On the individual side, the adoption of what is fashionable is by and large a very calculated act. The fashion-conscious person is usually quite careful and discerning in his effort to identify the fashion in order to make sure that he is “in style”; the fashion does not appear to him as frivolous’.101 Sontag extends that idea of creating a public persona in the realm of photography by observing that, in submitting to a portrait, sitters seek to create the idealized image in which they look their best.102 In the formal portraits analysed here and also in many other photographs accessible online or in books, Duchamp wears a dark tailored suit – an enduring emblem of masculinity and power. The gentleman’s suit –an ensemble consisting of a long-sleeved jacket and trousers with optional waistcoat or vest – is not merely a renunciation of fashion but is a deeply complex and meaningful form unto itself. In his study of the suit, Christopher Breward observes that Viennese architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933) considered the suit to be an aesthetic expression of enlightenment.103 Loos wrote [The suit] ‘is the attire of people whose individuality is so strong they cannot bring themselves to express it with the aid of garish colours, plumes or elaborate modes of dress […] Woe to the painter expressing his individuality with a satin frock, for the artist in him has resigned in despair’.104 Anne Hollander traces the genesis of the man’s suit as a product of modernity in which the once colourful clothing of the male peacock of the eighteenth century was replaced with a dark sober uniform of power that in its ‘carefully simplified dynamic abstraction’ expresses the ideals of masculinity.105 On the surface, this choice of clothing seems ubiquitous – making every man appear

Figure 2.5  David Gahr, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1965. David Gahr / Getty Images.

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the same – and also perpetuates the idea of the suit as non-fashion. However, in her study of the suit, Hollander argues that the notion of an unchanging sober, dark aesthetic associated with the man’s suit is a myth, since ‘styles in men’s clothes have merged, separated and rejoined, constantly creating new ideas of what looks right and what doesn’t’.106 It is the subtle details – the cut of the jacket, the quality of fabric, the choice of waistcoat, the width and style of the trousers, the colour of the shirt and the addition of accessories – that reveal clues to the wearer’s identity. In each of the selected portraits, Duchamp chose to wear a suit and accessories that allowed him to ‘look right’ at that specific moment.107 These details – ‘the width of the trousers and lapels, the length of the jacket’ – were noted by John Berger as relevant to his analysis of the suit in photographs.108 Berger further observed that the suit does not conceal class but instead underlines it, since the body, the bearing and the posture of the man wearing the suit cannot be entirely disguised by this costume of masculinity.109 Both the farmer and the aristocrat might wear a suit, but the difference in class is articulated in the subtle details of how they wear it. If we reconsider the photographs of Duchamp in the manner that Berger suggests, Duchamp’s slender figure is that of a gentleman unused to physical effort rather than the thick muscular bodies of those who are ‘fully at home in [physical] effort’.110 As artist Grayson Perry observes in his 2017 book The Descent of Man, ‘the business suit is the uniform of those who do the looking, the appraising’, allowing men to cloak themselves in the attire of anonymity.111 Duchamp repeatedly professed indifference to fame and fortune and, in wearing a suit, he cloaked his ambition that his artistic legacy be remembered and celebrated. Of course, Duchamp did not always wear a suit, and indeed there are many photos that capture him in more casual attire, including a portrait of him by Mark Kauffman published in Life Magazine in 1966. In this photograph taken in his New York apartment, Duchamp is seated in an upholstered chair behind a chessboard (Figure 2.6). He leans back in a relaxed posture with his legs crossed; his left hand holds his ever-present cigar and he smirks with wry amusement. At this point in his career, his fame is assured; he has been celebrated in several retrospective exhibitions and a significant portion of his life’s work has been placed in leading American art museums. He is casually dressed, wearing his signature pink striped shirt with a brown cardigan and grey corduroy trousers. And rather than presenting himself as a ‘messy creative’ type, he is still neatly and conservatively dressed. As these images published in the mass media reveal, Duchamp conformed to masculine ideals, whether dressed in a formal suit or in casual attire. He adopts the credo of the perfect dandy; he appears to be idle and cultivates an appearance of nonchalance in not having given any attention to his dressed body while paying consummate attention to it. He used his body as a readymade, masking his ambition and altering it with readymade clothing to create a work of art – namely himself. As we shall see, Duchamp left the definition of the readymade open, such that his body might be considered the medium for expression and experimentation in creating works of art that were not art in the traditional sense.

Figure 2.6  Mark Kauffman, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp in his apartment behind a chessboard with pieces designed by fellow artist Max Ernst, 1966. Life Magazine / The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images.

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Notes

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1 Duchamp quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 91. 2 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 114. 3 Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, The International Quarterly (1 October 1904): 142. 4 Ibid., 148. 5 Joanne Finkelstein, The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 213. 6 For a compelling argument on the significance of the materiality of photographs as objects, see Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, ‘Introduction: photographs as objects’, in Photographs Objects Histories (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–15. 7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 10. 8 Ibid., 12–13. Ellipsis added. 9 Duchamp was also photographed by many other photographers. The images by Loomis Dean, Elliot Elisofon and Gordon Parks published in Life Magazine in the 1950s can be viewed online. Accessed 28 December 2020 at https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/9AEWPY9HJUGyTQ. Many other images of Duchamp can be accessed online. 10 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 11. 11 Ibid., 13. 12 ‘A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel Duchamp, Iconoclast’, Arts and Decoration 5 (September 1915): 427. 13 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 2010), 27–28. 14 Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly quoted by Christopher Breward, The Suit: Form, Function and Style (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 7. 15 Christopher Breward, Fashion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 161–164. 16 According to his bride, Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor, Duchamp had an ‘almost morbid horror of hair’ and asked her to remove her body hair during their honeymoon. Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor, A Marriage in Check: The Heart of the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor, Even (Lyon: Les presses du réel, 2007), 489. Duchamp also collaborated on a short film with Man Ray in which Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven had her pubic hair removed by a barber. See David Hopkins, ‘Men Before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity’, Art History 21, no. 3 (September 1998): 317. 17 In a letter dated 20 October 1920 to Jean Croti and his sister Suzanne Duchamp, the artist notes that he has given up drinking – ‘but it’s not for all that that I’m getting fat’. In a letter dated 12 March 1928 to Katherine Dreier, Duchamp reports that he has weighed himself and gained four pounds in two months. See Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk Ludion, Affectionately Marcel: Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, trans. Jill Taylor (Ghent: Ludion Press, 1999), 91–93, 165. 18 Karli June Cerankowski, ‘Queer Dandy Style: The Cultural Politics of Tim Gunn’s Asexuality’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 41, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 226. See also Elisa Glick, Materializing Queer Desire, Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol (New York: SUNY Press, 2010). 19 Cerankowski, ‘Queer Dandy Style’, 226. 20 Previous scholarship has established gender play as a central tenet of Duchamp’s work. See, for example, Deborah Johnson, ‘R(rose) Selavy as Man Ray: Reconsidering the Alter Ego of Marcel

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Duchamp’, artjournal 72 (Spring 2013): 81–94. Johnson focuses on Duchamp’s recognition of the socially constructed nature of gender and his engagement of gender play in his collaborations with photographer Man Ray. 21 Breward, Fashion, 162. 22 Walter Benjamin included this observation in his notes to The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 259. Baudelaire was known to spend hours creating the perfectly tied cravat, and his sartorial preferences included tight buff breeches, highly polished boots, pale pink gloves and black clothing for evening. See Breward, Fashion, 162–163 as well as Steele, Paris Fashion, 82–83. 23 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 26–29. 24 Ibid., 27. 25 Ibid. 26 This dark and sober look for men has largely remained in place since the end of the eighteenth century with a notable exception in the 1970s when men and women adopted androgynous looks. Although there has also been a more recent trend towards more colourful fashions for men, in certain professions such as finance and for formal occasions like weddings and funerals, men in the Western world are still generally expected to wear a tailored suit in dark wool. 27 Barbara Vinken, ‘Tranvesty – Travesty: Fashion and Gender’, Fashion Theory 3, no. 1 (1999): 38. 28 Ibid., 42. 29 Amelia Jones, ‘“ClothesMake the Man”: The Male Artist as a Performative Function’, The Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 18–32. 30 Ibid., 18–19. 31 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 29. Ellipsis added. 32 Ibid. 33 Joseph Masheck specifically identifies 1923 as the year that the idea that Duchamp ‘had given up art altogether, not just painting, came into currency’. Joseph Masheck, ‘Introduction: Chance is Zee Fool’s Name for Fait’, in Joseph Masheck (ed.), Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1975), 19. 34 Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 1. In his introductory remarks, Lebel equates Duchamp to Monsieur G, a character in Baudelaire’s essay and also alludes to ‘the definition of dandyism with which Baudelaire supplemented his description of “Monsieur G”’. However, Lebel does not fully engage with the idea of Duchamp as dandy. 35 Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 5. 36 Ibid., 70. 37 Pierre de Massot quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, 234. 38 D’Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 127. 39 Katherine Drier recalled his ‘extreme good looks’, quoted in Naumann and Obalk, Affectionately, Marcel, 46. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia recalls in her memoirs of Duchamp that the artist ‘aroused’ the attractions of both men and women. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, ‘Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp (1949)’, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets, An Anthology (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1981), 260. 40 Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915–1923 (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 35. 41 André Breton, ‘Marcel Duchamp (1922)’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets, 209.

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42 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 29. 43 Joanne Finkelstein, The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 223. 44 Amy Fine Collins, ‘Vanity Fair: The Early Years, 1914–1936’, Vanity Fair (September 2004). Accessed 7 January 2020 at https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2006/10/earlyyears. 45 ‘Vanity Fair: Let this coupon bring it to you for a year’, Vanity Fair (March 1915): 98. 46 Ibid. 47 For example, see the photo of the English author Compton Mackenzie in Henry Brinsley, ‘Getting Back at Compton MacKenzie: With Compliments to Less Ambitious Writers’, Vanity Fair (March 1915): 45. Mackenzie is dressed in an identical manner to Duchamp and also wears his hair in the same way. Also see Robert Lloyd Trevor, ‘Shopping for the Well-Dressed Man’, Vanity Fair (September 1915): 72–73, 110. 48 Naumann, New York Dada, 35–36. 49 ‘Marcel Duchamp Visits New York’, Vanity Fair (September 1915): 57. 50 Ibid. Ellipsis added. 51 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 27. 52 ‘Marcel Duchamp Visits New York’, 57. 53 ‘A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel Duchamp, Iconoclast’, in Arts and Decoration 5 (September 1915): 427. 54 ‘The Nude-Descending-a-Staircase Man Surveys Us’, New York Tribune, September 12, 1915, reprinted in Naumann, New York Dada, 36. Ellipsis added. 55 Arthur Symons, ‘Charles Baudelaire: Poet, Critic, Man of Letters’, Vanity Fair (September 1915): 43. 56 The portraits of Duchamp by Hoffman and Steichen can be found in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 57 The uncropped version of this image is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. Accessed 15 February 2021 at https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_EXH.MD.04. 58 Beatrice Wood recounted her memories of this day spent with Picabia and Duchamp in her autobiography. Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself (New York: Chronicle Books, 2006). 59 ‘Brancusi Bronzes Defended by Cubist’, New York Times, February 27, 1927. Duchamp acted as a dealer of Brâncuși’s sculptures, selling them over time to avoid flooding the market and lowering their value. For details, see Duchamp’s interview with Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, 73–74. The interview provides evidence that Duchamp was acutely aware of and engaged with the commercial apparatus that underpins the art market. 60 ‘In New York Galleries: Constantin Brancusi’s Sculpture – Work by George Luks, Vonnoh, Kronberg, Others’, New York Times, November 21, 1926. The show also travelled to Chicago where Duchamp installed Brâncuși’s work at the Arts Club. 61 Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 106. 62 ‘Brancusi Bronzes Defended by Cubist’, New York Times, February 27, 1927. 63 For a full account of this legal trial, see Daniel McClean and Armen Avenessian, ‘Trials of the Title: The Trials of Brancusi and Veronese’, in The Trials of Art, ed. Daniel McClean (London: Ridinghouse: 2007), 37–53. 64 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 11. 65 See Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 58. After Marcel Duchamp’s parents died in 1925, he inherited some money from their estate. He also made an unknown amount of money in acting as

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an art dealer in the purchase and sale of eighty works by Francis Picabia and in handling Brâncuși’s exhibition and sale of works in the United States. He also bought and sold a drawing by Picasso that is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. See Susan Greenberg, ‘A Picasso Drawing at Yale, courtesy of Marcel Duchamp,’ The Burlington Magazine 148, no. 1236 (March 2006): 201–202. 66 See Daniel Delis Hill, ‘Fashions and Fancies of the 1920s’, Berg Encyclopaedia of World Dress and Fashion: United States and Canada, ed. Phyllis G. Tortora (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010). Hill cites a price tag of $325–$450 for a raccoon fur coat in 1917. In the fall of 1923 at Princeton University, the college newspaper described the popularity of raccoon fur coats on campus such that they were about ‘as thick as flies’. See ‘Ivy Style’, accessed 15 August 2018 at http://sites.fitnyc. edu/depts/museum/Ivy_Style/exhibition/raccoon-coat.html. This connection to Princeton in particular is notable in that it aligns with Duchamp’s intellectual charisma. 67 In the 1920s Duchamp was known to have travelled frequently between Paris and New York, since his US visa required renewal every six months. 68 This image appears on the cover of Sarazin-Levassor’s book. 69 Sarazin-Levassor, A Marriage in Check, 28. 70 Ibid. Ellipses in original text. Aristide Bruant (1851–1925) was a French cabaret singer, comedian and nightclub owner. 71 Ibid., 56–57. 72 Duchamp’s second appearance in Vanity Fair was included in an article on the best painters in the March 1923 issue. In a photo taken by Man Ray, Duchamp sits next to his friend Joseph Stella. The article includes eight male artists. While John Marin and William Zorach adopt a distinctive look that reads as ‘artist’, Duchamp blends into the background dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and tie. The caption for his photo reads: ‘The Nude Descending a Staircase and Duchamp walked up to fame. A sensation ten years ago, now an oracle’. See ‘Among the Best Painters’, Vanity Fair (March 1923): 52. 73 Sarah Lees and Catherine Whitney with Paul Martineau, Lusha Nelson Photographs: Celebrity, the Forgotten Man and 1930s America (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 2017). 74 Lusha Nelson quoted by Paul Martineau, ‘Lusha Nelson, One Wild Restless Dream’ in Lusha Nelson Photographs, 21. 75 Ibid. 76 Paul Martineau, ‘Lusha Nelson, One Wild Restless Dream’ in Lusha Nelson Photographs, 17. 77 Naumann reports that Duchamp was in New York in the fall of 1933 to organize a second exhibition of Brâncuși’s work at the Brummer Gallery and that he left New York at the end of January 1934. Upon his return to Paris, Duchamp embarked on his plans to issue an edited version of his notes, documents, paintings and drawings related to The Large Glass. See Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 111–112. 78 Lusha Nelson’s photograph of Marcel Duchamp can be accessed online in the Philbrook Museum of Art 2017 exhibition catalogue on pages 82–83. See Lees and Whitney, Lusha Nelson Photographs. Accessed 4 May 2021 at https://issuu.com/philbrookmuseumofart/docs/lushanelson_catalog_ issuu_20apr. 79 Cooper’s portrait was published in Vanity Fair in October 1935. See Lees and Whitney with Martineau, Lusha Nelson Photographs, 101. 80 ‘We Nominate for the Hall of Fame’, Vanity Fair (July 1934): 22.

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81 ‘Cool suits for business: A word of advice for New York businessmen’, Vanity Fair (July 1934): 89. 82 Maria Morris Hambourg, ‘Existential Portraits, 1947–48’, in Irving Penn: Centennial, ed. Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L. Rosenheim (New York: Yale University Press, 2018), 71. The portrait of Duchamp does not appear to have been published in Vogue (New York) before September 1977 when it was included in an article about Irving Penn. See Thomas B. Hess, ‘Irving Penn: Time is a Luxury’, Vogue (New York) 167, no. 9 (September 1977): 330–333, 381. 83 Hambourg notes that Penn equated this set to a type of game similar to that of a pitcher on a baseball diamond or a fencer engaged in a jousting match. Some sitters did not like the results, including Georgia O’Keeffe, who asked that her photograph be destroyed. See Hambourg, Irving Penn, 72–75. 84 Hambourg, Irving Penn, 72. 85 Bettina Ballard quoted by Hambourg, Irving Penn, 73. 86 Selected portraits from the series, including that of Salvador Dalí and Charles James, are included in the exhibition catalogue. Hambourg, Irving Penn, 70–93. 87 The portraits of Spencer Tracy and Duchamp are presented on adjacent pages in the exhibition catalogue. Hambourg, Irving Penn, 90–91. By contrast, dancer/choreographer Jerome Robbins wears tights and a close-fitting shirt-dress, signalling he is a dancer/choreographer. 88 Sontag, On Photography, 37–38. 89 Cornell collected 118 pieces of ephemera related to Duchamp. See Joseph Cornell, Duchamp Dossier, Untitled. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Objects #1990-33-1(1-118). 90 Walter Hopps, ‘Gimme Strength: Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp Remembered’ in Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp … In Resonance, ed. Polly Koch (Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1998), 70. 91 Joseph Cornell, Duchamp Dossier, Untitled. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object #1990-331(47). Accessed 5 January 2021 at https://philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/298606. html?mulR=1453093397|66. 92 Tomkins notes in his biography of Duchamp that Katherine Dreier acted with a maternal sensibility towards the artist and observes that Dreier bought Duchamp a new suit in the 1930s. See Tomkins, Duchamp, 283. 93 Joseph Cornell, Duchamp Dossier, Untitled. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object #1990-331(16). Accessed 5 January 2021 at https://philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/298574. html?mulR=1750878702|84. 94 Joseph Cornell, Duchamp Dossier, Untitled. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object #1990-331(63). Accessed 5 January 2021 at https://philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/298622. html?mulR=1022723496|26. 95 Joseph Cornell, Duchamp Dossier, Untitled. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object #1990-331(12). Accessed 5 January 2021 at https://philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/298570. html?mulR=672522616|72. 96 Joseph Cornell, Duchamp Dossier, Untitled. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Object #1990-33-1(11a,b). Accessed 5 January 2021 at https://philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/298559. html?mulR=246167079|21. 97 Some have suggested that Duchamp was blasé about his wardrobe. There is a story in which Duchamp is described as wearing three shirts, worn on top of each other in lieu of carrying a suitcase. See Julia Dür, ‘Glasswanderers’, Tout-fait.com: The Marcel Duchamp Online Studies Journal. 98 Bruce Weber, ‘David Gahr, Photographer of Musicians, Dies at 85’, New York Times, May 29, 2008.

99 Other artists photographed by Gahr included Salvador Dalí, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Claes Oldenburg, Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Rauschenberg. 100 See David Gahr’s website for this image and other portraits of artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe. Accessed 5 January 2021 at http://www.davidgahr.com/photographs/art-fair/nggallery/page/2. 101 Herbert Blumer, ‘Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection’, The Sociological Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1969): 277. 102 Sontag, On Photography, 85. 103 Breward, The Suit, 7. 104 Adolf Loos quoted by Breward, The Suit, 8. 105 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 83. 106 Ibid., 14. 107 Anne Hollander notes that ‘Most fashion in dress is adopted with the conscious wish not to look fashionable but to look right’. Hollander, Sex and Suits, 6. 108 John Berger, Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer (London: Penguin, 2013), 37. 109 Ibid., 39. 110 Ibid., 39–41. Emphasis in original. 111 Grayson Perry, The Descent of Man (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017), 37.

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Figure 3.1  Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Photo Georges Meguerditchian, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou France. © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Dressing Up: Readymade Identities

3

Many a time the mirror imprisons them and holds them firmly. Fascinated they stand in front. They are absorbed, separated from reality and alone with their dearest vice, vanity. However readily they spread out all other vices for all, they keep this one secret and disown it even before their friends.1 –Rrose Sélavy

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On 21 June 1917, Marcel Duchamp sat in front of a hinged mirror for a five-way postcard portrait created with the aid of an anonymous camera operator at the Broadway Photo Studio (Figure 3.1). This image not only references the figural repetition in his infamous work Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) but is also prescient of Duchamp’s multifaceted and complex identity constructions. Within his artistic circle, Duchamp adopted various guises that were captured in photographs: fashioning his body into his female alter ego, Rose/Rrose Sélavy (1920–1921); cutting his hair like a monk in Tonsure (1921); using shaving lather to add devil’s horns to his head for Monte Carlo Bond (1924); appearing nude on stage and in a photo with actress Bronia Perlmutter as Adam and Eve in Ciné Sketch (1924); and transforming himself into a grizzled old man of 85 years of age for a portrait sitting when he was only 58 in Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85 (1945). These images have received much scholarly study and, as Herbert Molderings has pointed out, Duchamp’s assumption of multiple personas demonstrates ‘how and to what extent the photographic image can indeed be used for “invention”’.2 And yet these images not only reveal Duchamp’s pleasure in engaging in masquerade, but also unmask the artist’s acute attention to the transformative power of clothing. When Duchamp arrived in the United States in 1915, masquerade balls were, according to Vogue, ‘one of the best-loved and gayest events on the social calendar’ in New York and the medium by which ‘self-conscious Americans have learned to throw aside the dun cloak of Puritanism and to plunge with carnival abandon into this whirling vortex of merriment in the guise of bird, beast, or flower, or as the elements of nature, or in plumes borrowed from many nations’.3 Duchamp and others in his avant-garde circle were known to frequent the masquerade balls held at Webster Hall in Greenwich Village.4 Notably, in September 1916, Duchamp acted as one of the judges of costumes for The Rogue Ball and awarded artist/illustrator Clara Tice first prize for her costume.5 In a Women’s Wear article titled ‘All Countries and Colors Seen at Rogue’s Ball’, the ‘gorgeous’ costumes seen at the ball were described in detail and it was noted that ‘Several of the men had dominoes of the black and white block after the cover of the Rogue. There were both lady and gentlemen Pierrots. The masculine trouser was a favourite in the feminine costumes, in bloomer, Zouave and Turkish effects’.6 In May 1917, Duchamp was one of the organizers of The Blind Man’s Ball, along with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood. The event, which was announced in the no. 2 issue of The Blind Man, was slated to take place on Friday 25 May, at the ‘Prehistoric, ultra-Bohemian Webster Hall’ in Washington Square.7 The wearing of costumes was encouraged with the notice: ‘Romantic rags are requested. There is a difference between a tuxedo and a Turk’.8 Those without costumes had to sit in ‘boughtand-paid-for boxes’ costing ten dollars rather than the regular admission price of two dollars.9 As Calvin Tomkins notes, The Blind Man’s Ball was one of the last of the Village costume balls, an uninhibited affair with nonstop drinking … Around midnight, bored and very drunk, Duchamp decided to scale a wooden flagpole that projected out at a forty-five degree angle from the balcony … When he finally reached the flag, there was a round of applause. Duchamp raised his pink paper hat to acknowledge it before sliding back down to safety.10

In the fictionalized recounting of this event by Henri-Pierre Roché, Duchamp (nicknamed Victor) was described as wearing ‘a capacious domino cloak which billowed out around him’, such that he looked

‘like a ladybird on a thick twig’ as he climbed up the flagpole.11 Although mere footnotes in accounts about Duchamp, these mentions offer evidence of the artist’s pleasure in organizing and attending masquerade balls. As Efrat Tseelon observes in Masquerade and Identities (2001), engaging in masquerade is ‘pleasurable, excessive, sometimes subversive’.12 The deliberate alteration of one’s habitual appearance with clothing, wigs, masks, hats and other accessories, and/or makeup creates the space and liberty to explore alternative personas and act without inhibition or censure; and this freedom to become someone else for a time creates pleasure.13 Masquerade also brings attention to the arbitrary nature of social and gender categories that are tied to appearance and can thus be used as a critical and analytical tool.14 In the previous chapter, Duchamp was unmasked as a dandy who harnessed fashion to conceal his complex, multifarious identity by adopting the uniform of the suit in his portraits that circulated in the mass media. In this chapter, I focus on Duchamp’s masquerading as his alter ego Rose/Rrose Sélavy in a series of photographs made in collaboration with Man Ray in 1920 and 1921 that initially circulated within the limited circle of the avant-garde. Although much scholarly attention has been devoted to these images, what has yet to be written is an analysis of Duchamp’s engagement with clothing in creating these transformations. I offer an alternative reading that focuses on Duchamp’s pleasurable engagement with masquerade as well as his use of parody to subvert the notion of the readymade. I argue that Duchamp used his body as a rectified readymade15 – altering it through the use of clothing and makeup – to present complex self-constructions within his avant-garde circle as part of an aesthetic strategy to conflate art and life.

Masquerading as Rose/Rrose

Dressing Up

It was sometime in the fall of 1920 that Duchamp adopted the pseudonym Rose Sélavy as his female alter ego.16 Although Duchamp’s elder brother Gaston had taken the pseudonym Jacques Villon when he abandoned law to become a painter, Marcel’s motivation for assuming one was vague.17 Duchamp said in his interview with Cabanne: ‘I wanted to change my identity and the first idea that came to me was to take a Jewish name that I especially liked, or that tempted me, and suddenly, I had an idea: why not change sex? It was much simpler … Rose was an awful name in 1920’.18 In spite of this recollection, the name Rose was actually a very popular choice for girls in the early part of the twentieth century, consistently ranking in the top twenty names for a girl in America from 1900 to 1921 and the name featured in a popular song about the wearing of second-hand clothes called Second-Hand Rose.19 The name Rose Sélavy, to which Duchamp added an extra ‘r’ in 1921 to become Rrose Sélavy, has been generally interpreted as a pun on the French phrase, ‘Eros, c’est la vie’, meaning ‘Eros (sex), that’s life’. In his interview with Cabanne, Duchamp linked the addition of the ‘r’ to Rose as a joke. He said: ‘The double R comes from Picabia’s painting, you know, the “Oeil Cacodylate,” … I don’t remember how I signed it … I think I put “Pi Qu’habilla Rrose Sélavy” – the word “arrose” [to water, toast or piss on] demands two R’s so I was attracted to the second R … All of this was word play’.20 Deborah Johnson

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warns us to read this statement with suspicion, noting that Duchamp routinely contradicted himself and concludes that Duchamp intended to mark his alter ego as ‘other’ with this name, such that her artistic identities encompassed ‘female, Jewish, androgynous, transgressive and apostate’.21 Several scholars have suggested that Gertrude Stein, as a Jewish lesbian with an androgynous appearance, may have served as a model for Rose, given the infamous line from her 1913 poem ‘Emily’: ‘Rose is a rose is a rose, is a rose’.22 It is remarkable that the rose, a fragrant flower with sharp thorns, has both male and female reproductive organs and is classified as a hermaphroditic plant, also known as a bisexual flower.23 I cannot help but wonder whether Duchamp was aware of the long-standing associations between the rose and bisexuality, given his acute attention to the nuances of language and the strong undercurrents of eroticism in much of his work, especially since within the 1895 French text Vocabula Amatoria – a reference text of words, phrases and allusions by leading French authors – ‘the entry for “Rose” is indexed in relation to the female pudendum and “Rosée” (dew) to semen’.24 In selecting Rose as the first name of his female alter ego, Duchamp either deliberately or inadvertently selected a name that was closely coupled with the human body and bisexuality. This name and its subsequent modification into Rrose Sélavy in 1921 were inscribed over the course of Duchamp’s lifetime onto twenty artworks as well as numerous documents, essays and two businesses linked to the fashion industry – namely, a fabric-dying operation and a fashion boutique.25 It was in the fall of 1920, according to Frances Naumann, that Duchamp ‘asked Man Ray to take pictures of him dressed in drag, posing in the guise of his female alter ego Rose Sélavy’.26 This series of images marks the first physical incarnation of Rose Sélavy in which Duchamp dressed as a woman, donning a woman’s wig, hat, necklace and coat for Man Ray’s camera.27 In a second series of photographs dated to the summer of 1921, Duchamp wore another outfit as well as makeup. While Man Ray was behind the camera, he acknowledged that at the time he was ‘still in the experimental state in photography and the results largely accidental’.28 The evidence suggests that Duchamp remained in control during this and other portrait collaborations.29 Although Duchamp was active in the construction of the images, John Berger, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes maintain that it is the viewer who looks at the image and must work to make meaning. According to Barthes, sometimes feelings may be invoked, especially when an image ‘pricks’ and causes one to mourn the passing of time or the loss of a loved one or anticipate ‘an anterior future of which death is the stake’.30 The appreciation of the affective qualities of photography espoused by Barthes is a relatively recent turn in art history that facilitates new insights into the construction of meaning in images.31 In order to fully engage with the possibilities of this line of inquiry in making meaning, I adopt this strategy in reflecting on my affective responses to the images of Duchamp. One of the feelings that initially struck me in viewing the many images of Duchamp in disguise was ambiguity, an affect which Sontag suggests is a result of the passage of time in which the ‘particular qualities and intentions of the photographs tend to be swallowed up’.32 Similarly, Berger attributes the inherent ambiguity of photography as arising out of ‘the abyss between the moment recorded and the moment of looking’, such that meaning must be discovered by reading the traces of meaning and making connections.33 The word abyss seems fitting to describe the long interval of time that passed between the moment in which the camera captured the traces of Duchamp on film dressed this way in 1920–1921 and a viewer looking at the images a century later.

To fully appreciate the nuances of meaning, it is also necessary to consider the size, format and circulation of these images. When Duchamp and Man Ray created these images in 1920–1921, they were not considered art, nor were they widely circulated in the print media, but instead were seen by friends, artists and collectors within the close circle of the avant-garde. This is a central point in my argument and one that is rarely mentioned in the scholarly analysis of Duchamp in masquerade, aside from Herbert Molderings’ astute observation that most of these ‘masquerade portraits, mostly playful and no bigger than a postcard’ (including those made later) were not considered works of art, since their places of display were not art galleries or art museums.34 In looking at these images today, it is crucial to note that viewing practices have changed, enabling alternative readings of these images as a continuation of Duchamp’s creative experiments in using his body as a readymade.

Dressing Rose/Rrose

Dressing Up

In Portrait of Marcel Duchamp as Rose Sélavy by Man Ray, the tightly cropped, oval-shaped, black and white image is in soft focus, but this does not obscure the fact that Duchamp is a man dressed as a woman (Figure 3.2). Oriented in a three-quarter view, Duchamp wears a black velvet hat, a brown wig, a double-strand necklace of natural pearls and a cloth coat with a softly ruched faceframing collar. Duchamp’s body has been transformed with clothing into a rectified readymade and he presents himself as a work of art. It is a deliberate masquerade or performance of ‘other’, since his choice of clothing – a coat and a hat – is somewhat utilitarian in cloaking the body rather than revealing it; the artist did not wear a dress or otherwise reveal his body, even though he might have done so, given that his slender frame and hairless body would have suited the angular and bodyrevealing fashions of the early 1920s.35 Although some scholars have described Duchamp’s choices of attire for Rrose Sélavy as ill-fitting, matronly and unfashionable,36 a fashion studies focus reveals that his choices of clothing were on trend, even though they may look awkward today. The nuances of what is fashionable at any given moment manifest in subtle ways through all social strata – in the length of the hair, the size of the hat and the cut of the coat, and an analysis of Duchamp’s choices relative to extant garments in museum collections and images in fashion publications indicates that he took notice of such details in transforming himself from Marcel into Rose/Rrose. Even though Duchamp selected less expensive versions of fashionable clothing and accessories in recreating himself as a rectified readymade, this effort is consonant with his determination to ‘cut short any counterattack of taste’.37 In the first series of images created in the fall of 1920, the transformation of Duchamp from man into woman included a wig with soft curls that frame his face. This shorter hairstyle, known as bobbed hair, was a recent and notable change in hair fashions for women. In the article ‘Vogue of Bobbed Hair: Of Course Greenwich Village Lassies Wear Short Locks, But Society’s Doing It Too’ published in the New York Times on 27 June 1920, the joys and freedoms of bobbed hair were expounded and it was noted that even ‘conservative society matrons have been won over’ to this new shorter hairstyle with ‘some going so far as to buy bobbed wigs’.38 Articles in Vogue and other fashion periodicals instructed their readers how to use their shorter hair to frame their face in relation to the fashionable smaller hat.39 Duchamp’s use of a wig in his masquerade echoes this fashion craze for bobbed hair.

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Dressed as Rose, Duchamp wears a wool coat with a face-framing collar. This feminine style of collar – with a soft ruffle that encircles the face – distinguishes it from the notched lapel of a man’s coat or suit jacket. His black velvet hat ornamented with glycerized ostrich feathers is worn fashionably low on the head in order to draw attention to the eyes. Extant examples of similar cloth coats with this type of collar and similar hats with vertical plumage from museum collections provide evidence that Duchamp’s choices were on trend.40 The pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and other fashion journals from the early 1920s also include numerous illustrations and photographs of comparable coats made of cloth (Figure 3.3) as well as similar hats with feather ornamentation worn low on the forehead (Figure 3.4). In selecting clothing and accessories that were à la mode, the artist demonstrated sensitivity to the nuances of fashion and its transformative power. Despite the fashionable markers of femininity, the transformation from man into woman is not complete, and deliberately so. The high contrast lighting creates a strong shadow on Duchamp’s neck that emphasizes his Adam’s apple as well as the whiskers on the right side of his chin. This choice of lighting may have been the consequence of Man Ray’s relative inexperience as a photographer in 1920, but the harsh lighting might also have been a deliberate choice in order to emphasize Duchamp’s masculine profile.41 Duchamp gazes directly at the viewer and is unsmiling, confronting the viewer with his partial transformation. Later in 1921, Duchamp sat for Man Ray in Paris for another series of photographs of Rose. In this second series of images, Duchamp wore makeup, including smoky eye shadow and lipstick (Figure 3.5). Instead of a wig, his head was topped with a dark felt hat with a wide brim that is encircled with a geometric-patterned scarf, possibly one by Sonia Delaunay.42 Duchamp here again uses his body as a readymade and dons another woman’s cloth coat; this one is expansively trimmed with fur at the neckline and cuffs, marking it as a more expensive choice. The hat and coat were borrowed from Francis Picabia’s girlfriend Germaine Everling, who inserted her hands into the image.43 Although the lighting is softer and more diffuse, imparting a more flattering texture to his skin, the transformation from man into woman even here remains incomplete. In each version of this image, we are aware that this is a man dressed as a woman.

Dressing Up

Figure 3.2  Man Ray, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp as Rose Sélavy, 1920–1921. Getty Images / Bettman.

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Figure 3.3  Ad for Weil Paris, Gazette du Bon Ton, 1920, no. 4, page XXVIII, Rijksmuseum RP-P-2009-1945-10. Image in public domain. 80

Dressing Up

Figure 3.4  Model wearing winter coat, ca. 1920. Keystone France / Gamma-Keystone, Getty Images.

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Figure 3.5  Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp dressed as Rrose Sélavy, ca. 1923. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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© Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

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Queer theory suggests that the gender doubling seen in images of Duchamp dressed as his female alter ego is a performance that highlights ‘the electivity of gender’ which serves to ‘destabilize gender binaries’.44 In Gender Trouble (2007), Judith Butler argues that gender is a cultural construction that is learned over time through a ‘set of repeated acts’ that produces a ‘natural sort of being’.45 Butler thus demonstrates that notions of masculinity and femininity are social constructs that are visually manifested through the fashioning of the body as an articulation of identity. Cross-dressers harness the ‘rhetoric of clothing, naming and performance or acting out’ to present themselves as the other gender and, as Marjorie Garber points out, the transformations that are left incomplete or imperfect are seen as particularly provocative and engaging.46 Cross-dressing opens up a space of possibility for the restructuring and ‘confounding culture’, such that the ‘disruptive element that intervenes’ serves to disrupt ‘not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself’.47 In his incomplete transformation, Duchamp disrupts the binary of man–woman in that he is dressed as Rose or Rrose but he is still recognizable as Marcel and thus playfully provokes the viewer into an affective response. Amelia Jones interprets this series as a manifestation of Duchamp’s gender ambivalence that complicates authorship and desire, and she identifies desire and repulsion as the two possible responses to Duchamp’s presentation of self as Rose/Rrose.48 However, this binary interpretation overlooks the range of possible affective responses to Duchamp’s incomplete

transformation. As Ahuva Belkin notes, the imperfect disguise of a cross-dressing male actor puts the female impersonator ‘into a different category, as a type of comic curiosity’ – one that may spark laughter.49 I see Duchamp’s playful explorations of androgyny as an aesthetic extension of his affinity for irony, expressed in subversive word play, puns and humour. After all, in 1919 he playfully scribbled a moustache and goatee on a cheap postcard reproduction of the face of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and wrote the initials L.H.O.O.Q. below. In 1961, Duchamp explained: ‘the curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at it, the Mona Lisa becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man, it is a real man’.50 Indeed, when the head of Mona Lisa is isolated within L.H.O.O.Q. such that the clothing is not visible, she could be a man, and as such serves to underline the role of clothing in communicating gender. Like many of Duchamp’s works, the word play here is significant; when the letters are spoken quickly in French, the phrase becomes: ‘Elle a chaud au cul’ or ‘Her ass is hot’. Duchamp liked to amuse himself and, as Tomkins observes about this work: ‘What could better signal a generation’s revolt against tradition, Western civilization, and the cult of the old masterpiece?’51 I argue that, in taking the name Rose/Rrose and in donning the sartorial signifiers of femininity to perform his alter ego, Duchamp has not denied his masculinity but instead used his body to disrupt and confound expectations of what he might do next. Like his cinematic hero Charlie Chaplin, Duchamp’s transformation was deliberately imperfect and, in this way, he reminds the viewer that he is a man, sufficiently confident in his own identity to present himself as a woman.52 By engaging in gender play for this series of photographs, Duchamp harnessed clothing as a transformative tool in order to continue his experiments in the meaning of the original and the copy in art.

Readymade Perfume

Dressing Up

It was early in 1921 that Duchamp decided that ‘Rose Sélavy would be the ideal name under which to launch a new brand of perfume, one that would be distributed between New York and Paris’.53 In creating his readymade perfume, Duchamp designed a label that included one of the portraits of his female alter ego along with the inscription ‘Belle Haleine Eau de Voilette, New York, Paris’ and ‘RS’ (in reverse). Duchamp selected a readymade perfume bottle by the firm Rigaud Paris, removed the label that read ‘UN AIR EMBAUMÉ / RIGAUD / PARIS’, and substituted his own label design (Figure 3.6). He inscribed Rrose Sélavy’s signature – using the extra ‘r’ in her name for the first time – on the label of the perfume box.54 Duchamp’s choice of the Rigaud perfume was provocative, since the six-inch glass bottle and its violet-coloured box are aesthetically pleasing objects, something that the artist would later indicate that he tried to avoid in selecting his readymades.55 This French brand of perfume, made and sold in the United States, was known for its use of exotic floral essences in creating perfumes inspired by popular culture, including the operettas La Vie Parisienne and La Belle Hélène.56 Perhaps the textual links to ‘air embaumé’ (Figure 3.7) and the operetta La Belle Hélène provoked Duchamp to select this particular brand of perfume.

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Figure 3.6  Marcel Duchamp, Belle Haleine – Eau de Voilette (cardboard box and brushed-glass perfume ­bottle), 1921. Private collection / Bridgeman Images. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN,

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

Montreal (2022).

In 1920–1921, one of the most popular brands of perfume during that period was called Rosine, a perfume by the couturier Paul Poiret available in France and America. In 1920, Women’s Wear Daily reported that Poiret’s perfume factory was manufacturing 200,000 bottles of perfume a month ‘destined for Paris and New York’, and identified the ‘Fabrique de Rosine’ as the perfume of choice for the ‘elegant woman of fashion’.57 Not only was Poiret well known in both France and America but it is highly probable that Duchamp knew of the designer.58 Poiret was the first fashion designer to create his own perfume under the corporate entity Les Parfums de Rosine – named after his first-born daughter Rosine – and his innovations not only influenced but profoundly changed the perfume industry.59 Poiret had made public declarations that he was ‘an artist, not a dressmaker’60 and this provocative statement would have been good reason for Duchamp to mock Poiret’s celebrity status in this series of images. Nancy J. Troy also notes the interesting coincidence that Duchamp took the name of ‘Rose/Rrose’ when Poiret’s first perfume was named ‘La Rose de Rosine’, noting that Duchamp was patently aware of the tropes of femininity as a result of Poiret’s prominence.61 James McManus argues that Belle Haleine presents a parody of the advertising and marketing campaigns of fashion designers; by inserting the figure of Rrose as ‘corporate figurehead (whose gender identity Figure 3.7  Ad for Rigaud Perfume, page published in Art – Goût – Beauté, Feuillets de l’élégance féminine, Février 1926, no. 66, 6e Année, page 8, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-2009-4182-8. Image in public domain.

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is questionable),’ Duchamp mocks ‘celebrity figures (e.g. Coco Chanel) who were transforming their identities into product brand name’.62 And with this gesture, as McManus argues, Duchamp anticipated the role of celebrity in determining his ultimate legacy within the art history canon. Duchamp used a photograph of the modified perfume bottle in designing the cover of New York Dada (Figure 3.8), a pamphlet-style single-issue publication of four pages, published by Man Ray and Duchamp in the winter of 1921 that circulated within their avant-garde circle.63 The image of Duchamp on both the cover of New York Dada and the bottle Belle Haleine is diminutive, about the size of a couple of postage stamps, making it very difficult to see the details of Duchamp’s face and dress. According to Man Ray’s account, Duchamp designed the cover, indicating that the size of the image for Belle Haleine was a calculated decision.64 If viewers did not know this was Duchamp, they might not feel desire or revulsion – the responses suggested by Amelia Jones for this image.65 In her feminist critique, Jones argues that these Rrose Sélavy photographs disrupt notions of the genius of the male artist and writes: ‘Duchamp specialists are surprised by the femininity of this authorial mark, its difference from the expected signature: “Marcel Duchamp”’.66 Jones reads gender play as ambivalence, since Duchamp’s transformation to woman is ultimately unconvincing, and argues that his gesture opens up the possibility of disrupting the hegemonic construction of gender by ‘conferring authority on “woman” as author’ but his gesture is incomplete.67 In signing the work, Rose ‘becomes an author’, but it remains obvious that ‘she herself has been “authored” by her other’ and thus the myth of the male genius as father of the work remains intact.68 While these arguments are both thorough and convincing, Jones somewhat underplays the implication of Duchamp’s evident delight in irony and contradiction in his works.69 Duchamp once said: ‘Irony is a playful way of accepting something. My irony is that of indifference: meta-irony’.70 And notably, ‘the prankster’ Rrose Sélavy had her own calling card that included the phrase: ‘Complete line of whiskers and kicks’.71 In studying the images of Duchamp dressed as a woman, it is also relevant to note that, by the 1920s, cross-dressing was ‘not especially rare’ and could be easily found in ‘clubs, vaudeville, street theater, and the circus’.72 It was also a time of emerging female emancipation, with some women embracing their new-found freedoms by dressing, as Jane Mulvagh writes: ‘as much like a man as possible – in a smoking jacket, waistcoat, necktie, tailored suit, stout shoes or pyjamas’.73 In 1922, Vogue observed that ‘Men and Women are becoming every year more indistinguishable. The distinction between the sexes has been discovered to be grossly exaggerated’.74 It is through fashion that gender is given visual expression and, as Elizabeth Wilson reminds us, fashion is not only ‘obsessed with gender’ but continually ‘defines and redefines the gender boundary’.75 Each period in history has expressed this gender boundary through the articulation of acceptable choices of clothing, accessories, hairstyles and other forms of body adornment, which either emphasizes or minimizes the differences between men and women. By the end of the nineteenth century, when Duchamp was in his early teens, fashionable women’s dress emphasized femininity with an S-shaped corseted silhouette that was ornamented with lace, feathers, frills and bows; a woman’s dress was central to her identity and status within society, and codes of femininity dictated strict rules of what

Figure 3.8  Marcel Duchamp, cover of New York Dada, 1921.Yale University Art Gallery. Image in public ­domain.

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was considered appropriate attire. As argued in Chapter 1, Duchamp’s early drawings for Parisian journals reveal his knowledge of fashionable dress codes and an awareness of shifting gender roles and women’s burgeoning efforts to make a place for themselves in public spaces. In the decade that followed, Duchamp was witness to the social upheaval of the First World War and the new-found freedoms enjoyed by women, and therefore his attitudes to gender reflected in these earlier works are relevant in considering his presentation of himself as a woman. In sum, it is through fashion that gender is manifested in a visual form. Notably absent from scholarly analyses of the Rrose Sélavy series of images is due consideration of the fact that Duchamp manipulated the codes of fashion, using clothing to adopt various guises in order to articulate his own body as a rectified readymade as well as making strategic interventions into the patriarchal gender hierarchies. In the creation of these images Duchamp acknowledges his familiarity with the signifiers of fashionable dress for women in the early 1920s. As the next section shows, each element of dress is meaningful as a marker of modern femininity that can be read within the context of a period of emerging female emancipation.

La Garçonne

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

In engaging in cross-dressing, Duchamp cloaked his male body with clothing, makeup and accessories to become his female alter ego, while his masculinity remained intact. His incomplete transformation becomes a parody, and Duchamp lets us in on his joke. Just as his drawings of 1908– 1909 were created with subversively ironic subtext, I argue that Duchamp, in his transformation into Rrose Sélavy, constructed a parody of the flapper or la garçonne. This new modern woman, the flapper or la garçonne, embraced an androgynous style of dress and ignored the staid bourgeois codes of manners, dress and morality that had governed a woman’s dress and behaviour in the first decade of the twentieth century (Figure 3.9). Embracing her new-found freedoms, this modern woman cut her hair, applied makeup in public, went without stockings and danced, drank and smoked with abandon. The word ‘flapper’ was initially associated with young English girls in that awkward stage between girl and woman.76 However, by 1917 the term ‘flapper’ was being used to describe the ‘new’ modern woman who embraced new styles of behaviour and dress. The flapper was described in the February 1917 issue of Vogue (New York) as a jumble of contradictions:

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She is a fantastic grotesque, pretty in the modern manner, which is a wild mixture of Paris, futurism, the primitives, and a little rouge. She is quite small, inconceivably fragile; she has a delicate chin, audacious eyes, and a candid forehead. She is feverishly interested in two things, herself and her clothes. Everything else in the world quite frankly bores her to tears.77

The slender, youthful and uncorseted flapper is notably linked here to Paris and Futurism. In France, this modern woman was called la garçonne. Not only could the modern woman dress as she wished, she was free to embrace her sexuality, and she became immortalized in 1922 by Victor Margueritte’s

Figure 3.9  Models wearing 1920s fashions. Getty Images / Hulton Deutsch.

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scandalous novel La Garçonne.78 And it is within this context that Duchamp chose to dress as a woman for his collaboration with Man Ray. Other artists in Duchamp’s circle, including poet Jean Cocteau and artist Francis Picabia, were influenced by this type of modern young American woman. Cocteau described her thus: ‘The United States […] evokes a girl more interested in her health than in her beauty. She swims, boxes, dances, leaps onto moving trains – all without knowing she is beautiful. It is we who admire her face, on the screen – enormous, like the face of a goddess’.79 In Picabia’s illustration Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity) for the July– August 1915 issue of the arts and literary magazine 291, no. 5–6, he illustrated this energetic young woman as a spark plug with the word ‘For-ever’ imprinted on her side (Figure 3.10). In this rendering of a woman without curves, stripped of softness and feminine emotion, she is not only an engine part, but also a phallic symbol. Elizabeth Hutton Turner observes that this modern woman, ‘a youthful sexual alter-ego for the Old World weighed down by tradition’, served to break the social taboos, styles, techniques and spatial frames of the work of artists like Jean Cocteau, Alfred Jarry and Francis Picabia.80 Although Duchamp was not mentioned in this context, the spirit of une jeune fille américaine undoubtedly entered into the realm of his consciousness too, given his close friendship with Picabia as well as female Dada artists like Beatrice Wood and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Whether described as la jeune fille américaine, la garçonne or the flapper, the spirit of the liberated androgynous gamine profoundly influenced fashion in the late 1910s and 1920s. The fashionable silhouette of the early 1920s emphasized straight lines rather than curves, and clothes were shown to best effect on a lean, angular and boyish figure that was hipless, bust-less and waist-less. Dress historians have identified Denise Poiret, muse and wife of French fashion designer Paul Poiret, as ‘the prototype of la garçonne with her slim, youthful and uncorseted figure’.81 She conveys the sensual appeal of la garçonne in a photograph dated to 1919 (Figure 3.11). Although she was married, her posture is open and erotically suggestive; and her slender and boyish figure is revealed by the body-revealing cut of her dress. What is perhaps most interesting (and otherwise unnoticed by art historians) is that her headdress is very similar to that worn by Duchamp in his cross-dressing transformation into Rrose. The hat is ornamented with strands that stand stiffly away from the head and create a bird-like visage. A similar hat, also by Poiret but made of silk, metallic thread and feathers, is held in the collection of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the curatorial notes for that object read: ‘In concept, it is similar to a more widely known example of a gold lamé and black monkey fur, worn by Denise Poiret with her “Paris” evening coat. Both recall eighteenth-century depictions of the headdresses of the allegories of the Continents, notably of Africa and the Americas’.82 This type of headdress was highly fashionable (see model wearing a similar hat in Figure 3.4) and remained so until about 1925. Here also is a visual link to Poiret that has not previously been mentioned by other scholars. Denise Poiret embodied the glamour of la garçonne, and there were several close female friends of Duchamp who had adopted androgynous styles of dressing – most notably painter Florine Stettheimer, sculptor and photographer Berenice Abbott, German Dada artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and artist/illustrator Clara Tice. Each of these women embraced the less restrictive dress codes of the

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Figure 3.10  Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité, 1915. Image in public domain.

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Figure 3.11  Photographer unknown, Denise Poiret, 1919. Getty Images / Keystone France.

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period and interpreted them in a highly distinctive manner. In the next part, I shall consider the manner of dress of each woman in relation to the style of la garçonne. Although artist Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) rarely allowed herself to be photographed (Figure 3.12), she was known to wear her clothes with ‘aristocratic fastidiousness, neither quite carelessly nor quite consciously’.83 Known to have frequented Parisian couture salons with her sisters, she also wore trousers and ‘by no means considered them a taboo on the feminine’.84 Her selfportraits often included elements of dress from both genders. For example, in Family Portrait II (1933), she dons black trousers with high-heeled red shoes and she may be wearing either black lounging pyjamas or a pantsuit.85 In either case, the two-piece ensemble is sleek, like a man’s suit, giving her body the lean and elegant lines of la garçonne while also asserting her femininity with high-heeled red shoes.86 Her androgynous look contrasts with the dress of other members of her family who wear more traditional attire, with her sisters dressed in slim-fitting long evening gowns and her mother in an old-fashioned Victorian-era dress. Susan Fillin-Yeh notes that Stettheimer’s depiction of herself in androgynous attire is a self-conscious construction of ‘a consummate [female] dandy’s personifications’ and thus ‘offer[s] evidence of the very acceptability of role and rule changes in the New York art world of the 1910s and 1920s, among a crowd that prized personal and artistic leeway and room to maneuver’.87 Duchamp and Stettheimer were close friends, and Duchamp appeared in several of Stettheimer’s artworks, including La Fête à Duchamp (1917), Sunday Afternoon in the Country (1917), Portrait of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy (1923) and Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1923–1926). Duchamp also acted as curator of a posthumous exhibition of Stettheimer’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1946,88 and this signifies that the relationship with Stettheimer was both close and important to him. The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) was an intimate friend of both Duchamp and Man Ray. Freytag-Loringhoven made her body her canvas and adopted radical costumes that were admired by her group of ‘gender-sensitive colleagues, friends, and admirers’ that included Duchamp.89 The Baroness often wore found objects like soup cans, soup spoons and tailgates as part of her costume (Figure 3.13). And as her friend Berenice Abbott later recounted: ‘She invented and introduced trousers with pictures and ornaments painted on them. This was an absolute outrage. I didn’t dare dress like that’.90 Two images of Freytag-Loringhoven appeared in the 1921 issue of New York Dada. The two rectangular black and white photographs, about the size of cartes de visite, are stacked vertically in the upper-left corner of the page and were printed alongside an ‘ad’ that reads ‘DON’T MISS Kurt Schwitters and other ANONYMPHS at the SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME, INC., 19 East 47th Street, New York’ and a Dada poem (printed upside down) called ‘YOURS WITH DEVOTION, trumpets and drums’.91 Although there were no associated photo credits, the images have been attributed to Man Ray. In one photo, the Baroness has bobbed hair and wears a hat ornamented with feathers and beaded fringe that was pulled low on her head to frame her eyes. She wears a long gold chain necklace and appears to be naked from the waist up; in her right hand, she grips a strand of black beads. Her gaze is direct and unsmiling and there is a strong resemblance to Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy for Belle Haleine. In the other photo, she is portrayed in profile, and in this

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Figure 3.12  Photographer unknown, Florine Stettheimer, ca. 1917–1920. Image in public domain.

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photo her hair is much shorter and cut like a man’s. Her frame is slender, and she could be a man, except that the nipple of one breast is erect while the other breast is cropped out of the image. There is no text underneath and the meaning of the image is deliberately left ambiguous. In both images there is a strong sense of androgyny notably conceived within the era of la garçonne. Sculptor Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) also embraced an androgynous look and challenged gender norms (Figure 3.14). Born in Ohio, Abbott cut her hair in 1917 while still in high school, calling it her ‘first ever act of rebellion’ and a ‘glorious moment’ that let her feel ‘lighter and freer’.92 After moving to New York, she, like many other liberated women of the time living in the Village, including her friend Baroness Elsa, not only ‘dressed in masculine clothes’ but adopted ‘a code of free behaviour and manner, dress, and relationships that set them apart from convention’.93 While seated in a café in New York, Abbott was approached by Man Ray, who had only recently turned to photography to supplement his income and was looking for subjects to practise on. He asked Abbott to pose for him, winning a prize of $10 for his portrait of Abbott titled Portrait of a Sculptor in an exhibition presented in the Wannamaker department store.94 It was Man Ray who introduced Abbott to Duchamp. And it was Duchamp who encouraged Abbott’s efforts to become a sculptor and later sought her help in casting pieces of a chess set that he had designed.95 One of her first sculptures – Lady in a Hoop Skirt (1920) – illustrates her sensitivity to the extremes of women’s fashions.96 In spite of Duchamp’s support, Abbott initially struggled to make a living through her artwork and took a job as Man Ray’s assistant in his Paris studio in 1923. According to her biographer Julia van Haaften, Abbott ‘likely helped Man Ray and Duchamp’ with the production of Monte Carlo Bond (1924) since she was working as Man Ray’s assistant at the time; Van Haaften suggests that Abbott ‘may have printed and trimmed the little photos for the thirty copies that Duchamp signed as himself and as his alter ego Rrose Sélavy’.97 It was not long thereafter that Abbott set up an independent practice as a photographer. Artist/illustrator Clara Tice (1888–1973) was dubbed ‘the uncrowned Queen of Greenwich Village’ by Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield.98 The slender, flat-chested and petite Tice was a fashion trendsetter, having cut her hair into a bobbed style in 1908 for the sake of convenience – more than a decade before it was considered fashionable to do so.99 Tice selected her clothing so she could ‘do things’, and was an early adopter of rolled stockings, dresses with shorter hemlines and items of menswear, taking ‘issue with women who thought these styles were immodest’.100 In 1915, Tice achieved a different sort of notoriety after her paintings and drawings of nude women were confiscated by Anthony Comstock, the founder of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. This event catapulted her to fame, such that her photo appeared in the same issue of Vanity Fair (Figure 3.15) as the announcement of Marcel Duchamp’s arrival in New York. Marie T. Keller suggests that it is likely that Tice and Duchamp ‘met in the offices of the magazine, where she went often to submit her illustrations’ and over the next two years, Tice and Duchamp ‘were regular participants in the cultural and social life of Greenwich Village’.101 Duchamp introduced Tice to the Arensberg salon in 1917, where she met Henri-Pierre Roché, Edgard Varèse and others; Tice also participated in the Independents’ Exhibition of 1917 and contributed her portrait of Varèse to The Blind Man.102

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Figure 3.13  George Grantham Bain Collection, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhaven, ca. 1920–1925. Library of Congress, Washington. Image in public domain.

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Figure 3.14  Photographer unknown, Portrait of Berenice Abbott, ca. 1920s. Getty Images / Keystone France.

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In rendering her modernist abstractions of the human form, she asserted her own unique graphic style – one that was described by a critic as inhabiting ‘a naturalness so unbridled [that it] is apt to frighten the citizens of the land of the free’.103 Her photograph and her illustrations appeared regularly in Vanity Fair.104 She was so ‘highly regarded and so instantly recognizable as one of those “queer artists”’ that she was given the role of ‘Clara’, playing herself, in the Greenwich Village Follies and her image was painted onto the overture curtain of the Schubert Theatre alongside Duchamp and several other avant-garde artists.105 Later in life, Tice apparently confided to family members that, for a brief time in the 1910s ‘she had “lived” with Duchamp’.106 These four women, Clara Tice, Florine Stettheimer, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Berenice Abbott, were part of Duchamp’s intimate circle and tested the boundaries of what was acceptable dress and behaviour for women. Although Vogue celebrated and promoted the fashionable look of androgyny within its pages, as discussed earlier, Angela J. Latham reminds us that American society expressed ideological concerns and even legal arguments over what were viewed as immodest and grotesque fashions at that time.107 Latham observed that society women ‘from all over the United States were banding together to condemn such vulgar fashions of women’s apparel that do not tend to cultivate innate modesty, good taste, or good morals’.108 This documentation of such efforts to prohibit the wearing of fashions seen as immodest and immoral serves as a reminder that the youthful and body-baring fashions of the early 1920s were initially met with considerable resistance. In this light, the early adoption of the androgynous attire, behaviours and freedoms of la garçonne by Tice, Stettheimer, Von Freytag-Loringhoven and Abbott can be read as subversive acts that challenged the hegemonic norms of society. And thus, Duchamp’s emulation of this look in transforming his body into his female alter ego can be situated within this context, such that his incomplete transformation can be read as a form of emulation or parody of his circle of female friends. In dressing as a woman and authoring his works as Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp engaged in parody, since it is in parody that the original is recontextualized through humour. Gender parody is itself a paradox, ‘a fantasy of a fantasy’ that, as Butler notes, serves to reveal ‘that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin’.109 The imitation is a circular displacement of identity without resolution, such that this ‘perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization’ and in this way disrupts the notion of a natural gender.110 Foucault echoes this sentiment in asking: ‘Do we truly need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative’ even though ‘one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures’.111 Clothing is a key element of signalling gender and, in cross-dressing, the notion of natural gender is subverted through the fashioning of the body to adopt the signifiers of masculinity, femininity or androgyny. In the end, Duchamp’s masquerade as a woman adopts the intellectual stance of the dandy as part of his strategy of subversive irony in that he is neither man nor woman, but man as woman and a parody of himself that displaces the original. In writing about cross-dressing, Butler observes: ‘As Figure 3.15  Page 60 from September 1915 issue of Vanity Fair with drawings by Clara Tice and photograph of Tice by unknown photographer. Courtesy of Condé Nast.

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imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself’.112 Although intended for a different context, these words can be applied here to interpret Duchamp’s use of his body within his artistic praxis. For each of the images in which Duchamp engaged in masquerade and captured that act in photographic form, he used his body as a readymade to signal his multiple identities within his avant-garde circle; like his readymades that challenged and subverted the notion of the original and the copy, both of his personas – Duchamp as the Baudelairian dandy and Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy – harnessed the transformative power of clothing to extend his experiments on the parameters of the readymade and mock the myth of originality. In using his body as a rectified readymade, Duchamp’s performance of identity emerges as a strategy to conflate his art and his life. To further unpack this conflation of art and life, the chapters that follow will delve into the concept of the readymade itself, and thereafter consider one item from Duchamp’s wardrobe – the waistcoat –that was transformed from an item of clothing into a readymade work of art.

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1 Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp) in ‘Men before the Mirror’ reproduced in Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand Du Sel), ed. Michel Sanoullet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 188. 2 Herbert Molderings, Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85: An Incunabulum of Conceptual Photography, trans. John Brogden (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2013), 71. 3 Anne Rittenhouse, ‘On with the Masque!’, Vogue (New York) 42, no. 12 (December 15, 1913): 19. 4 According to the New York Times, Webster Hall was designated a historic landmark in 2008. The structure, located at 119–125 East 11th Street, was built in 1886 of red brick and was the site of many masquerade balls in the 1910s. Aside from Duchamp, artists Charles Demuth and Man Ray were also known to have frequented the hall. See ‘New Protected Buildings include Webster Hall’, New York Times (online), March 18, 2008. 5 This event took place at Webster Hall. According to Francis M. Naumann, Duchamp was awarded a booby prize for his costume but what he or Tice wore was not described. See Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada: 1915–1923 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 118–119. Clara Tice was later photographed in costume for a January 1917 ball hosted by Vanity Fair in which she wore an Egyptian-inspired costume. The caption reads: ‘Clara Tice: Whose black and white sketches (and black and white cats) are familiar objects of worship in the byways of Washington Square, as well as in the text pages of Vanity Fair. On the night of the ball Miss Tice’s neck and arms were painted in brilliant, resplendent silver’. See ‘Vanity Fair Gives a Party’, Vanity Fair, January 1917, 54. 6 ‘All Countries and Colors Seen at Rogue’s Ball: Greenwich Village Celebrates Lucky Friday in Wide Range of Fancy Dress Costumes’, Women’s Wear (New York) 13, no. 77 (September 30, 1916), 16. This article does not identify the names of any of the attendees at the ball. 7 See ‘The Blind Man’s Ball’, The Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917): 2. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 See Calvin Tompkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 185. Ellipses added. Tomkins also notes that Beatrice Wood wore an elaborate beaded dress while performing Russian dances learned from Pavlova’s dancing master.

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11 Roché’s manuscript Victor was unpublished during his lifetime; this work is considered to be Roché’s ‘roman à clef about Marcel Duchamp and the Arensberg circle in New York during the First World War’. In this manuscript, Roché also describes their preparations for the Florentine Ball at the Vanderbilt in which Victor (Duchamp) dressed as an astronomer, Pierre (Roché) as a nobleman and Patricia (Wood) in a ‘dazzling tunic’. In preparation for this event, Victor is described as organizing Pierre’s costume and requesting a quilted doublet. See Henri-Pierre Roché, 3 New York Dadas + The Blind Man, introduced by Dawn Ades (London: Atlas Press, 2019), 7, 45–51, 79. Roché’s choice of Victor as a nickname for Duchamp was traced to a fancy dress ball that Roché attended with Duchamp in 1916; according to Naumann, ‘Roché was so impressed by the artist’s unstinting generosity, he started calling him Victor (from the word “victorious”), a name he and a few select friends eventually shortened to “Totor.”’ See Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915–1923 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), 110. 12 Efrat Tseelon, ‘Introduction: Masques and Identities’, in Masquerade and Identities: Essays on gender, sexuality and marginality, ed. Efrat Tseelon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 2. 13 Ibid., 3–5. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Naumann defines the rectified readymade as: ‘a readymade produced by “correcting” or in other ways introducing slight adjustments and/or alterations to a given object in order to complete it’. Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1999), 299. 16 Duchamp signed two works with this pseudonym in 1920. The first was Fresh Widow in which the leather-clad door frame was inscribed with a copyright notice printed on the doorsill. The second work was a birdcage filled with marble cubes, Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? See Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 85. 17 Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1959), 3. 18 Duchamp quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), 64. Ellipsis added. 19 See ‘Behind the Name: Popular Names in United States’. Accessed 17 February 2021 at https:// www.behindthename.com/name/rose/top/united-states. As well, the popularity of the name was captured in song in 1921 when Fanny Brice sang Second-Hand Rose at the Ziegfeld Follies. This popular song is about the wearing of second-hand clothes, including ‘second-hand pearls’, ‘second-hand curls’ and another woman’s ‘last year’s coat’. Although the lyrics seem to closely echo Duchamp’s clothing selections for his photographs with Man Ray, the song would have been released after Duchamp made the first series of images with Man Ray in 1920. I thank Marlis Schweitzer for bringing this to my attention. For the lyrics to this song, see https://genius.com/ Fanny-brice-second-hand-rose-lyrics. Accessed 17 February 2021. 20 Duchamp quoted in Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 64–65. Ellipses added. 21 Deborah Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray: Reconsidering the Alter Ego of Marcel Duchamp’, artjournal 72 (Spring 2013): 82. 22 Quoted in Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray’, 83. See also David Hopkins, ‘Men before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity’, Art History 21, no. 3 (September 1998): 307. 23 Darcy Larum, ‘Hermaphroditic Plant Info’, Gardening Know How. Accessed 17 February 2021 at https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/info/hermaphroditic-plant-information.htm. 24 Amy de la Haye, ‘Introduction: The Rose’, in Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion (London: Yale University Press, 2020), 19.

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25 Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray’, 81. 26 Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 85. 27 In 1920, Man Ray had only recently begun to explore the medium of photography and describes recruiting Berenice Abbott, Edgard Varèse and Duchamp as his first models. See Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988), 76–82. 28 Letter to Katherine Dreier dated 20 February 1921. See Man Ray: Writings on Art, ed. Jennifer Mundy (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2016), 61. 29 In his autobiography, Man Ray does not make any mention of the creation of the portraits of Duchamp in 1920–1921; instead, he discusses his transition from being a painter to working as a photographer and mentions that he asked friends, ‘mostly writers and painters’, to sit for him and gave his prints away. See Man Ray, Self Portrait, 80. It is clear that Duchamp maintained creative control in another portrait project he undertook with the photographer Percy Rainford on 13 January 1945; this was documented by Frederick Kiesler in an undated typewritten manuscript intended for publication in View: The Modern Magazine that went unpublished. The manuscript is included as an appendix in Molderings, Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85, 97–111. 30 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 31 Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (eds), Feeling Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 7. 32 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 21. 33 John Berger, Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 64. 34 Molderings, Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85, 38. 35 In the photograph Adam and Eve (1924–1925), also created in collaboration with Man Ray, Duchamp appears nude as Adam alongside actress Bronja Perlmutter as Eve. In this black and white photograph, Duchamp’s hairless body is revealed, and he is as slender as a pubescent girl or boy. Duchamp also drew this image in his late series of etchings, as discussed in Chapter 1. 36 Johnson describes Duchamp as wearing ‘fake jewelry, a cloth coat, and an unfashionable, badly fitting, brimmed and feathered hat’. See Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray’, 92. 37 Marcel Duchamp quoted in Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 35. 38 ‘Vogue of Bobbed Hair: Of Course Greenwich Village Lassies Wear Short Locks, But Society’s Doing it Too’, New York Times, June 27, 1920. The reporter also notes that some artists like Clara Tice and Frances Gifford had embraced bobbed hair as far back as 1908. 39 See, for example, ‘The Beneficent Rule of Bobbed Hair’, Vogue (New York) 22, no. 60 (March 15, 1921): 42–43. 40 There are numerous examples of coats with this type of soft, face-framing collar that date between 1919 and 1925 in museum collections. See for example, several cloth evening coats by Maria Monaci Gallenga and Paul Poiret with similar collars dating to the early 1920s in the collection of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, including Object #1989.165.1 and Object #C.I.61.40.4. The Kyoto Costume Institute in Tokyo also has a similar cloth coat by Paul Poiret (Object AC#6279 89-1). For similar hats with vertical feather ornamentation from 1920s, see for example, Black hat with feathers by Kurzman in the collection of the Costume Institute at The Met (Object #C.I.45.77.4). See also Silk velvet hat with ostrich feathers by Caroline Reboux in the collection of LACMA (Object #48.30.5). 41 In Man Ray’s autobiography, he indicates his decision to try his hand at photography in 1920, even though he initially found the idea of photographing the work of others to be ‘repugnant’. Sometime later that year, he decided to photograph the dust on Duchamp’s work-in-progress The

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Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. In his detailed account of that photograph, he notes that he opened the shutter and came back an hour later, a technique that indicates that he did not have any lighting equipment at the time. See Man Ray, Self Portrait, 76–79. 42 Johnson identifies the hat worn by Duchamp as a cloche – a close-fitting bell-shaped hat; however, the cloche did not gain widespread popularity until about 1922. Johnson also identifies Duchamp’s headscarf as the work of Sonia Delaunay. See Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray’, 92. While it is possible that she was the designer (since Delaunay was creating textile works in 1920), her work was not widely available until 1924–1925. See Juliet Bellow, Sonia Delaunay (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 111. 43 Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), 693. Deborah Johnson has indicated that there is some lingering controversy over whether the ‘feminine qualities [of the hands] were the result of retouching or recombining negatives, rather than Everling’s presence’. Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray’, 92. 44 Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray’, 93. 45 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 45. 46 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2011), 134, 131–150. 47 Ibid., 17. 48 See Amelia Jones, ‘The Ambivalence of Rrose Sélavy and the (Male) Artist as “Only the Mother of the Work”’, in Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 146–190. 49 Ahuva Belkin, ‘The scarf and the toothache: cross-dressing in the Jewish folk theatre’, in Masquerade and Identities: Essays on gender, sexuality and marginality, ed. Efrat Tseelon (New York: Routledge, 2001), 107–108. 50 Marcel Duchamp quoted in Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros, c’est la vie, a Biography (New York: Whitson Publishing Company, 1981) 176. 51 Tomkins, Duchamp, 218. 52 In 1915, Charlie Chaplin dressed as a woman in the film The Woman. Duchamp was a great fan of Chaplin films, as has been noted by several Duchamp biographers and scholars, including Francis M. Naumann, ‘Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites’, in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 43. 53 Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 85. Adrian Sudhalter interprets the images of Duchamp dressed as Rose/Rrose in relation to the popularity of French perfume in America; with French perfume linked to sophistication and feminine identity. See Adrian Sudhalter, ‘R/rose Recontextualized: French and American Identity and the Photographic Portraits for Dadaglobe and New York Dada’, in aka Marcel Duchamp: Meditations on the Identities of an Artist, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. Mcmanus (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014), 38. 54 Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 86. 55 In an interview with Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp recounted that the readymades ‘were not chosen because they looked nice or were artistic or in conformity to my taste … So that makes the selection much more difficult, because you can’t help but choose things that please you’. Marcel Duchamp quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (Brooklyn: Badlands Unlimited, 2013), 54. 56 Founded in Paris in 1852, a New York office opened in 1868. See ‘History of Rigaud Perfumes’. Accessed 8 February 2021 at https://www.bougies-rigaud.com/en/history-of-rigaud-perfumes.html

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57 ‘Poiret Perfumer Vies with Poiret Couturier’, Women’s Wear Daily, April 7, 1920. 58 Duchamp’s close friend Francis Picabia was a childhood friend of the designer. See Nancy J. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 38. Poiret was also instrumental in helping Man Ray find work when he first moved to Paris in July 1921, something that Duchamp acknowledged in his interview with Pierre Cabanne; see Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 66. Man Ray discusses Poiret at length in his autobiography, including his first meeting with the designer; he indicates that at that time he had neither lights nor access to a darkroom and Poiret not only supplied lights but also allowed Man Ray to use the attic of the atelier as a darkroom. See Man Ray, Self Portrait, 100–110. 59 Christie Mayer Lefkowith, Paul Poiret and his Rosine Perfumes (New York: Editions Stylissimo, 2007). 60 ‘Paul Poiret Here to Tell of his Art, Parisian Creator of Gowns Arrives on the Provence for a Lecture Tour Here’, New York Times, September 21, 1913. 61 Troy, Couture Culture, 298. 62 James W. McManus, ‘Not seen and/or less seen: Hiding in front of the Camera’, in Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. Mcmanus (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 75. 63 Naomi Sawelson-Gorse reads this publication to be ‘the male’s retort to female dadaists and feministic discourse’ at a time when women’s issues, including suffrage and birth control, were changing the dynamic of Euro-American society. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ‘Preface’ to Women in Dada, Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), xvii. 64 In his recollection of the design of New York Dada, Man Ray wrote: ‘Aside from the cover which he designed, he left the rest of the make-up [of the magazine] to me, as well as the choice of contents’. See Man Ray, Self Portrait, 87. 65 See Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 150. Jones and many other authors do not consider the size of this image in their analysis; however, the small size of the image on the perfume bottle readymade or the cover of New York Dada actually makes it very difficult to discern the details. 66 Jones, Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 155. 67 Ibid., 156. 68 Ibid., 160. 69 For one of many observations of the artist’s predilection for humour, see Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 96. 70 Duchamp quoted in Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 85. 71 Marquis, Marcel Duchamp, 194. 72 Johnson, ‘R(r)ose Sélavy as Man Ray’, 87. 73 Jane Mulvagh, Vogue History of 20th Century Fashion (London: Viking, 1988), 50. 74 Ibid. 75 Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 116. 76 In 1913, a print ad for Bonwit Teller is the first to use the term ‘flapper’ in the pages of Vogue (New York); see Advertisement: Bonwit Teller, Vogue (New York) 41, no. 11 (June 1, 1913): 5. In 1914, the term is explained as follows: ‘London has an apt term – “the flapper” – for the girl who has reached the “awkward period,” whose figure between the ages of 12 and 16, still undeveloped, is difficult to attire with the proper chic’. See Advertisement: Bonwit Teller, Vogue (New York) 43, no. 7 (April 1, 1914): 4.

Dressing Up

77 Mildred R. Cram, ‘The Extreme Adolescence of America’, Vogue (New York) 49, no. 3 (February 1, 1917): 66. 78 This novel presents the story of an emancipated young French woman who, after finding out her fiancé was cheating on her, decides to live her life on her own terms and has multiple sexual partners including a lesbian love affair. The book was seen as an affront to social norms and resulted in considerable scandal in France, such that the author, Victor Margueritte, was stripped of his Légion d’honneur. An edited version of the book which omitted passages describing sexual acts was published for an American audience as The Bachelor Girl in 1923. See Victor Margueritte, The Bachelor Girl, trans. Hugh Burnaby (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1923). It is also notable that Théophile Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, which includes cross-dressing, was translated and published in English in 1921. In the preface, the reader is cautioned that ‘If your wife or your daughter were to open it, she would be lost. It is a dangerous book, and it counsels vice’. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), ix. Gautier’s donning of a scarlet red waistcoat will be discussed in a subsequent chapter. 79 Jean Cocteau quoted in Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ‘La Jeune Fille Américaine and the Dadaist Impulse’, in Women in Dada, Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 5. 80 Hutton Turner, ‘La Jeune Fille Américaine and the Dadaist Impulse’, 17. 81 See Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, Poiret (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2007). Also see Poiret ‘Exhibition Overview’, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accessed 8 February 2021 at https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2007/poiret. 82 See curatorial notes for Flonflon, Paul Poiret, silk, metallic thread, feathers, ca. 1920 in the collection of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Object #2005.191. 83 Parker Tyler, Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), 91. 84 Ibid., 98. 85 Stettheimer’s painting Family Portrait II is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Object #8.1956. 86 In this painting Stettheimer shows herself in profile, so the precise details as to what she is wearing are unclear. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was fashionable to wear lounging pyjamas, an ensemble consisting of trousers with a matching top, often made of silk or silk satin. See examples of lounging pyjamas from this period in the collection of the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Object #1985.273a-c as well as Object #2009.300.2569ab. 87 Susan Fillin-Yeh, ‘Dandies, Marginality, and Modernism: Georgia O’Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Other Cross-Dressers’, in Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture, ed. Susan Filllin-Yeh (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 137. 88 In the acknowledgements of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue, Duchamp is described as ‘Guest Director’. Henry McBride, Florine Stettheimer (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1946), unpaginated. 89 Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity, A Cultural Biography (Boston: MIT Press, 2003), 197. 90 Berenice Abbott quoted by Gisela Baronin Freytag V. Loringhoven in ‘Afterword’, in Gammel, Baroness Elsa, 394. 91 Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, New York Dada (New York: April 1921), 4. Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris.

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92 Julia Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 11. 93 Ibid., 36. 94 Ibid., 36–37. 95 Ibid., 37. 96 According to Van Haaften, this sculpture has since been lost. A photograph of it is included in Van Haaften’s book on page 32. 97 Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott, 79. 98 Marie T. Keller, ‘Clara Tice, Queen of Greenwich Village’, in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender and Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 417. 99 See ‘Vogue of Bobbed Hair’, New York Times, June 27, 1920. The American dancer Irene Castle is generally credited with being the first to cut her hair in this style in May 1914; see Marlis Schweitzer, ‘Accessible Feelings, Modern Looks: Irene Castle, Ira L. Hill, and Broadway’s Affective Economy’, in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 204–238. 100 Keller, ‘Clara Tice’, 420. 101 Ibid., 425. 102 Naumann, New York Dada, 118–119. 103 Keller, ‘Clara Tice’, 417. 104 Tice’s portrait appeared in Vanity Fair at least three times. See ‘The Blacks and Whites of Clara Tice’, Vanity Fair, September 1915, 60. ‘Vanity Fair Gives a Party: Fancy Dress, of Course and Only for its Youthful and Feminine Staff of Artists’, Vanity Fair, January 1917, 54; ‘The Seven Vanities of Vanity Fair: Portraits of a Few of Our Most Revered and Redoubtable Staff Artists’, Vanity Fair, December 1918, 41. For the 1918 photograph, she wore a man’s military jacket with jodhpurs and held a riding crop in her hands. 105 Keller, ‘Clara Tice’, 429. Deborah Saville also notes that Tice was the stereotype for the character Ysetta in the play Hobohemia, a 1919 play about a young woman who moves to Greenwich Village to explore an alternative lifestyle. See Deborah Saville, ‘Freud, Flappers and Bohemians: The Influence of Modern Pscyhological Thought and Social Ideology on Dress, 1910–1923’, in Dress 30 (2003): 70. 106 Keller, ‘Clara Tice’, 425. 107 See Angela J. Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 18–63. 108 Latham, Posing a Threat, 49. 109 Butler, Gender Trouble, 188. 110 Ibid. 111 Michel Foucault, ‘Introduction’, in Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), vii. 112 Butler, Gender Trouble, 188.

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Made to Measure: Recalibrating the Readymade

4

It [the readymade] seemed perfect for these things that weren’t works of art, that weren’t sketches, and to which no art terms applied. That’s why I was tempted to make them.1 –Marcel Duchamp

Figure 4.1  Rrose Sélavy mannequin by Marcel Duchamp, Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. Installation photo, Man Ray, 1938. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

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The preceding chapters have considered Duchamp’s acute attention to the fashioned body in his drawings and in his presentation of self, both in the public realm and within the circle of the avantgarde. This important thread within his oeuvre frames the readymade in a new light, particularly since the word itself was, prior to Duchamp’s usage of the term in reference to his creative practice, linked to clothing manufacture. Towards the end of his life, the artist said: ‘I’m not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn’t the most important single idea to come out of my work’.2 The literature on the readymade is vast, with much emphasis given to how these provocative objects challenged the prevailing notions of aesthetics, authorship, craft and originality associated with high art. This chapter fills a notable gap in addressing the remarkable connections between the readymade and clothing. It was not long after Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915 that he chose the term ‘readymade’, a word long associated with the mass manufacture of garments, to describe his studio experiments with utilitarian objects like a bicycle wheel, bottle rack and snow shovel that he had assigned the status of artworks. Although Duchamp’s acute attention to the nuances of language have been duly noted,3 the etymology of the word ‘readymade’ in clothing manufacture is not often mentioned in the analysis of Duchamp’s readymades. As was noted earlier, several of his readymades have explicit links to clothing, including the readymade typewriter cover displayed in a parody of a woman’s skirt Traveler’s Folding Item (1916); the coat rack Trébuchet (1917); and the hat rack Porte-Chapeau (1917). In 1938, Duchamp dressed a female mannequin as Rrose Sélavy in readymade clothing from his own wardrobe (Figure 4.1) for display in the International Exhibition of Surrealists in Paris. Between 1957 and 1961, during a period in which the concept of the readymade began to achieve wider recognition, Duchamp assigned the status of readymade to four waistcoats under the series title Made to Measure and in so doing gave further emphasis to the link between clothing and the readymade. This thought-provoking Made to Measure series has largely been overlooked in the scholarship on Duchamp, even though these waistcoat readymades are conspicuously documented and positioned within Duchamp’s final set of notes. However, as we shall see, there is significant evidence that this waistcoat series was a beguiling gesture by Duchamp that not only extends the parameters of the readymade but also challenges the notion that art cannot be worn. Duchamp, whose goal was ‘neither an abstract negation of art nor a romantic reconciliation with life but a perpetual testing of the conventions of both’,4 arguably acknowledged and extended the parameters of the readymade into clothing with this gesture. This chapter surveys the gendered history and etymology of the readymade; reviews the timeline and means by which Duchamp’s readymades came to be known; describes the waistcoat readymades in relation to notable precedents, including the use of Duchamp’s own waistcoat in dressing Rrose Sélavy; and analyses Duchamp’s final set of notes related to clothing. Ultimately this analysis positions Duchamp’s Made to Measure series as a calculated effort by the artist, intended as a recalibration of the readymade to include clothing.

The History and Etymology of the Readymade Duchamp first used the term ‘readymade’ in a letter to his sister Suzanne in January 1916 when he wrote: ‘Now, if you have been up to my place, you will have seen, in the studio, a bicycle wheel and a

Made to Measure

bottle rack … I have bought various objects in the same taste and I treat them as “readymades.” You know enough English to understand the meaning of “ready-made” that I give these objects’.5 As we shall see, the meaning of ‘readymade’, at this particular moment in history, was closely linked to the mass manufacture of clothing and carried negative associations in terms of inferior taste and quality, especially in relation to women’s clothing. In its original usage, the term ‘readymade’, also spelled as ‘ready made’ and ‘ready-made’, described a piece of clothing, furniture or other article made to standard size and specification, rather than made to order.6 The earliest recorded use of the term in reference to clothing appeared in the seventeenth century when garments were laboriously constructed by hand.7 With the invention of mass production processes for the manufacture of clothing, a two-tiered system developed which differentiated custom-made clothing from mass-produced clothing. It was during this initial period of mechanization that the term ‘readymade’ became correlated with low quality and taste and this negative association lingered into the first decade of the twentieth century when Duchamp coopted the term into his art practice. In light of Duchamp’s penchant for gender-crossing, it is notable that the history of readymade clothing is linked to the articulation of gender norms and expectations through dress. Even though the invention of the sewing machine in the mid-nineteenth century might have been harnessed to mass-produce clothing for either gender, the manufacturing of ready-made clothing evolved along distinct gender and class lines.8 The first readymade clothing made for women consisted of garments like cloaks and capes that did not require close fit, while middle-class men readily adopted all manner of readymades, including the sack or lounge suit.9 During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the sharp contrast between the relatively austere clothing worn by men and the distinctly feminine silhouettes and heavily embellished clothing for women served to create a visible and ‘omnipresent metaphor for attempting to maintain the power relations of separate spheres’.10 The advice columns and advertisements of the period, especially in the last decade of the century, reflected this rhetoric, encouraging women to express their femininity through custommade clothing, while advertisements aimed at men aligned the adoption of the readymade suit with masculine ideals, democracy, progress and change. It would not be until the 1910s that cultural forces and capitalism opened the readymade market to the production of women’s clothing, with advertising playing a significant role in overcoming the lingering association with inexpensive and shoddy clothing, especially amongst the elite.11 In the October 15, 1912 issue of Vogue titled ‘The Excellence of the Ready-made’, the author observes a recent improvement in quality of the ready-made garments linked to an evolution of production processes, noting that ‘In the early days of ready-made clothes, the makers used poor materials, poorer models, and attempted an elaboration which not only marked their products as wholly of the shop but made them utterly impossible for women of good taste’.12 This rhetoric assured women with good taste that it was possible at long last to purchase a ready-made garment without concerns about quality.13 The evident association between clothing, taste and the readymade is remarkable in light of Duchamp’s choice of this particular word to describe objects like the urinal and typewriter cover as works of art. In 1915, when Duchamp moved to New York, the idea of readymade clothing was well established, especially within menswear. Men’s stores published ads in favour of buying readymade suits in order

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to save time as compared to the lengthy process involved in creating a custom-made, made-tomeasure garment.14 Although tailors countered with ads about quality and fit,15 it did not take long before the readymade came to be substituted with ‘ready-to-wear’, a term that means ‘readymade for sale, rather than made to order’.16 In describing clothing as ‘ready-to-wear’ rather than ‘ready-made’, mass-produced clothing’s association with mass production or ill-fitting and cheap clothing was masked. The earliest recorded usage of the word ‘ready-to-wear’ in an American publication was on 18 November 1890 in an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune which read: ‘Because of the marked economy as compared with Tailor’s prices, and yet without compromising your standard of dress, there is too such a satisfaction in finding reliable, well-made, stylish, ready-to-wear garments’.17 Over time, the use of the term ‘ready-to-wear’ increasingly replaced the word ‘ready-made’ and a very significant shift in the number of ads and features using the term ‘ready-to-wear’ occurs around 1913, only a few years before Duchamp’s arrival in New York.18 Notably, the term ‘ready-to-wear’ is still used to this day, in the context of differentiating such clothing from haute couture. As this brief etymology of the readymade has shown, by 1916 the use of the word ‘readymade’ had largely been supplanted by the term ‘ready-to-wear’, thus circumventing the lingering associations of the readymade with inferior quality and taste. The association between taste and art was a matter of interest to Duchamp who described having some difficulties choosing an object with no ‘obvious aesthetic qualities’ for his first American readymade (a snow shovel he assigned the title In Advance of a Broken Arm) purchased from a hardware store in 1916.19 In a conversation with Walter Arensberg, Duchamp expressed disdain for those (like Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso) who were motivated by aesthetics and the prevailing notions of taste, saying that ‘[They are] people of taste … Even when their taste is bad’.20 Duchamp would later describe his selection of readymades as motivated by ‘visual indifference, and at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste’.21 In adopting the term ‘readymade’, a word long associated with inferior taste and quality in clothing, Duchamp harnessed language to undermine the notions of taste and value associated with art. Duchamp initially experimented with the terms he used to describe these objects since, in the letter to his sister, he uses the phrase ‘readymade sculpture’ in reference to the bicycle wheel and bottle rack in his studio, in writing ‘I bought this as a readymade sculpture’.22 In 1917, his infamous work Fountain was described as ‘a fixture’ and as ‘an ordinary article of life’ in the text of ‘The Richard Mutt Case’.23 And it would take several more decades before the word readymade came to be used more broadly to describe a work of art. The Surrealists adopted the term in 1935 in Gascoyne’s survey of Surrealism: ‘Such was Marcel Duchamp’s disgust for “art” that he invented a new form of expression, which he called Ready-Made. A Ready-Made was any manufactured object that the artist liked to choose’.24 André Breton defined the ‘Ready-made’ in 1938 in Dictionnarie abrégé du surrréalisme / The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism as ‘an ordinary object promoted to the dignity of art object simply by way of the artist’s choice’.25 However, outside of these artistic circles, the term readymade continued to be used primarily in reference to clothing production for a few more decades.26 In 1945, Duchamp’s work not only appeared on the cover of Vogue (New York) but also received laudatory attention in two influential arts and literary journals. In March 1945, the entire 54-page issue of the arts periodical View was devoted to Duchamp.27 With essays, memoirs and photographs by influential figures of the New York avant-garde, including Man Ray, Julien Levy, Mina Loy and Ettie

Stettheimer (among others), the New York publication ‘veered close to canonization’ of the artist.28 In October 1945, gallerists Harriet and Sidney Janis published the essay ‘Marcel Duchamp: Anti-artist’ in the influential British arts journal Horizon. This essay included their definition of the readymade: Ready-mades are what the name implies, complete objects which are at hand, and which by reason of the artist’s selectivity are considered by him as belonging in the realm of his own creative activity. The assumption is that the object, conveying properties which coincide with the artist’s angle of approach, is endowed as a work of art by virtue of the insight and authority of the artist’s selection. Selection is here no longer just a step in the process. It becomes a completed technique.29

This interpretation of the readymade gives considerable emphasis to the artist’s act of selection of an object on which he confers the status of art. Despite this attention to Duchamp within two influential arts journals, the significance of the readymade as an artistic output only came to be more broadly recognized by scholars, curators and art critics some years later, in concert with the publication of the first book on Duchamp by Robert Lebel in 1959.30 In a radio interview with George Heard Hamilton in 1959, the BBC interviewer begins with the comment that ‘So many people want to know about the readymades these days’.31 During his conversation with Hamilton, Duchamp reflected on the subversive quality of the readymade since it was not made by his hand: The readymade can be seen as a sort of irony … I didn’t even make it myself, as we know art means to make, hand make, to make by hand. It’s a hand-made product of man, and there instead of making, I take it readymade, even though it was made in a factory. But it is not made by hand, so it is a form of denying the possibility of defining art.32

In 1960, Duchamp admitted in an interview with curator Katherine Kuh that he was unable to come up with a satisfactory definition of the ready-made, but distinguishes between a found object as art and one that is chosen and designated as such by the artist: The curious thing about the Ready-made is that I’ve never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. Any made object, isolated from its functional meaning, can become a Ready-Made, either with or without further embellishment … My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the objet trouvé because the so-called ‘found object’ is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique. That most of my Ready-Mades were mass-produced and could be duplicated is another important difference. In many cases they were duplicated, thus avoiding the cult of uniqueness, of art with a capital ‘A’.33 Made to Measure

In this statement, Duchamp emphasizes that most of the objects that he elevated to the status of art objects were mass-produced and could be duplicated, qualities that are relevant in considering his recalibration of the readymade to include clothing with the Made to Measure series.

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In his talk ‘Apropos of “Readymades”’ delivered on 19 October 1961 at the symposium The Art of Assemblage held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Duchamp said: ‘Another aspect of the “Readymade” is its lack of uniqueness … the replica of a “Readymade” delivering the same message, in fact, nearly every one of the “Readymades” existing today is not an original in the conventional sense’.34 Here Duchamp alludes to the fact that most of the original readymades (including Bottlerack, Fountain and Bicycle Wheel) had been lost or destroyed and he had allowed a number of reproductions and replicas to be made by others, many of which he signed.35 The year 1964, the fiftieth anniversary of Duchamp’s Bottlerack, is considered a pivotal turning point in the history of the readymade. It was this year that Galleria Schwarz in Milan offered limited editions of fourteen of Duchamp’s readymades for sale. The reproductions were issued in series of eight signed and numbered copies made available for sale plus an additional two copies made for ‘author’ and ‘publisher’ plus another two copies made and reserved for exhibition.36 Unlike the original objects purchased in a store and inscribed by the artist, these recreations were meticulously constructed from precise technical drawings corrected by Duchamp and in this way further complicated the original conception of the readymade.37 Although this series met with considerable criticism at the time, this effort, as Schwarz later explained, allowed Duchamp ‘to rescue these Readymades from oblivion and at the same time restore the missing pages to the corpus of his works’.38 And as Adina Kamien-Kazhdan observes in her comprehensive study of the replication process in Remaking the Readymade (2018), it was the replicas that allowed Duchamp’s readymades to be exhibited in museums and galleries in Europe and elsewhere, which not only propelled his work into the public eye but also influenced a ‘new generation of artists, who belatedly recognized his revolutionary spirit, pioneering ideas, and continuing avant-garde status’.39 When Duchamp co-opted the term readymade into his art practice after arriving in New York in 1915, it carried prescient associations with clothing and with notions of taste. This analysis of the etymology of the readymade indicates that it took nearly half a century before the usage of the word shifted from mass-produced clothing into the canon of art history. In appropriating the term ‘readymade’ – a term linked to clothing manufacture – to describe his studio experiments with objects, Duchamp harnessed language as a tool to provocatively question the judgements of value and taste normally associated with art. As Lebel observed, Duchamp had a predilection to protest ‘against what he considers the excessive importance attached to some works of art’.40 Therefore by linking his artwork to a word associated with mass-manufactured clothing, in treating his body as a readymade in adopting various guises including his alter ego, and in later recalibrating the readymade to include clothing with the Made to Measure series, Duchamp deliberately underlined the subversive irony of the readymade as an artistic gesture.

Rrose Sélavy Wears a Readymade Waistcoat In 1938 Duchamp used his own clothing, including his waistcoat, to partially dress a blonde female mannequin (Figure 4.1). Rrose Sélavy appeared thus for the first time in public as one of sixteen mannequins on display in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition (17 January – 24 February 1938)

Made to Measure

at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris. This exhibition, which was unlike any other exhibition that had preceded it and bore no resemblance to any of the Surrealists’ previous exhibitions, has been widely acknowledged as a significant rupture in the history of exhibitions and the ideology of gallery space.41 In this chapter, I present Duchamp’s exhibition design and his choice of clothing for his mannequin as notable outputs that contextualize the waistcoat readymade series within Duchamp’s body-aware artistic practice. As générateur-arbitre (idea generator/referee) for the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, Duchamp was responsible for initiating ideas and orchestrating the scenography, including the layout and placement of the art, while also acting as referee for disputes between Surrealists.42 Duchamp reimagined the ornate and elegant interior of the gallery as a dark, damp grotto with empty coal sacks hanging from the ceiling and created an immersive and multi-sensory experience that engaged and provoked the visitor from the moment they stepped inside.43 Before visitors entered ‘one of the smartest galleries in Paris’,44 they had to pass through a long, narrow corridor lined with sixteen mannequins that had been dressed by artists vetted by Duchamp. The artists were (listed here in order of presentation): Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, Sonia Mossé, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernst, Miró, Augustin Espinoza, Wolfgang Paalen, Salvador Dalí, Maurice Henry, Man Ray, Josef Breitenbach, Léo Malet and Marcel Jean.45 The retail display mannequins dressed by the artists were slim simulacra of the female form. By this time, the Surrealists had used mannequins as a medium of artistic expression for a relatively long period, with André Breton’s citation of ‘the modern mannequin’ as a manifestation of the ‘marvelous’ documented in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism.46 The Surrealists were ‘rather choosy about the mannequins they borrowed’, having rejected ones that were considered ‘too maladroit and unlifelike’.47 Their final choices of readymade women conformed to the fashionable beauty ideal of the late 1930s and had slender white bodies, small busts and long legs, softly curled mid-length hair, pencil-like eyebrows and curled eyelashes. The mannequins used in the exhibition were borrowed from one of the grands magasins for the duration of the show, and Duchamp’s curatorial vision for the display included a sign giving credit to ‘Mannequins PLEM’, creating a highly visible link to commerce in the exhibit. Although the mannequins were later dismantled and returned, photographs by Josef Breitenbach, Raoul Ubac and Man Ray record their dressed figures during the installation.48 According to Man Ray, ‘we each out did one another with bird cages, roosters’ heads, etc. for headgear; veils, cotton wadding and kitchen utensils for clothes; I left mine nude with glass tears on the face and glass soap-bubbles on the hair’.49 Artist Georges Hugnet (1906–1974) later recounted the loving attention given by the artists to dressing their mannequins: ‘The Surrealist artists all felt they had the soul of Pygmalion. One could see the happy owners of mannequins … come in, furnished with mysterious little or big bundles, token for their beloved, containing the most unlikely presents’.50 Hugnet’s remark indicates that the artists imbued these inanimate mannequins with human qualities, fashioning them with great care. Only two of the artists dressed their mannequins in clothing or fabric: Seligmann covered his mannequin from head to toe in a nun-like swath of white fabric, with only her hands and face left exposed, while Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy was partially dressed, her legs and pubic area left bare (Figure 4.1). The other mannequins were fashioned (or violated) with all manner of objects that included a birdcage, a black bag, a dagger, wire, mushrooms and beetles.51

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On the wall behind each mannequin, Duchamp hung blue enamel street signs with the names of real and imagined streets in the city of Paris. In one of the few detailed accounts relating to these mannequins, André Masson (1896–1987), whose work the Nazis would later deem ‘degenerate’, indicated he was ‘proud to have rue Vivienne’, meaning ‘alive’, which he considered ‘a capital of Surrealist myth’.52 This narrative confirms that Duchamp had a hand in assigning the street names.53 Duchamp is also given credit for installing the wiring which illuminated his own mannequin as well as those by Dalí, Ernst, Mossé and Tanguy. The use of wiring would have required Duchamp to give thought and planning as to the layout of mannequins. Bettina Wilson, in her exhibition review for Vogue, commented on only two of the mannequins that seemed relatively innocuous in appearance in comparison with some of the others on display and her comments foreground the role of fashion in this display. About one of the mannequins that was dressed by Sonia Mossé (1897–1942),54 Wilson wrote: ‘One dummy had a chalk white body with water-lilies here and there, a green beetle on her mouth, and tiny green lobsters on her body – the whole veiled in green tulle’.55 Mossé’s ornamentation of the mannequin body with water-lilies and her use of green tulle – a semi-transparent material of fine netting used to give soft volume to evening dresses and ballet costumes – enveloped the mannequin’s body in a colourful fluffy cloud, obscuring and softening the effect of the green lobsters and green beetles underneath. Wilson also described Dalí’s mannequin, which ‘had Schiaparelli’s shocking pink knitted helmet on her head as well as a penguin on top, a broken egg on her chest, and tiny coffee-spoons all over’.56 The knitted helmet covered Dalí’s mannequin’s face in its entirety, leaving only two slits for the eyes and a small opening for the mouth; the menacing appearance of this mannequin in black and white photos was undoubtedly neutralized when seen in person, since the helmet was executed in Schiaparelli’s signature colour – a vibrant tone of pink called fuchsia. Only the year before, Schiaparelli and Dalí had collaborated on the design of Lobster Dress (1937) and the Tear Dress (1937). Wilson’s selections focus on the mannequins that might have had the greatest visual appeal to the readers of Vogue, especially those familiar with the collaboration of Schiaparelli and Dalí. Dalí was also commissioned to create another version of his mannequin for a shop window, notably on the same street as the gallery. In a photograph of the shop window, the mannequin’s face is left uncovered, and she is dressed in a softly draped, long, beaded cape that extends from her shoulders and pools on the floor. She holds an oversized flower in one hand, her naked body is ornamented with small coffee spoons like Dalí’s art gallery mannequin, and her feet are clad in men’s shoes like Duchamp’s, linking this window display to the gallery display. This extension of the display space of the art gallery into the department store highlights the significance of context in defining the object as art but also implicates them both as sites of spectacle. This type of display was soon after echoed in the New York store windows of Bonwit Teller at Sixth Avenue and 18th Street. The slippage between art gallery and shop window and the influence of the Paris exhibition in New York was noted in the article ‘Surrealism in New York shops’ published in Vogue in March 1938: ‘Current art forms creep into American shop-windows almost as soon as they do in the galleries’.57 Duchamp’s mannequin did not receive much notice, which is perhaps not surprising given that her body was not caged, encrusted or otherwise violated. With Duchamp dressing her in a fairly conventional manner in comparison to the other mannequins, she stood apart, like Duchamp himself, as a quiet referee or voyeur on this scene of female mutilation.58 According to Man Ray,

‘Duchamp simply took off his coat and hat, putting it on the figure as if it were a coat rack’, making it ‘the least conspicuous of the mannequins, but most significant of his desire not to attract too much attention’.59 Duchamp admitted to Cabanne that he had indeed used his own clothes in dressing the mannequin, whom he identified as ‘Rrose Sélavy herself’.60 She thus appeared in a public exhibition for the first time cross-dressed as a man in a shirt and tie, waistcoat, jacket, hat and Oxford brogues, and with her gender revealed by her feminine facial features, curly blonde hair, exposed pubic area and slender legs. Her breast pocket contained a small lightbulb which one reviewer described as ‘comme une blague’ (like a joke).61 Louis Kachur observes that Duchamp’s mannequin ‘has not been regarded as one of his important works and is sparsely commented on’, but reads it as a complex gesture that extends Duchamp’s use of his alter ego to sign his artworks and foreshadows the nude mannequin in Étants donnés, as well as raising the issue of gender in an exhibition that included few women artists.62 Kachur’s reading aligns with my analysis of Duchamp’s motivations for crossdressing discussed in the previous chapter. I argue that Duchamp’s mannequin can be read as a harbinger for his waistcoat series, offering us insight into how these readymades might be worn in an erotic encounter. And as we shall see, Duchamp intended these readymades to be worn.

The Waistcoat Readymades

Made to Measure

Duchamp’s series of readymade waistcoats, titled Made to Measure, was created between 1957 and 1961, an interval that coincides with broader recognition of the readymade as an artform.63 Each waistcoat was assigned the first or last name of the person that was given the waistcoat: TEENY (1957); SALLY (1958); PÉRET (1958); and BETTY (1961). Although this series of waistcoats are notably provocative as readymades because they are garments worn on the body and in this way emphasize the origins of the readymade in clothing manufacture, they have not previously been considered significant works in Duchamp’s oeuvre.64 A waistcoat, more commonly known in North America as a vest, is a sleeveless garment for the upper body that is worn under an outer garment such as a doublet, frock coat or suit jacket, and consequently may only be partially visible when worn. Waistcoats were considered an essential part of a man’s wardrobe from the middle of the seventeenth century until about the late 1960s and were sometimes embellished with embroidery or made in coordinating or contrasting fabrics, and thus offered men an opportunity to make a sartorial gesture with bright colour, bold pattern and iconographic imagery.65 For example, an extant waistcoat from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art dated to 1780–1794 (Figure 4.2) incorporates both embroidered text and iconography that alludes to the wearer’s political ideology during the tumultuous French revolutionary period.66 Although the waistcoat was typically gendered as masculine, some women co-opted this garment into their wardrobe and the fact that this garment can be worn by either man or woman is interesting in light of Duchamp’s predilection for gender play. It is also relevant that several other artists, including Théophile Gautier (1811–1879), Sonia Delaunay (1855–1979) and Fortunato Depero (1892–1960), also created and wore waistcoats as artistic gestures. In 1830, the poet, playwright and art critic Théophile Gautier (Figure 4.3) wore a scarlet red waistcoat with green trousers trimmed with black velvet to the infamous choreographed protest

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Figure 4.2  Unknown maker, Waistcoat, France, ca. 1780–1794. Los Angeles County Museum of Art,

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M.2007.211.1078. Image in public domain.

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event in 1830 in Paris, known as the Battle of Hernani, in which the ‘Romantic Army’ of artists, poets, intellectuals and students from the Latin Quarter gathered to defend Victor Hugo’s controversial play of that name against censure. In the chapter ‘La Légende du Gilet Rouge’ in his book Histoire du Romantisme (1874), Gautier marks the significance of this waistcoat and describes his painstaking efforts to select the textile, a shimmering red satin sourced from China, and to convince a reluctant tailor to make up an unusual style of waistcoat which fastened at the back.67 Although Gautier also encouraged others in the Romantic Army to dress in costumes as a strategy to irritate and scandalize the bourgeoisie, Victor Hugo noted that ‘M. Théophile Gautier was a particular insult to their eyes, in a scarlet waistcoat and with thick long hair cascading down his back’.68 Like Duchamp, Gautier explored the notion of androgyny and gender-crossing within the pages of Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), a novel loosely based on the life of Julie d’Aubigny (1670 or 1673 – 1707), a French opera singer who dressed in men’s clothing during her travels and while performing.69 This novel was translated into English and published in America in 1921, around the time that Duchamp conceived of and photographed his cross-dressing alter ego Rose Sélavy – a remarkable coincidence.

Made to Measure

Figure 4.3  Paul Nadar, Portrait of Théophile Gautier, ca. 1856. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image in public domain.

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In 1913, Sonia Delaunay designed and constructed the Robe Simultanée / Simultaneous Dress and Gilet Simultanée / Simultaneous Waistcoat.70 Assembled from irregular textile pieces in saturated colours, these garments articulated her artistic vision of Simultanism – a theory related to the enhancement of colours through thoughtful placement in relation to each other. Delaunay considered these garments an extension of her painting practice and later said: ‘I wanted to escape fashion, to do something absolutely new and modern … A dress, an overcoat, and a star are all fragments in space’.71 In wearing the dress during evenings at the fashionable Parisian ballroom where she and her husband met with other avant-garde artists in the 1910s (including Futurist Gino Severini), she presented herself as ‘a living painting, so to speak, a sculpture of living forms’, as her husband Robert Delaunay observed.72 The Delaunays also attended ‘meetings at the Duchamp brothers’ home in Puteaux’ (a suburb located in the west part of Paris) alongside figures that included Duchamp’s close friends Francis Picabia (1879–1953) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) where they discussed concepts related to the fourth dimension and linear perspective.73 There are several photographs of Sonia Delaunay from 1914 in which she appears to be wearing the Gilet Simultanée vest with a skirt (Figure 4.4), and in wearing a garment typically worn by men, she asserts her place within the male-dominated inner circle of the avant-garde.74 The Delaunays’ sartorial strategy influenced the Futurists in Milan.75 In 1914, Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Manifesto on ‘Antineutral Dress’ articulated a vision for men’s dress that would give ‘Italians joyful and bellicose clothing’ with ‘dynamic colors and patterns of fabrics’.76 In 1923, Futurist painter and sculptor Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) designed and wore colourful waistcoats with appliqués of abstracted fish or other geometric designs that had been cut and sewn onto the front panels of the vests that reflected this ethos.77 In 1924, Depero and his colleague Filippo Tommaso Marinetti were photographed wearing their colourful and eclectic waistcoats with dark sack suits, white shirts, crisp bow ties and bowler hats at the Futurist Congress in Turin (Figure 4.5). For the Futurists, their meticulously handcrafted waistcoats, jackets, trousers and ties were aesthetic expressions of the movement and intended to undermine the aesthetic of sober austerity typically displayed by men at the time.78 Gautier, Delaunay and Depero designed waistcoats for their personal use and wore them in public as artistic gestures – presenting their bodies as living sculptures. And thus, even though Duchamp was not the first to use the waistcoat as a medium of artistic expression, his decision to do so merits a closer look since Duchamp was thoughtful in where he focused his attention. As well, his stature within the annals of art history makes his deliberate recalibration of the readymade to include clothing both meaningful and notable. Like his other readymades, Duchamp purchased the four waistcoats for the Made to Measure series. In the latter part of the 1950s when Duchamp selected his first waistcoat as a candidate for readymade at the department store Lord and Taylor, men’s waistcoats were often sold as part of a three-piece tailored suit, but could also be purchased or made up as a coordinating accessory.79

Figure 4.4  Sonia Delaunay in her apartment, 1913. Snark/Art Resource.

For example, in July 1956 Vogue magazine included an article about wedding attire for bride and bridegroom, categorizing the wedding by time of day and degree of formality and in each case the bridegroom is wearing a waistcoat. For the wedding in which the couple would be ‘Marryingquietly’ (as Duchamp and Alexina ‘Teeny’ Sattler Matisse did in January 1954), the bride and groom are dressed in attire suitable for an intimate luncheon or at-home event. The bridegroom’s wedding costume is described as ‘a well-cut, dark-blue suit and waistcoat; in his buttonhole, the traditional single flower from the bride’s bouquet’.80 The waistcoat as the fashionable attire of a bridegroom is interesting in light of Duchamp’s decision to give three of the four waistcoats to married couples. Like his other readymades, Duchamp’s choice of title for the waistcoat readymade series included a verbal component or linguistic twist that reframed the object. In his talk ‘Apropos of Readymades’ in 1961, Duchamp noted the importance of this verbal element assigned to the readymade: One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the ‘readymade’. That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal. Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called ‘Readymade Aided’.81

It is this linguistic twist that directs the spectator to use their mind rather than focus on the aesthetics of the readymade. In directing the spectator of the waistcoat readymades to the phrase ‘made to measure’ in the series title, Duchamp added the requisite level of irony since the vests were purchased and not actually tailor-made for the persons who received them as gifts. Marcus Moore observes that the French term for waistcoat – gilet – is linked to the profession of giletier – ‘a vest maker or waistcoat hand, a suit-maker’s young protége’; and Moore connects this word play to the nine bachelors in Duchamp’s The Large Glass depicted ‘in suited attire, with their vests prominent’.82 The buttons are the details of the Duchamp waistcoats that have drawn the most commentary by scholars. In each case, Duchamp altered the buttons with lead typeface, spelling the first or last names of the intended recipient of the waistcoat readymade. Naumann reads this detail as being connected to Duchamp’s work in designing the catalogue for the exhibition of the Three Brothers Duchamp for the Guggenheim Museum in 1956, since the catalogue included a variety of typefaces and fluctuating margins that created a unique but unified identity, and working with typefaces for the catalogue may have sparked a similar attention to detail in the creation of the waistcoat readymades.83 Carol James interprets the typeface buttons as the gesture that transforms the wearer into a readymade, writing:

Figure 4.5  Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) proudly show their ‘Futurist’ waistcoats in Turin, photography taken from the magazine L’Illustrazione Italiana of Christmas 1953, page

Made to Measure

The letters used were typeset forms, so that the only person who could read the name was the wearer looking in a mirror. Wearing a name only you can read, you are renamed, changed in the same way a coatrack becomes a Trap [Trébuchet], a readymade … The women’s names androgenize the garments, but the mirror effect is the odd thing, the aberration that really bestows the name on the gazer.84

61, 14 January 1924 (b/w photo by unknown photographer). Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections, Florence, Italy / B ­ ridgeman Images. 123

With this paradoxical twist, Duchamp intellectualizes the work. The typeface buttons, the most visible manifestation of Duchamp’s hand, render these four waistcoats into the artist’s most personal works. By changing the buttons to typeface, the readymades were customized as gifts to his wife, daughter-in-law and his close friends and as such convey a sense of intimacy. The text spells out the name of the intended recipient, rather than a generic word like gilet, and in this way, the buttons demonstrate a deliberate effort to make the readymade personal and unique. In contrast to Duchamp’s professed indifference to the selection of object as a readymade, these items were modified with great care.

TEENY

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

Duchamp’s first waistcoat in the series, titled TEENY, was authored for his wife Alexina in the winter or spring of 1957, possibly for her birthday on 16 January.85 The waistcoat is made of green wool with a cream silk backing and lining. It has four welt pockets on the front and six buttonholes (Figure 4.6). Duchamp modified the original buttons by glueing lead typeface that spelled his wife’s nickname ‘Teeny’ in reverse.86 The bottom buttonhole is deliberately left empty.87 The label in the waistcoat

Figure 4.6  Marcel Duchamp, TEENY, 1957. Private collection. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

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is visible near the back of the neck facing and reads: ‘Lord & Taylor, The Man’s Shop, The Natural Shoulder Line, Wool Challis, Imported from England’. The presence of this label marks the garment as a readymade since at some point in time, possibly even years earlier, Duchamp purchased the garment from Lord & Taylor, an upscale department store in midtown Manhattan, located then at Fifth Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets. Similar wool waistcoats cost about $16.50 at the time.88

SALLY The second waistcoat in the series, which is also made of green wool, was titled SALLY and authored on the occasion of the marriage of Teeny’s son Paul Matisse to Sarah Barrett, also known as Sally, in December 1958.89 In an undated photograph included in Naumann’s book, the SALLY waistcoat appears to be virtually identical to the TEENY waistcoat.90 Perhaps it too was also purchased at Lord & Taylor in New York. Although it has generally been assumed that this waistcoat was made for Sally, it is signed in ink near the label ‘pour Paul Matisse / Souvenir de 27 Décembre 1958 / et ma grande affection Marcel Duchamp’.91 With this inscription, Duchamp suggests that either bride or groom might wear this garment, but as we will see later, it was Paul who wore it. Duchamp’s gift of the TEENY and SALLY waistcoat readymades to his family and the retention of these readymades within the family circle distinguish these artworks as objects of deep personal meaning and significance.

PÉRET

Made to Measure

The readymade Gilet pour Benjamin Péret is a reversible waistcoat such that it could be worn in two ways; one side is made of striped red and black cotton corduroy and the other side is made of grey flannel.92 Both sides have welt pockets, and the lining is grey satin. The waistcoat is signed and dated ‘Marcel Duchamp 1958’ with black pen at the back of the neck of the lining (Figure 4.7).93 Duchamp made this readymade in honour of his friend, the French poet Benjamin Péret, in November 1958 and indicated this with five metal typeface buttons spelling ‘Péret’ on the red/black striped side (the reverse grey side has plastic buttons that have not been altered).94 Since there are six buttonholes but only five lead-face buttons, it is evident that the artist left this gap intentionally.95 Following Péret’s death in September 1959, Arturo Schwarz, the Milan art collector, purchased the waistcoat at auction at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. He donated this waistcoat and other works by Duchamp to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1998.96 The waistcoat Gilet pour Benjamin Péret has been exhibited several times at the Israel Museum and elsewhere.97 The condition report for this waistcoat indicates that there are stains on the underarm and back as well as a loose thread at the pocket.98 Such marks are highly suggestive of wear, but it is not known whether Péret and/ or Schwarz wore it. The readymade is stored and displayed in a Plexi box, hanging on a plastic coat hanger that reads ‘amatisse’ (friendship) on the back. The catalogue record for this object in the Israel Museum indicates that the waistcoat is classified and stored as part of the museum’s modern art collection. The manner of display and the classification of the object by the Israel Museum serve as evidence that the institution recognizes this object as an artwork.

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Figure 4.7  Marcel Duchamp, PÉRET, 1958. The Israel Museum. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

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BETTY

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The readymade waistcoat BETTY was a gift from the artist to his close friend Judge Julius Isaacs on the occasion of Julius and Betty Isaacs’ fortieth wedding anniversary on 11 September 1961.99 This waistcoat is made of light brown wool in a checked pattern called Tattersall with a pink silk lining and has five buttonholes and two welt and two flap pockets on the jacket front (Figure 4.8). The five buttons were modified with lead typeface spelling ‘Betty’ and the readymade is signed ‘Marcel Duchamp / 1961’ on the inside lining.100 The waistcoat includes a maker label ‘Alfiataria & Camisaria, António Pergerajeazda, Lisbon’ on the inner pocket, suggesting that it was either purchased while Duchamp was in Europe or from a shop in New York that imported this particular waistcoat.101 Marcus Moore observes of this waistcoat that ‘the discreet act of tailoring sheds further light on an aspect of Duchamp’s oeuvre’ in that the artist was at this time involved in ‘artisanal traditions in making the erotic casts for Étant Donnés’.102

Figure 4.8  Marcel Duchamp, BETTY, 1961. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022).

Made to Measure

The waistcoat was part of a bequest to the museum by Betty Isaacs in 1983 and is now housed in the contemporary art collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.103 It has been displayed in exhibitions at the museum on four occasions.104 According to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s condition report dated 7 June 2012, the readymade waistcoat BETTY ‘displays general signs of wear associated with use’ which includes ‘soiling and discolouration from perspiration and wear at the neck, under arms and upper centre back’.105 There was also evidence of previous repairs and alterations, including extensive stitching in yellow thread in order to close the back vent.106 These marks of wear and signs of alteration suggest that the waistcoat was actively worn, but it is not clear whether it was Julius Isaacs or his wife Betty who wore it. Although the museum has a great many waistcoats included in its historic dress collection,107 it is stored in the paintings and small sculptures’ storeroom and not amongst the dress collection of the museum.108 The BETTY waistcoat readymade is identified as a sculpture in the catalogue record, indicating that this waistcoat is recognized as an artwork by the institution.

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Recalibrating the Readymade In giving these readymades to friends and family and in creating a written record of this waistcoat series, Duchamp made efforts to ensure that these works would not be overlooked or forgotten. This written documentation related to the waistcoats can be found in a series of handwritten notes that were discovered after his death in 1968 and translated and published by his son-in-law Paul Matisse in 1983. Scholars have not previously analysed this series for the many references to clothing contained therein, but I observe that these notes contain significant evidence as to the importance of the Made to Measure series within Duchamp’s oeuvre. These notes also reveal the artist’s acute sensitivity to the sensory qualities of clothing and the act of dressing. Although the notes are undated, the note about the waistcoat readymade series is written underneath a notation that references his epitaph. When Duchamp wrote this note, he was clearly aware of the passing of time and contemplating what he wanted to be inscribed on his tombstone. Referenced as Note 252 (recto),109 the epitaph and notations about the waistcoats, parts 2 and 4 of the note, read as follows (with the letters of the names written in reverse): 252 (recto). 2 Épitaphe … et d’ailleurs/ c’est toujours les autres qui meurent/ dernier 4 Sur measure 4 gilets pour homme, à cinq boutons./ TEENY PERET SALLY BETTY /

The translated version of this note reads as follows:

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

252 (recto). 2 Epitaph … and besides/ it’s always the others that die/ last 4 Made to measure 4 vests for men, with five buttons./ TEENY PERET SALLY BETTY /110

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The phrase ‘D’ailleurs/ c’est toujours les autres qui meurent’ was ultimately inscribed on Duchamp’s tombstone, which highlights the significance of this particular note. And the close positioning of the waistcoat series in relation to the wished-for epitaph offers material evidence of the magnitude of the Made to Measure series to Duchamp himself. In the preface to the publication of these notes, Anne d’Harnoncourt paints an image of Duchamp ‘sifting through a mass of apparently casual jottings and scraps of paper and taking as much care in their selection and presentation for publication as Kandinsky or Mondrian expended in the writing and editing of their extended didactic essays on their visions of a new art’.111 Although this set of notes includes many references to clothing, d’Harnoncourt notices his reference to velvet trousers but does not unpack Duchamp’s evident fascination with clothing.112 She reflects that ‘The notes are, in themselves, a fluctuating, shifting, incomplete “work” of endless fascination … and it will take readers at least [fifty years] to explore the territory to which they stake a claim’.113 Her comments anticipate the interpretation that I offer here. Although the reference to the waistcoat readymade series in Note 252 is the most significant piece of evidence of the importance of this series to the artist, Duchamp also made many other interesting observations about clothing and textiles in this set of notes. Duchamp uses clothing to

articulate his concept of ‘infrathin’ in Note 231 where he describes the infinitesimal ‘difference between the volumes of air displaced by a / clean shirt (ironed and folded) and the same shirt soiled’. In Note 44, Duchamp references ‘the sound of velvet trousers brushing together’ as another example of the concept of ‘infrathin’. In this case, he signals his sensory knowledge of this soft silky texture of velvet – a textile with deep pile, since velvet makes virtually no sound when rubbed together. Duchamp also observes in this note that he knows that moths affect the conservation of materials and mentions the iridescence of some fabrics. In Notes 9 and 25, he identifies specific terms for unusual textiles including moiré, watered silk and corduroy (the PÉRET waistcoat readymade is made of corduroy).114 These multiple references to textiles and clothing provide compelling evidence of the artist’s acute reflexivity to their sensorial properties. And as George Baker has observed, the artist’s evocative choices of textiles, notably using leather in the panes of Fresh Widow and lace as a framing device for the paintings hung in the Société Anonyme’s inaugural exhibition in 1920, point to ‘a larger interest of Duchamp in “feminine” work and textiles’.115 In Note 103, Duchamp astutely observes that clothing can be used as a mask – an idea which he initially explored in his early sketches of men in uniform and threaded into his masterwork The Large Glass. In this note, he writes that his malic gas forms ‘will have “the appearance”, the masks of / male forms, they will only be malic; the pasted – on, the decorated, the / “made in Germany,” the finery that fools the eye’.116 Here Duchamp acknowledges that clothing can be used to deceive the eye, a remarkable statement that serves as evidence that he duly considered how identity is framed and socially constructed through choices of clothing. Another remarkable piece of evidence that points to Duchamp’s deliberate recalibration of the readymade is found in Note 44 (shown here in its entirety). In this note, Duchamp acknowledges that art can be worn: 44 Moules en plis./dans le cas du coude/ Moule (à coude droit)  ex. type – pantalon porté et très marqué / de plis. (donnant une expression  sculpturale/ de l’individu qui l’a porté) / le fait de porter le pantalon, le port du/ pantalon est comparable à l’exécution/ manuelle d’une sculpture originale  Avec en plus, un renversement technique : / en portant le pantalon/ la jambe  travaille comme la main du/ sculpteur et produit un moule (au/ lieu d’un moulage) et un moule en étoffe/ qui/ s’exprime en plis – / y adapter l’infra  mince/gorge de pigeon  question de conservation des étoffes – (mites)/ ne pas les solidifier – peut être  dans certains cas  Chercher autre examples –

44 Crease molds./ in the elbow’s case/ (right elbow) Mold type ex. – worn trousers and very creased. / (giving a sculptural expression of the individual who wore them) / the act of wearing the trousers, the trouser/  wearing is comparable to the hand / making of an original sculpture

Made to Measure

The translation of this note by his son-in-law Paul Matisse reads as follows:

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Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

 With in addition, a technical inversion : / while wearing the trousers/ the leg works  like the hand of the / sculptor and produces a mold (instead / of a   molding) and a mold in cloth / which / expresses itself in creases – / adapt to this infrathin / of iridescent fabric.  Question of conservation of materials – (moths) / don’t solidify  them –  maybe in certain cases Look for other examples –117

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In this note, Duchamp makes a remarkable comparison between the wearing of trousers and the making of a sculpture, and in this way, the simple act of putting on a pair of trousers is given notable aesthetic significance. This line in Note 44 – ‘the act of wearing the trousers … is comparable to the hand / making an original sculpture’ – makes it plainly evident that Duchamp believed that art could be worn.118 It is in this final set of notes that Duchamp left traces of his sensory and intellectual encounters with clothing, articulated his opinion as to whether or not art could be worn, and took care to leave evidence of the significance of the waistcoat readymade series within his oeuvre. The unique qualities of the waistcoat readymade series were noticed by Duchamp’s son-in-law Paul Matisse, the owner of the SALLY waistcoat, who described them as a ‘triumph of creation’ in a letter to Arturo Schwarz dated 9 November 1964.119 In this letter, Matisse affirmed that the waistcoat readymade series was ‘a new and highly significant departure from established forms’ because it could be worn.120 In writing to Schwarz, Matisse invited him to share ‘the recognition of its unique meaning in Marcel’s Oeuvre’ since in ‘juxtaposing this work of 1958 with the earlier masterpieces, one recognizes immediately a very significant change!’121 Matisse observed ‘a return to the tradition of the Readymade’ and noted that the waistcoat series is ‘a striking and profound conceptual development of the early theme’ that completes Duchamp’s masterwork The Large Glass and therefore has notable significance within the artist’s oeuvre.122 Matisse reasoned that this readymade is unique because it allowed the person who wears the waistcoat to become a walking, talking Duchamp Readymade; he wrote: ‘in the closet, it is but a vest, worth at most perhaps fifteen dollars’ but ‘when Worn, however, by myself, it becomes a work of art’.123 He emphasized that ‘when I put it on I become as it were, a Duchamp Readymade, self-regulating. Imagine! A readymade which walks, talks, and even writes about itself – Yes I am wearing the vest at this instant! It is a triumph of creation that Marcel has never equaled, and one which even Modern Science cannot match’.124 Matisse thus acknowledged that art can be worn and predicted that this series is of ‘such major importance’ that the implications will not be lost on the accredited scholar of twentieth-century art forms.125 This impassioned letter, which was reproduced in full in Schwarz’s 2000 catalogue raisonné, did not, however, inspire Schwarz or other scholars to consider the wider implications of this series. Instead, Schwarz commented on the material qualities of the waistcoats by linking the warm and cool colours to their psychological affect and observed the use of lead on the buttons as a symbol of alchemy; he also connected these garments to the wearer’s marital status and interpreted Duchamp’s gifts of the waistcoats to three brides (Teeny, Sally and Betty) as a symbolic gesture of their completion in that ‘their marriages set them on the way to achieving an integrated personality’.126 However, Schwarz overlooked the comment by Matisse that indicated that he, rather than his bride

Sally, was the one wearing the waistcoat. Nor did Schwarz engage with Matisse’s argument that a readymade can be worn and thus missed the opportunity to acknowledge the importance of this series. Similarly, d’Harnoncourt did not reflect further on the waistcoat readymades, even though she signalled her knowledge of this letter when she wrote: ‘Paul Matisse has pointed out that this is the only Readymade which requires a human presence for completion. Like the 9 Malic Molds waiting to receive the “illuminating gas,” the Waistcoat depends on its wearer to animate it’.127 And even though these scholars overlooked the evidence offered by Matisse and that can be found in Duchamp’s final set of notes, I argue that the waistcoat readymade series has extraordinary significance within the artist’s oeuvre when properly considered in relation to his sustained engagement with the fashioned body throughout his life and work. The waistcoats, created late in the artist’s career, represent four of Duchamp’s most personal and intimate readymades – a choice undoubtedly made with intent to beguile. In his 1967 interview with Cabanne, Duchamp said: ‘The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste’.128 Despite this professed indifference, these readymades were selected and customized for each recipient. More importantly, the waistcoat series is the only readymade that anticipates activation by the body of the wearer. The Made to Measure series not only offers a direct reference to the origin of the word readymade in clothing manufacture, but was also a deliberate recalibration of the parameters of the readymade to include clothing. Art can be worn, and the implications thereof are profound, as shall be revealed in the final chapter.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Made to Measure

6 7

Marcel Duchamp quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 48. Duchamp quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, 155. On Duchamp’s attention to the nuances of language, see, for example, Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 26. Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’ in The Duchamp Effect, Essays, Interviews, Round Table, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 18. Letter from Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, 15 January [1916] in Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk (eds), Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000), 43–44. Ellipses added. As well, Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins noted that this letter offers ‘the first recorded use of the term [by Duchamp], which is always in English’. See Tomkins, Duchamp, 154. It is also interesting to note that, although Duchamp wrote this letter to his sister in French, they had travelled together to the British coastal resort of Herne Bay in August 1913 so that Suzanne could study English. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Connecting Threads: Duchamp’s Readymades and Large Glass Project in Context, 1913–14’, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 57–58 (2019): 71. ‘Readymade’, Oxford English Dictionary (Third Edition, 2000), n.p. In 1633, poet and antiquary John Weever wrote in his book titled Ancient Funerall [sic] Monuments: ‘To each one, a Gown and a hood ready made’. John Weever quoted in ‘Readymade’, Oxford English Dictionary, n.p.

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8 Rob Schorman, Selling Style: Clothing and Social Change at the Turn of the Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 22. 9 This style of suit has a loose-fitting style of jacket sewn without a waist seam and straight-legged trousers. 10 Schorman, Selling Style, 30. 11 Ibid., 47. 12 See ‘The Excellence of the Ready-Made’, Vogue (New York) 40, no. 8 (October 15, 1912): 27. Articles published in Vogue prior to this typically describe the ready-made garment in derogatory terms. See, for example, Marquise de Panhael, ‘How to be Beautiful’, Vogue (New York) 4, no. 13 (September 27, 1894): 202, 204. Also see ‘Fashion: Seen in the Shops: Ready-Made Skirts’, Vogue (New York) 5, no. 12 (March 21, 1895): v. 13 There is a distinct shift in tone in articles published in Vogue about the quality of the readymade around 1895. The improvement in quality of readymade skirts is noticed by the anonymous author of the column ‘Seen in the Shops: Ready-Made Skirts’, Vogue (New York) 5, no. 12 (March 21, 1895), v. 14 See for example an ad published in the New York Times in 1915 by Lord & Taylor, an upscale department store at Fifth Avenue and 39th Street (where Duchamp would later purchase one of the waistcoats). In an ad titled ‘A Word to Men’, the department store promotes its Men’s Ready Made Tailor Shop, conflating the terms ‘Ready Made’ and tailoring. The copy gives emphasis to the specific attributes that signal a garment is ‘right’ in terms of fabric, tailoring and style. Advertisement: Lord & Taylor, New York Times, October 15, 1915. 15 In an ad published in the New York Times in 1916, Clemons Custom Tailor suggested that made-tomeasure was superior to a ‘ready-made’ suit and compares an ill-fitting suit to a car that does not work. The ad reads: ‘A “ready-made,” that’s acceptable in materials and making, but doesn’t fit, is like an automobile that does everything but go’. Advertisement: Clemons Custom Tailor, New York Times, March 3, 1916. 16 ‘Ready-to-wear’, Oxford English Dictionary, n.p. 17 Ibid. 18 In 1901, there were sixteen occurrences of ‘ready-to-wear’ in Vogue, mostly in describing shirtwaists, footwear or hats. By 1913, this had increased exponentially, with 100 occurrences of the term in ads and features like ‘Seen in the Shops’. 19 Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 62. 20 Transcription of conversation with Duchamp by Walter Arensberg dated 6 February 1916 in Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ‘Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg’, in The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambrige: MIT Press, 1996), 156. 21 Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 49. 22 Duchamp quoted in Naumann and Obalk, Affectionately Marcel, 44. 23 See ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, The Blind Man (May 2, 1917): 5. 24 ‘Readymade’, Oxford English Dictionary, n.p. 25 André Breton quoted in Lucy Lippard, Surrealists on Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 210. 26 In 1959, the word readymade is less frequently used in connection to clothing, with only three instances identified in Vogue that year, including an article about sewing fashions that describes a ready-made belt and two ads in the January and July 1959 issues for girdles by Hilbrun, Corsetière Co.

Made to Measure

27 This New York arts journal has been credited with introducing Surrealism to American audiences. Edited by the poet Charles Henri Ford (1908–2002), the magazine was published from 1940–1947. 28 Tomkins, Duchamp, 343. 29 Harriet Janis and Sidney Janis, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Anti-artist’, reprinted in Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: George Wittenborn, 1951), 310. 30 See Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 195. 31 George Heard Hamilton, Interview with Duchamp for broadcast on BBC Radio, New York, 19 January 1959. Accessed 10 November 2020 at http://www.golob-gm.si/4-three-standard-stoppages-marcelduchamp/r-interview-with-marcel-duchamp-george-heard-hamilton.htm. 32 Ibid. Ellipsis added. 33 Marcel Duchamp quoted in Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 91–92. Ellipsis added. 34 Marcel Duchamp, ‘Apropos of Readymades’ (lecture at the symposium The Art of Assemblage, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 19 October 1961) in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1989), 142. Ellipses in original. 35 See Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade: Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica (London: Routledge, 2018), 86–109. 36 Ibid., 141–199. 37 Ibid., 7. 38 Arturo Schwarz quoted in Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 240. 39 Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade, 87. 40 Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 35. 41 See Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Louis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Adam Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-Garde 1925–1941: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013); Elena Filipovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2016). 42 In today’s parlance, this role would be described as exhibition designer. 43 As well, the main gallery was lit only by an electrified street brazier and visitors were given flashlights if they wished to see the artwork, while a soundtrack emitted hysterical laughter and the lockstep of a German army procession and a dancer leapt about the space in pools of muddy water. 44 Man Ray. Self Portrait (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1988), 191. 45 See Kachur, Displaying the Marvellous, 43–62. 46 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 16. 47 Kachur, Displaying the Marvellous, 41. 48 Many of these photos are in the collection of the Musée de d’art Moderne de Paris. 49 Man Ray, Self Portrait, 191. 50 Georges Hugnet quoted in Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 39–41. Ellipsis in Kachur. 51 Man Ray’s photographs of the mannequins in the exhibition can be found online. Accessed 15 February 2021 at http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/33171/man-ray-resurrectiondes-mannequins-american-1966/. 52 André Masson quoted by Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 51.

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53 Other street names included ‘Passage des Panoramas’ for Dalí, ‘Porte des Lilas’ for Tanguy, ‘Rue Nicolas-Flamel’ for Espinoza. See Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 51. 54 Kachur indicates that little is known about Mossé aside from the fact that she died in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Mossé had no other works in the show. See Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 45–46. 55 Bettina Wilson, ‘Surrealism in Paris’, Vogue (New York) 91, no. 5 (March 1, 1938): 144. 56 Ibid. 57 ‘Surrealism in New York shops’, Vogue (New York) 91, no. 5 (March 1, 1938): 108–109. This is the same issue in which Bettina Wilson’s account of the Paris exhibition appeared. 58 Duchamp would also return to the mannequin as a vehicle of artistic expression in his shop window installation Lazy Hardware for Gotham Book Mart in New York in 1945, as well as in his final work Étant donnés: 1 La chute d’eau, 2 Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2 The Illuminating Gas) (1946–1966). In each case, Duchamp left the female mannequins’ pubic area bare, exposing hairless flesh. Duchamp was known for his dislike of any body hair, as discussed in Chapter 2. 59 Man Ray, Self Portrait, 191. 60 Marcel Duchamp quoted by Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 65. 61 Guetta quoted by Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 48. 62 Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 47. 63 Duchamp also made another clothing-inspired work, Couple of Laundress’s Aprons (1959), around the same time. Despite the title, this readymade is not a wearable garment but instead consists of a modified potholder that opens to reveal a fabric phallus and a patch of fur. Duchamp made this readymade in an edition of twenty. See Museum of Modern Art, New York, Object #51.1977. 64 The most recent mention of the waistcoats at the time of writing is by Kamian-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymades, 83. In this text, the waistcoats are described but not analysed. 65 In 1666, Samuel Pepys reported in his diary that King Charles II had declared a new style of clothing that included a vest. For more on the history of the waistcoat, see Tom Greatrex, ‘Waistcoat’, ed. Valerie Steele, The Berg Companion to Fashion, 719–720. 66 Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, ‘From Caterpillar to Butterfly and Back: A Waistcoat of the French Revolution’, Costume 45 (2011): 63–74. 67 Théophile Gautier, ‘La Légende du Gilet Rouge’, Histoire du Romantisme (Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1874), 84–90. 68 Victor Hugo quoted by Mary Gluck, ‘Dressing Up: Bohemia – Commerce and the Creation of the Artist’s Life’, in Fashion & Art, ed. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (London: Berg, 2012), 139. 69 Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle De Maupin (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921 [1835]). According to her biographer, photographer Berenice Abbott once owned a copy of Gautier’s book that was confiscated by her ‘horrified mother’. See Julia Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 15. 70 At the time of writing, these garments are held in private collections. 71 Sonia Delaunay quoted in Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 65. Ellipses added. 72 Robert Delaunay quoted in Juliet Bellow, ‘Fashioning Cléopatre: Sonia Delaunay’s New Woman’, Art Journal 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 17. Sonia Delaunay would continue to design women’s clothing, other textiles and ballet costumes; for more on that topic, see Juliet Bingham, ‘In focus: picturing Sonia Delaunay’, in Sonia Delaunay, ed. Tadeo Kohan et al. (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 252–257.

Made to Measure

73 Tom Slevin, ‘Sonia Delaunay’s Robe Simultané: Modernity, Fashion and Transmediality’, Fashion Theory 17, no. 1 (2013): 32. 74 See also photographs of Sonia Delaunay in 1914 in Sonia Delaunay, ed. Tadeo Kohan et al. (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 45, 49. 75 In October 1914, the critic Giuseppe Prezzolini described the Futurist approach to clothing to be ‘a copy of the Cubist clothes that the French painter Delaunay and friends wore some evenings at Bullier’. Giuseppe Prezzolini quoted in Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 65. 76 Giacomo Balla, ‘The Antineutral Dress: A Futurist Manifesto’, reprinted in Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 157–158. 77 Colour photos of the Futurist clothing, including waistcoats and berets, designed by Fortunato Depero are included in the exhibition catalogue Across Art and Fashion. See Stefania Ricci (ed.), Across Art and Fashion (Florence: Mandragora SRI., 2016), 104–108. These photos show that Depero’s signature was rendered in thread on the front of the waistcoats. 78 Franca Zocoll, ‘Italian Fashion Design’, in Handbook of International Futurism, ed. Gunter Berghaus (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), 146–153. 79 See, for example, the ad for a Brooks Brothers three-piece suit with coat, vest and trousers for $90 in a display ad in the New York Times, February 8, 1957. See also the photo of jacket and trousers worn with a coordinating vest sold by John Jarrell for $15 in the article ‘In Vogue for Men: The Men’s Page’, Vogue (New York) 128, no. 3 (August 15, 1956): 121. 80 See ‘Vogue Plans for Four Kinds of Weddings’, in Vogue (New York) 128, no. 1 (July 1, 1956): 75. 81 Marcel Duchamp, ‘Apropos of “Readymades”’, in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), 142. 82 Marcus Moore, Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art, 1965–2007. By Means of Duchamp’s Peripheral Vision: Case Studies in a History of Reception (PhD Dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, 2012), 180. 83 Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 187. 84 Carol P. James, ‘An Original Revolutionary Messagerie Rrose,’ in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 285–286. 85 Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 187. This waistcoat is presently held by the Duchamp family, and a representative from the Association Marcel Duchamp in Paris indicated that Duchamp did not sign this waistcoat. Email to author from Séverine Gossard at the Association Marcel Duchamp dated 27 November 2017. 86 Schwarz observes that the lead typeface letters were glued on. See Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), 229. 87 In writing about this vest, Naumann suggested that Duchamp ‘altered their buttons to spell out the name of the recipient, who in all cases (because of the design of the vest) would have to have a name (first or last) limited (or that could be reduced) to a maximum of five letters’. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 187–188. However, there are in fact six buttonholes not five, indicating that Duchamp removed the last button and deliberately left the buttonhole empty. 88 An ad for a similar waistcoat in bright red wool with brass buttons can be found in the September 1956 issue of Vogue. See ‘Shop Hound’, Vogue (New York) 128, no. 4 (September 1, 1956): 199. The price of this waistcoat is shown as $16.50. 89 Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 229.

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90 Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 197. The last-known location for this waistcoat is in the Collection of Paul Matisse, Groton, Massachusetts. My efforts to reach Matisse were unsuccessful. 91 Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 806. 92 The waistcoat was initially described on the 2012 condition report as follows: ‘Readymade doublesided vest, back of satin, front of striped black/red velvet, interior grey. Reversible vest’. Object Condition Report #B98.0454, The Israel Museum, dated 3 June 2012. In my communication with curator Efrat Aharon and conservator Irit Lev Beyth in 2020–2021, it was determined that a more accurate description of the textile is red/black striped cotton corduroy. The conservator also confirmed that the waistcoat does not contain a maker label. Email communications with author dated 6 December 2020 and 12 April 2021. 93 Although Schwarz owned and described this waistcoat in his catalogue raisonné, he does not mention that it was signed by Duchamp. This information is found on the Object Condition Report #B98.0454, The Israel Museum, dated 3 June 2012. 94 Email communication with author from curator Efrat Aharon and conservator Irit Lev Beyth dated 12 April 2021. 95 Naumann incorrectly assumes that Duchamp was limited in his choice of names because of the design of the vest. See Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 187–188. However, a close look at TEENY, BETTY and PÉRET reveals that each waistcoat has six buttonholes. 96 Marcel Duchamp, Waistcoat for Benjamin Péret, Rectified readymade, 1958. Israel Museum, Object #B98.0454, The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art in the Israel Museum. 97 The waistcoat has been exhibited in the following exhibitions: Dreaming with Open Eyes: The Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art (21 December 2000 – 9 June 2001) and also Dada Surrealism and Beyond (27 February 2007 – 14 August 2007). It also travelled to the Kunst und Mode exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna (14 June – 16 September 2012), and in the Dada and Surrealism travelling exhibition Duchamp, Magritte, Dalì. I Rivoluzionari del ‘900 (16 October 2017–11 February 2018). Email communication to author dated 8 November 2017 from Neta Perez, Assistant Curator, Department of Modern Art at The Israel Museum. 98 Object Condition Report #B98.0454, The Israel Museum, dated 3 June 2012 by Irit Lev Beyth. 99 Moore, Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art, 180. 100 Email communication to author on 12 November 2017 with photos from Dr Chelsea Nichols, Curator Modern Art, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 101 This printed label is sewn onto an inside pocket of the waistcoat and is visible in photos provided to me in correspondence with Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 102 Moore, Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art, 180. 103 Collection Record Object #1983-0032-229, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Accessed 1 November 2017 at https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/38502. 104 The exhibitions have included: Acquisitions 1983–84 in 1984; Peripheral Relations: Marcel Duchamp and New Zealand Art 1960–2011 in 2011; Collecting Modern in 2014; and Détour in 2018. In the most recent exhibition of the waistcoat conceived by conceptual artist Michael Parekowhai, the waistcoat was replicated by fashion designer Kate Sylvester with the buttons spelling out M-I-K-E-P and a label reading Kate Sylvester / for Michael Parekowhai / Aotearoa. Emails to author dated 12 November 2017 and 11 February 2019 from Chelsea Nichols, Curator Modern Art, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. For the exhibition by Michael Parekowhai (17 March–8 November 2018), see ‘Detour’. Accessed 9 February 2019 at https://detour.exhibition.tepapa.govt.nz/#/.

105 Object condition report #1983-0032-229, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa by Rachel Collinge dated 7 June 2012. 106 Email to author dated 22 December 2020 from Lizzie Bisley, Curator of Modern Art, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 107 A search of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s database using the term ‘waistcoat’ yielded 259 results. Accessed 1 November 2017. 108 Email to author dated 12 November 2017 from Chelsea Nichols, Curator Modern Art, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 109 Unlike the notes by Duchamp organized and published in The Box of 1914, the Green Box (1934), or In the Infinitive (1967), these collected notes were organized, translated and published posthumously. See Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, trans. Paul Matisse (Boston: G.K. Hall & Company, 1983). 110 Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, unpaginated. The original notes were handwritten by Duchamp on scraps of paper and were unnumbered; for publication, the editor and translator of the notes, Paul Matisse, ordered and assigned numbers to each but left pages unpaginated. The line breaks and punctuation in the quoted material has been replicated as it was published. 111 Anne d’Harnoncourt, ‘Preface’, in Marcel Duchamp, Notes, trans. Paul Matisse (Boston: G.K. Hall & Company, 1983), x–xi. 112 Ibid., xii. 113 Ibid. 114 Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, unpaginated. 115 George Baker, ‘Leather and Lace’, October 131 (Winter 2010): 126. 116 Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, unpaginated. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Paul Matisse letter to Arturo Schwarz, 9 November 1964, reprinted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), 808. 120 Paul Matisse quoted in Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 808. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 229. 127 D’Harnoncourt, Marcel Duchamp, 310. 128 Duchamp quoted in Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 48.

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Reading the Readymade: The Thingly Nature of Fashion in the Museum

5

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contributions to the creative act.1 –Marcel Duchamp

Figure 5.1  Yves Saint Laurent, ‘Mondrian Dress’ 1965/66 fall–winter, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Art Resource.

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The Made to Measure series by Duchamp not only extended the parameters of the readymade into clothing but is imbricated within the etymology of the word readymade itself. If a waistcoat can be rendered a readymade, then a logical extension of that premise is that any garment can become a readymade under certain parameters. This begs the question of how a spectator knows to read a readymade as a work of art? As Thierry de Duve observed, ‘to enjoy the readymade is to wonder what it is doing in the museum’.2 A similar question might also then be asked as to what a ‘Mondrian’ dress by Yves Saint Laurent in 1965/66 (Figure 5.1) – in which the dress is used as a form of canvas on which Mondrian’s logic of colour placement is replicated – is doing in an art museum? And by extension, might it too be considered a readymade? In directly addressing such questions, I reveal the implications of Duchamp’s revolutionary act in relation to the presentation of fashion in the museum. When Martin Heidegger wrote the essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in 1927 he identified an essential essence or thingly quality that distinguishes art from other objects, and argued that it is this ‘something else’ that makes it art. Heidegger does not mention Duchamp’s readymades or the work of other avant-garde artists but instead discusses the difference between a pair of shoes and a painting of a pair of shoes by Vincent Van Gogh.3 Heidegger writes an evocative description of the shoes in Van Gogh’s painting, noting the traces of the damp, rich soil on the leather, and reading emotions of loneliness and fatigue in the pattern of wear; and he identifies the shoes as equipment since they serve a function in protecting the foot of the peasant worker. In Heidegger’s argument, art cannot be worn since the actual shoes themselves lack the autonomy of a painting of shoes. For Heidegger, Van Gogh’s painting reveals the thingly nature of the shoes in a way that the actual shoes do not; he writes: ‘Artworks universally display a thingly character, albeit in a wholly distinct way’.4 And while Heidegger links this thingly quality of art to truth at work, his multifarious argument does not help the reader identify this attribute; perhaps it is assumed that one knows it when one sees (or feels) it. Among the many twentieth-century philosophers who attempted to define the nature of art, the essays by Arthur Danto (1924–2013) and George Dickie (1926–2020) are particularly germane in relation to Duchamp’s readymades. Not only were these essays written in the 1960s after Duchamp’s work began to achieve broader recognition, but each author addresses everyday objects elevated to the status of art. In Danto’s essay ‘The Artworld’ published in 1964 (the same year that Duchamp manufactured and sold replicas of his readymades at the Galleria Schwarz), the philosopher identifies the idea of an ‘artworld’ as a world of ideas that defines the boundaries of what art is. Danto argues that artworks such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964) or the comic-book-inspired paintings of Roy Lichtenstein ‘are not imitations [of the object] but new entities’.5 To distinguish between Brillo boxes that are stacked in a storeroom of a supermarket from those in an art gallery, Danto identifies art theory that ‘takes it [an object] up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is’.6 Danto equates the artworld to a world of ideas.7 In Dickie’s essay ‘Defining Art’ published in 1969, written in response to Danto, the philosopher observed that ‘Duchamp’s act took place within a certain institutional setting’ and argues that it is this setting ‘that makes all the difference’.8 Dickie underlined the significance of the institution in conferring the status of art on an object like a urinal; he writes: ‘An artifact’s hanging in an art museum, a performance at a theater, and the like are sure signs that the status [of art] has been

conferred’.9 Dickie later refined his position in his 1984 book The Art Circle to define the artworld as a network of people (art critics, art historians, gallerists, museum directors) and institutions (museums, galleries, schools) that participate in the creation of a global network for the presentation, sale, distribution and display of art.10 In the absence of art dealers and art institutions, the readymade is still an everyday object of unrealized artistic intention – like the overlooked umbrella, coat rack and urinal in Duchamp’s earliest presentations of the readymades in 1916 and 1917.11 It is both the world of ideas and the network of people known as the artworld that over time came to accept the readymade as a work of art, such that it was collected and exhibited within the institutional frame of the art museum. Within the liminal spaces of museums (and art galleries), objects – including urinals and dresses – are isolated from their commercial origins and fetishized through modes of display (often elevated on plinths or set behind plexiglass) that nurture an aesthetic response. As Carol Duncan observed in her book Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, the presence of ‘things that are most properly used when contemplated as art – is taken as a given that is both prior to and the cause of art museums’.12 How then does the spectator distinguish between a waistcoat readymade and a garment of fashion – like a ‘Mondrian’ dress designed by Yves Saint Laurent – presented for aesthetic contemplation within an art museum? Are there clues or signals that differentiate one from the other? This chapter explores these questions by first considering the interconnected roles of author, spectator, curator and institution in identifying the readymade as a work of art. In doing so, the parameters of the readymade are articulated, using evidence offered by Duchamp himself in conjunction with the enunciative conditions of the readymade articulated by Duchamp scholar Thierry de Duve. This is followed by a direct comparison of selected objects for the candidacy of readymade – namely, two of Duchamp’s readymade waistcoats from the series Made to Measure (1957–1961) from the Israel Museum of Art and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa – in relation to two haute couture dresses by French designer Yves Saint Laurent (1936–2008) from his 1965/66 fall–winter collection Homage to Mondrian from the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met). In making a direct comparison of the Duchamp waistcoat readymades and the YSL ‘Mondrian’ dresses, the significance of Duchamp’s recalibration of the readymade will be revealed.

The Role of the Author Reading the Readymade

When Duchamp first wrote to his sister Suzanne in January 1916 to introduce her to the idea of the readymade, he described his purchase of ‘various objects’ and articulated the steps necessary to transform a snow shovel and other everyday items into readymades.13 This letter marks a distinct shift in the nature of the artist’s work from that of making to that of shopping and choosing.14 Suzanne was also given instructions on how to make a readymade for herself by inscribing a phrase on the inside bottom circle of an object and signing it ‘[after] Marcel Duchamp’.15 In this letter, Duchamp indicated that the artist’s signature is pivotal in the authoring of the readymade, even one made remotely.

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Philosopher Jacques Derrida defined the signature as evidence of the ‘actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer’ that marks the creator as having been present.16 The signature of the creator inscribes an aura onto the object, and the aura of this creative genius is there even in his or her absence. De Duve notes the significance of the placement of the signature on Fountain, in that ‘the signature had to be truly visible, manifestly drawn by a not-too-expert hand on the lower left of the urinal, as though it were a page of manuscript, or perhaps a painting’, since in the absence of this signature it would not be evident that this manufactured object had been altered by the artist’s hand.17 De Duve argues that it does not matter that Duchamp’s signature on the urinal took the form of an alias, a strategy that Duchamp would later use many times in works signed by his alter ego Rrose Sélavy, since ‘the name of the author, threaded through the string of pseudonyms, will only be validated by an authorization that will rebound upon him through his fame’.18 Duchamp’s signature authorizes the work as an object of art. The linguistic twist so often associated with the readymade such as In Advance of the Broken Arm is also mentioned in this 1916 letter to his sister.19 The poetic association is given additional emphasis in the artist’s 1961 talk, ‘Apropos of “Readymades”’. Duchamp said: ‘One important characteristic [of the readymade] was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed … [that] was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal’.20 This sentence was ‘also supposed to have a poetic essence and no ordinary meaning’, as Duchamp described in an interview that took place in 1961.21 For example, in 1916 Duchamp inscribed a dog-grooming comb with the phrase ‘3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n’ont rien à faire avec la sauvagerie’ which has been translated into ‘three or four drops falling from above have nothing to do with savagery’, a phrase that has been linked to Duchamp’s preoccupation with eros.22 In 1917, Duchamp gave a hat rack nailed to the floor the title Trébuchet meaning trap. For Duchamp, this intellectual engagement with the object translated an everyday thing into a work of art. In Kant after Duchamp, Thierry de Duve articulates and explicates the significance of Duchamp’s readymades that shifted the definition of art from the Kantian association of art with the beautiful to the declarative statement ‘this is art’. De Duve argues that, when Duchamp removed the element of craft from his artistic practice, he challenged the definition of art itself in that ‘works of art are shown in order to be judged as such’.23 And while Duchamp would later return to craft in the replication of the readymades in collaboration with Arturo Schwarz in 1964, the urinal as readymade (even a 1964 replica meticulously crafted from glazed earthenware and painted to resemble the original porcelain urinal purchased in 1917) retains the visual link to its functional origins as a bathroom fixture. In his analysis, de Duve initially suggests that the borders between art and non-art are now more explicit: ‘Behold a urinal. Either you judge that it’s nothing, or that it’s art. But once you judge it to be the latter, it carries, implicitly at least, a label saying “this is art.”’24 However, de Duve ultimately rejects the structuralist and linguistic analysis of this binary reduction of art and non-art and analyses the conditions of the readymade through the lens of Michel Foucault’s theorization of the enunciative paradigm in The Archeology of Knowledge (1972). De Duve writes: Thus, the sentence ‘this is art,’ as it affixes itself to a readymade, is not the sign of the passage of artistic practice from a visual regime to a linguistic one, but the enactment and the manifestation of the

enunciative function in which objects that show themselves as art and as art alone are caught up. It translates the readymade, as statement.25

De Duve makes it clear that the artist’s declaration that an object purchased from a store, inscribed with a signature, and assigned a poetic element is insufficient to render a thing a work of art. Indeed, Duchamp himself was cognizant of this by acknowledging that the spectator played a key role in defining the artwork.

The Role of the Spectator

Reading the Readymade

For Marcel Duchamp, the spectator was an equal partner in the creative act that articulates the work of art. Duchamp expressed this idea in a session on ‘The Creative Act’ in April 1957 at the Convention of the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas, and published in Robert Lebel’s catalogue in 1959.26 In his statement, Duchamp suggested that the artist begins with an intention to create a work, but that there might be a gap between what the artist hoped to achieve and what was realized. Duchamp defined the role of the spectator as part of the creative act since it is the spectator who determines ‘the weight of the work on the esthetic scale’ and renders judgement as to whether or not it is art by ‘interpreting its inner qualifications’.27 In expressing his view that the creative act is a partnership between the artist and the spectator, Duchamp assumed a spectator who is both knowledgeable and willing to embrace ambiguity in interpreting the readymade as a work of art. Duchamp’s thoughts on the role of the spectator as an equal partner in creating the work aligned with the postmodern thoughts of Umberto Eco (1932–2016) as well as Susan Sontag (1933–2004), both of whom expressed similar sentiments in the early 1960s. In his 1962 treatise on modern aesthetics Opera aperta (The Open Work), Umberto Eco articulated the radical difference between traditional art and modern works in which the artist deliberately cultivates a multiplicity of meanings through ambiguity, such that the reader is seen as an active participant in responding to the work. Eco used the term ‘work’ to encompass a range of mediums including performance, music and the visual arts, and viewed the openness of contemporary visual art as a rupture from a ‘unified, definitive image of our universe’ that must be seen, accepted, and integrated into the viewer’s sensibility.28 This freedom of interpretation is seen as bringing deep pleasure to the experience of art that invites the viewer ‘to conceive, feel, and thus see the world as possibility’.29 Eco’s lyrical analysis embraced the opacity of the open work, giving the spectator freedom to have a unique experience with art and in this way echoed Duchamp’s position.30 Likewise, Susan Sontag embraced ambiguity in her 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’ and provocatively asserted that the sensual qualities of the work of art have been ignored in wanting to translate the work into its intellectual equivalent. She observed that ‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous’, and this discomfort is often managed by seeking interpretation by others.31 She equated the modern style of interpretation to excavation that ‘digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one’,32 but suggested that such acts of interpretation largely serve ‘to impoverish,

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to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of meanings’.33 Sontag argued in favour of welcoming ambiguity in allowing the ‘luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are’, to overcome the diminished sensory experience that results from the crowded conditions of modern life.34 In this essay, written in the same year (1964) that Duchamp’s replica readymades were made available for sale, Sontag suggested that the instinct of the spectator to seek meaning through the interpretation of others (critics) should be suppressed in favour of engaging in a richer sensory experience. The reader was encouraged to ‘learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more’ in order to make works of art a personal experience and in this way more, ‘rather than less, real’.35 Sontag’s argument against interpretation of art encouraged spectators to be active participants in creating meaning and in this way aligned with Duchamp’s position on the role of the spectator. In 1964, Duchamp described the interaction between the onlooker and the maker as akin to ‘the spark that comes from that bipolar action [that] gives birth to something – like electricity’.36 That electrifying discharge of energy – between artist and onlooker – is what brings the work to life.

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The Role of the Curator

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The pivotal role of the curator in defining the readymade is made plainly evident from the fate of Duchamp’s readymades in the early years when his creations were overlooked, discarded or lost.37 Perhaps the most potent example is the story told by curator George Heard Hamilton in connection with Duchamp’s mid-century recreation of a snow shovel readymade called In Advance of the Broken Arm for an exhibition at Yale University in 1945. Hamilton later recounted that it was not recognized as a work of art when the shovel was put on display – ‘nothing happened. Nobody came to see it’.38 When the Yale show went on tour the following winter, a janitor in a small Minnesota museum ‘mistook it for a shovel’ and used it to clear away a snowdrift.39 Despite the presence of Duchamp’s signature on the shovel, the shovel was just an implement for the custodian. Nurturing the spark of energy between artist and spectator falls into the remit of the curator who articulates what is around the artwork, such that the object can be read as an artwork. Despite Duchamp’s professed indifference to the trajectory of his career and his repeated statements that he had given up art for chess, considerable evidence exists that Duchamp was actively engaged in curatorial acts that not only produced discourse around his work but also ensured his legacy. In her aptly titled book The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, Elena Filipovic documents these curatorial acts and observes that ‘the critical reception of Duchamp has been slow to acknowledge these activities, which didn’t necessarily – or literally – produce the artwork so much as situate, contextualize, and frame it’.40 Her work underlines the significant efforts Duchamp undertook to ensure his work was not forgotten including: the rhetorical gestures that publicized the refusal of Fountain; the publication of his notes; the creation of a portable museum with Boîte-en-Valise; and the placement of his works with museums and important private collectors like Walter and Louise Arensberg as well as Katherine Dreier. Duchamp also promoted his work in the broader public domain by giving many interviews and by allowing his work to appear in popular magazines like Life, Time, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Consequently, Filipovic observes a deep level

Reading the Readymade

of engagement and complexity to Duchamp’s administrative and curatorial gestures that served to publicize, recognize, value and safeguard his work and legacy. Filipovic documents these efforts and rewrites the historiography of Duchamp’s oeuvre to articulate the artist’s ‘perennially engaged relationship to the framing sites and discursive or presentational procedures that help construct something as a work of art’.41 Filipovic observes that ‘the readymade is not only an object selected and nominated but, perhaps even more importantly, one that is curated’,42 and also points out that there are numerous ‘intangible and transient, context- and situation-specific details of the presentation of the artwork’ that are ‘intrinsically difficult to acknowledge and perhaps even more difficult to historicize’.43 Filopovic’s work on Duchamp serves to emphasize that the meaning of an artwork is articulated not only by what is inside the frame or on top of the pedestal but also ‘what is outside and around the artwork’.44 Although Duchamp never called himself a curator or an exhibition designer, he acted in this capacity several times during his career, often disrupting the conventions of display. In his capacity as head of the Hanging Committee for the infamous 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition, Duchamp hung the works alphabetically starting with the letter R.45 In designing the inaugural exhibition for the Société Anonyme in 1920, Duchamp covered the gallery floor with industrial rubber, wrapped the walls with reflective fabric and used lace doilies to frame the paintings hung for display.46 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Duchamp acted as générateur-arbitre or idea generator / referee for the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris and, under his direction, the elegant interior of the Galerie Beaux-Arts was transformed into a dark, damp grotto with coal dust dropping from the ceiling, such that it was difficult to see the artwork on display.47 In 1942, the Surrealists again asked Duchamp to act as exhibition designer for First Papers of Surrealism (14 October – 7 November 1942), and this time Duchamp radically transformed the gallery space in the Whitelaw Reid mansion with ‘sixteen miles’ of ordinary white string. The string was wound from chandeliers and mantels and pillars in crisscrossing skeins that again confounded and disoriented the viewer from freely moving through space and seeing the artworks. In each case, Duchamp challenged the idea that the purpose of an exhibition was to display art objects in a manner that provided an aesthetic or educational experience of art. Instead, he created experiences where visitors were presented with an immersive sensory encounter that subjected their bodies to discomfort.48 The body of the spectator was foregrounded here, rather than the art, such that Duchamp’s exhibition designs highlight his body-aware sensibility and art practice as well as countering his professed claim to indifference. By harnessing his imagination and embracing ‘anything that could bring out the meaning of two incompatible elements’,49 Duchamp designed exhibitions that forced an emotive response from the spectator, even if it was boredom or distress. In this way, Duchamp was prescient in experimenting with what is now called ‘the curatorial’ – which Jean-Paul Martinon describes as ‘a jailbreak from pre-existing frames’ as well as ‘a sensual practice of creating signification’.50 In the curatorial, Martinon goes on to explain, attention is given to how bodies move through the exhibition space, but more importantly, the curatorial frames the exhibition as a disrupter of generally accepted bodies of knowledge, including ‘what we understand by art, art history, philosophy’ and also ‘cultural heritage’.51 Although Duchamp did not call himself a curator, his exhibition designs reveal his acute sensitivity to the aesthetics and strategies of display.

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He anticipated that spectators would be active participants in the experience since they could not only look passively at the art but had to navigate their bodies in specific ways to see the work. In adopting a lighthearted spirit of playfulness where the art was secondary to the experience,52 Duchamp predicted the spectators’ willingness to embrace ambiguity, an affect that is relevant to the reading of the readymade.

The Role of the Institution The role of the museum in shaping the history of art is something that Duchamp took notice of when talking about the Louvre:

Dressing and Undressing Duchamp

For me, the history of art is what remains of an epoch in a museum … I haven’t been to the Louvre in twenty years. It doesn’t interest me, because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre, instead of others which weren’t even considered, and which might have been there.53

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Although Duchamp expressed doubts about museums as ‘mausoleums of art history’,54 he must have been acutely aware that the objects that cross their portals were imbued with the power and authority of the institution. Over the course of his lifetime, Duchamp was remarkably strategic – demonstrating both extraordinary patience and care – in his efforts to ensure that his work was ultimately housed in leading American art museums. As Filipovic documents, the artist nurtured his relationships with his most prominent collectors – Walter and Louise Arensberg – over many years and supported the development of their art collection as the ‘single most important reservoir of his work’ by ‘specifically reserving items for them, gifting them works, facilitating the purchase of his pieces on the secondary market, and even spending his own inheritance money to buy back works to resell to them’.55 In addition, he ultimately acted as an intermediary in the negotiations for the donation of the Arensberg collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the early 1950s.56 Duchamp acted in a similar capacity for Katherine Dreier in directing the donation of The Large Glass to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in acting as executor of her will.57 In the course of his efforts to oversee the placement of these collections, Filipovic observes that Duchamp not only made detailed drawings of the galleries and supervised the installation and lighting of the works but also requested a doorway be cut into the gallery’s exterior wall and thus ‘effectively reconfigured the architecture of the museum to suit his works and vision’.58 Duchamp’s choice of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as the institutional home for a significant portion of his life’s work is interesting, since this particular museum resembles a Greek temple. This type of architecture, as Carol Duncan maintains in her book Civilizing Rituals, Inside Art Museums, marks the museum as a ritual space ‘carefully marked off and culturally designated as reserved for a special quality of attention’ that encourages ‘contemplation and learning’.59 As the visitor traverses the park and approaches the Philadelphia Museum of Art, climbing many stairs to enter this imposing

temple-like building, the anticipation and entry protocol create a distinct demarcation from the everyday that facilitates an aesthetic experience. Within the ritualized space of the art museum, ‘the act of looking becomes a sort of trance uniting spectator and masterpiece’.60 Duchamp was undoubtedly conscious of the architecture when he drew up the plans for the placement of his works in this particular institution, such that he was able to nurture that spark of energy that he considered necessary to complete the creative act in the viewer.

The Enunciation of the Readymade As the preceding analysis has shown, the requisite conditions of the readymade as articulated by Duchamp (in word or action) involves four parties: (1) the author who selects an object, assigns a poetic inscription to that object and inscribes his or her signature (which might be an alias) thereon; (2) a spectator who is willing to accept the object as a work of art; (3) a curator who is attentive to the presentation of the work as an art object; and, (4) an institution that accepts and exhibits the object as artwork. Thierry de Duve presents the requisite conditions of the readymade in a slightly different but analogous manner, identifying four conditions that enunciate the readymade: ‘(1) an object, (2) an author, (3) a public, and (4) an institutional place ready to record this object, to attribute an author to it, and to communicate it to the public’.61 De Duve acknowledges that it is not really possible to prove that these four elements are sufficient conditions but argues that what is true for any of the readymades by Duchamp is also true for the category of art in general. He writes: And consequently these conditions are – at least for a certain historical framework, for a certain cultural formation – the enunciative conditions of all works of art, of the Mona Lisa as well as the Mona Lisa with a mustache, or any one object chosen by Duchamp as well as any other candidate for the status of art, and a fortiori of the picture, of the piece of sculpture, of the traditional work, whatever its style. It is in this that the readymade is paradigmatic. What it says for itself in its particularity, it says for the work of art in general.62

Reading the Readymade

In this statement, De Duve suggests that the four enunciative conditions may be applied to any of Duchamp’s works as well as to any other candidate (my emphasis) that lays claim to the status of art. Let us then apply De Duve’s enunciative conditions of the readymade to Duchamp’s waistcoat readymades, specifically the PÉRET waistcoat (Figure 4.7) from The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art in the Israel Museum,63 and the BETTY waistcoat (Figure 4.8) from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.64 Although there is little doubt that the other two waistcoats TEENY (1957) and SALLY (1958) would readily be accepted into the collection of any art museum, they remain with the Duchamp family, and are thus excluded here. In the course of authoring PÉRET in 1958 and BETTY in 1961, Duchamp first went shopping, choosing from the many options available at the time before purchasing these particular ready-towear waistcoats. His choices are not remarkable in terms of textile or pattern; the striped red and black cotton corduroy waistcoat chosen for Benjamin Péret and the Tattersall patterned wool and silk

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waistcoat chosen for Betty and/or Julius Isaacs are both relatively conservative options for that time. The BETTY waistcoat includes a maker label written in cursive script on the inside left pocket that reads: ‘Alfaiataria & Camisaria António Pereira A.L. da Lisboa’ which translates roughly to ‘tailoring and shirt shop of António Pereira of Lisbon’.65 The PÉRET waistcoat does not include a maker label, which may be because the waistcoat was designed to be reversible to grey flannel.66 The waistcoats differ in length with the BETTY waistcoat markedly longer.67 This suggests that Duchamp may have taken care to purchase waistcoats to suit the physical dimensions of those he anticipated would wear them. Duchamp then altered these two mass-manufactured garments by modifying their buttons with lead typeface to spell Betty and Péret. The artist also authenticated the waistcoats by inscribing his signature and the year at the necklines in ink. In both cases, the waistcoats exhibit evidence of wear, previous repairs and stitched alterations, leaving no doubt that these readymades were worn. The BETTY and PÉRET waistcoat readymades are held by public institutions with substantial holdings of Duchamp’s works. They are also stored as sculptures with other art objects, and not stored with other garments and textiles, even though both waistcoats include signs of wear. In accepting these waistcoats into museum collections, the institutions have conferred their authority to designate these objects as works of art. Furthermore, these waistcoats have been displayed as readymades in museum exhibitions alongside Duchamp’s other works of art, such that the public would likely recognize them as works of art rather than as being items from the artist’s wardrobe. In this way, the waistcoats have fulfilled de Duve’s conditions of the readymade, even though they were initially gifted to friends and have previously been worn as clothing. Although not considered a necessary condition in the enunciation of the readymade, the waistcoats were given titles (the names of the recipient) and also include the poetic inscription so often associated with Duchamp’s readymades. In the series titled Made to Measure, Duchamp explicitly references the etymology of the readymade in clothing manufacturing and this further underlines his unabashed pleasure in irony and linguistic puns in that these waistcoats were purchased at a department store and were not actually made to measure for the recipients. And thus, since a waistcoat can become a readymade, might then a dress also be assigned the status of a readymade? And what do the enunciative conditions of the readymade articulated by de Duve reveal when applied to other iconic garments originating in the 1960s held in the collections of art museums?

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Testing the Parameters of the Readymade Like Duchamp’s readymade waistcoat series, the haute couture dresses that have come to be known as the ‘Mondrian’ dresses by French designer Yves Saint Laurent have the potential to make the wearer into a walking readymade. Although the ‘Mondrian’ dresses are often included in scholarly analyses of the intersection of fashion and art,68 the question has yet to be asked whether these dresses could be candidates for the category of readymade. Not only are both objects intended to be worn but there are several interesting parallels between the artist and the fashion designer. First, Saint Laurent’s strategy of appropriation of Mondrian’s imagery mirrors that of Duchamp who

Reading the Readymade

appropriated readymade objects as works of art. Secondly, Duchamp decided to quit painting after the rejection of Nude Descending a Staircase, no. 2 in 1912, while Saint Laurent once described himself as a ‘failed painter’. And lastly, both encountered controversy that resulted from the presentation of their work: notoriety arose from Duchamp’s presentation of his work at the New York Armory Show in 1913 and at the Society of Independents in 1917; likewise, Saint Laurent faced controversy and vitriolic criticism on two occasions, once after his 1971 spring haute couture show – which paid homage to wartime fashion –and again in 1983, following the retrospective exhibition of his work at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is also fascinating to note that during his lifetime Saint Laurent owned Duchamp’s modified perfume bottle – Belle Haleine (see Figure 3.6) – yet another curious connection between the two iconoclasts. Given these notable parallels between Duchamp and Saint Laurent, a direct comparison of the waistcoat readymade series and the YSL ‘Mondrian’ dresses seems fitting. Let us then evaluate the YSL ‘Mondrian’ couture dresses using de Duve’s enunciative conditions of the readymade to identify the similarities and differences from Duchamp’s waistcoat readymades. On 2 August 1965 in Paris, Yves Saint Laurent presented his 1965/66 fall–winter collection that included six dresses with matching coats inspired by the work of Dutch De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944). In this series, the artist’s canvas was transformed into cloth in the shape of a dress (Figure 5.2). The sleeveless A-line dresses (with matching coats) appropriated the geometric colour blocking, black lines and modernist patterns of Mondrian’s paintings in heavy Racine jersey, with all the shaping concealed in the seams.69 In a post-runway interview in August 1965, Saint Laurent said: ‘The form of all my dresses comes from blocks of color moving like mobiles’.70 The ‘Mondrian’ dresses captivated the attention of the press, with Women’s Wear Daily proclaiming the collection to be a ‘succès fou’, a smash hit that would ‘revolutionize the fashion industry’.71 The designer was heralded by Harper’s Bazaar for designing the ‘Dress of tomorrow – the assertive abstraction, a semaphore flag, sharply defined in crisp white jersey, perfectly proportioned to flatter your figure’.72 Images of the ‘Mondrian’ dress were published in the New York Times,73 and in the September 1965 issues of British, French and American Vogue. Within the span of several weeks, the dresses were being widely copied at multiple price points and Saint Laurent expressed consternation about the proliferation of cheap copies seen in shop windows during his American tour in October 1965.74 Nonetheless, the designer licensed Vogue to issue patterns in February 1966 for three versions of the dress that could be made at home.75 The ‘Mondrian’ dresses became Saint Laurent’s most copied and most famous designs. Many leading museums around the world own one or more YSL ‘Mondrian’ dresses.76 As iconic examples of the designer’s oeuvre, the original haute couture dresses are coveted objects by private collectors and institutions alike.77 These dresses rarely come up for auction.78 The Costume Institute Collection at The Met in New York owns two examples.79 The Met’s ‘Mondrian’ dress with the red, yellow and blue colour blocks has appeared in numerous exhibitions and books, including on the cover of Alice Mackrell’s book Art and Fashion (2005).80 This dress, identified as #81 in the Saint Laurent collection, was considered the most ‘important’ when first presented on the runway.81 This is the same version of the dress worn by model Jean Shrimpton and photographed by Richard Avedon for the September 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.82 The Met also has another ‘Mondrian’ dress, which has a less vibrant colour pattern of cream and black blocks, and is also larger in size and has

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Figure 5.2  Terry Fincher, A model wearing a day dress from the Mondrian collection of French fashion ­designer Yves Saint Laurent, 23 August 1965. The collection was inspired by the paintings of Piet Mondrian. Terry Fincher / Express / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

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Reading the Readymade

a different numbering sequence.83 These particular dresses were donated to The Met in 1968 and 1969. Although both dresses are in very good condition with few signs of wear, there are evident differences in the type of linings and the placements of the label inside the dresses, leading to the supposition that one of the dresses may have been relined.84 This is akin to the evidence of wear and alterations in the BETTY waistcoat noted earlier. The second enunciative condition stipulates that the work have an author, which was articulated in the waistcoats with Duchamp’s signature in each as well as the assignment of names. The YSL ‘Mondrian’ dresses both include the Yves Saint Laurent Paris label as well as a unique numbering sequence stamped thereon: 10527 and 10528. This numbering sequence identifies each dress as an haute couture garment, making it a unique piece sized to fit the specific measurements of the purchaser.85 Even though Saint Laurent had no part in actually sewing the dress, as designer, the couture label in the ‘Mondrian’ dress signifies that Saint Laurent was at some point present and authenticated the object, even if his hands never touched this dress or the other versions of it. This act of authorship is similar to Duchamp’s selection and modification of the readymade waistcoats, since the artist or someone else modified the buttons to spell out the names. Although Saint Laurent did not sign the dresses, they include his label – a mechanical version of his signature. The artist Duchamp signs the waistcoat and it becomes BETTY; the designer Saint Laurent attaches his label and a number sequence as a proxy for his signature. In both realms, the creator authenticates the object with a label or signature that becomes its signifier of value. As Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut observed: ‘The couturier does nothing different from the painter who constitutes a given object as a work of art by the act of affixing his signature to it. If there is an instance where one makes things with words, as in magic … it is certainly in the universe of fashion’.86 The object fulfils the condition of the author function with the signature of the artist or the label of the designer. In addition, Saint Laurent appropriated Mondrian’s work into his own, which is similar to the manner in which Duchamp added a moustache to a print of the Mona Lisa in 1919 to create L.H.O.O.Q. and Cornell appropriated the 1945 Vogue cover by Erwin Blumenfeld of a model standing behind Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre as part of his work Duchamp Dossier. Although Saint Laurent ascribed the title Homage to Piet Mondrian to his 1965/66 fall–winter collection, this phrase does not incorporate the poetic inscription or linguistic twist so often associated with the authoring of the readymade. Unlike his mentor Christian Dior who gave lyrical names to each of his creations,87 Saint Laurent assigned numbers to each of the six ‘Mondrian’ dresses.88 The numbers and collection title by Saint Laurent do not convey a compelling sense of irony, even though it might be said retrospectively that the dress mocks the idea of originality in appropriating Mondrian’s painting motifs or possibly even copying an unknown Canadian fashion designer working in Paris who was making similar dresses that same year.89 However, it is worth noting that several of Duchamp’s readymades were assigned plain titles in concert with their function, such as Bottle Rack (1913) or Comb (1916), and therefore the absence of the linguistic twist in the numbering of the dresses does not prevent the dresses from fulfilling the requisite conditions of the readymade. The third enunciative condition of a readymade requires an institution to house the object and present it to the public as a work. Two of the four Duchamp waistcoats are owned by museums, classified as readymades, and stored amongst other contemporary artworks, and both waistcoats are

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included in the catalogue raisonné of Duchamp works by Arturo Schwarz.90 Many of the Mondrian dresses are owned by art museums, and although the House of Yves Saint Laurent keeps sales records of each couture dress ordered that include the name of the clients, there is no catalogue raisonné, so to speak, for Saint Laurent that documents how many dresses there are presently in existence and their current locations.91 The dresses owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art have been removed from the fashion system and as museum objects will never be worn again, but their status as artworks within this institution remains somewhat ambiguous. The dresses are stored with other garments and textiles from the Costume Institute Collection and not kept in the same storage as the museum’s contemporary art collection; however, it could also be argued that this is more suitable because of the material qualities of the objects themselves in relation to conservation concerns. More significant is the fact that The Met has allowed its curators to publicly argue for the status of fashion as art.92 The fourth enunciative condition of a readymade requires a public to acknowledge the status of the work as an art object. As noted earlier, the Duchamp waistcoats have been exhibited as readymades in several exhibitions. The multi-coloured ‘Mondrian’ dress has been exhibited several times at The Met and elsewhere.93 Most notably, this dress and several other versions of the ‘Mondrian’ dress were exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design (14 December 1983 – 2 September 1984), organized by Diana Vreeland (1903–1989). In this presentation, the dresses were hung adjacent to a painting by Burgoyne Diller (1905–1965), whose modernist paintings are often mistaken for those of Piet Mondrian.94 Seven Yves Saint Laurent dresses are visible in an installation photograph where the dresses were mounted on flattened body shapes with outstretched arms and hung in a line. The body-shaped mount was elevated several feet above the ground and painted purple, the same colour as the wall behind the form, such that the mount mostly blended into the background. The mounts presented the dresses at eye level and in line with Diller’s painting, and the flatness of the display of the dresses emphasized the similarities between the dresses and the painting. Other dresses designed by Saint Laurent that were inspired by the work of other artists were also exhibited this way.95 However, it is impossible to retroactively assess whether the public read the Mondrian dresses as readymades in the context of this fashion exhibition. Richard Martin, who became the curator of the Costume Institute upon Vreeland’s retirement, said that the presentation of the ‘Mondrian’ dress in this exhibition ‘made people think of the dress in terms of planar clothing by utilizing Mondrian as a kind of paradigm for the flatness that prevailed in that era’.96 Martin did not use the term readymade nor did he argue that the dresses were read as art. Exhibition maker Judith Clark linked Vreeland’s choice of unusual mount to the complex relationship between fashion and art, writing: ‘She [Vreeland] had never stated that fashion was indeed art but exhibited the love affair between the two. She exhibited Yves Saint Laurent’s “Mondrian Dress” next to the original Mondrian painting. Her clever hand as a critic was to exhibit the dress on a flattened body – halfway between 2-D and 3-D – revealing a possible ambiguous reading’.97 Both of these comments make it clear that it is difficult, if not impossible, to retroactively render judgement as to whether the public interpreted this dress as a readymade.98 Embracing the ambiguity of interpretation, something that Duchamp himself took delight in, leaves the status of the object up to the beholder to resolve.

Even so, it is necessary to directly address the critics that spoke out against the exhibition of Saint Laurent’s career retrospective at The Met. Within days of the gala opening in December 1983, critics expressed outrage. Nina Hyde of the Washington Post summarized the controversy thus: ‘Though other designers have rented space at the Met for parties to show off their clothes, this is the first Metropolitan Museum show of a living designer’s work. “It will give him one more shop window on Fifth Avenue,” sniped a competitor. “A museum should be a place of reverence, not a place of business,” said a fellow Parisian designer’.99 Although some might argue that this is sufficient evidence to deny the Mondrian dresses status as a readymade, let us not forget that there was a similar level of outrage expressed in 1917 when Fountain was presented as a candidate for the Society of Independents exhibition by R. Mutt. During the emergency meeting of the society’s board of directors to consider Fountain, George Bellows expressed incredulity when he said: ‘You mean to say, if a man sent in horse manure glued to a canvas that we would have to accept it?’100 The board, which included Katherine Dreier, voted on the matter, refusing to exhibit Fountain; after the opening, their position was made clear in a statement: ‘The Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art’.101 The definitive tone of this refusal reminds us that it took some time before Duchamp’s urinal readymade was accepted as a work of art. And it seems to be taking some time for fashion to be accepted as a valid form of artistic expression. In making a direct comparison of two waistcoats authored by Duchamp with two ‘Mondrian’ dresses by Yves Saint Laurent, relative to the enunciative conditions of the readymade, it might be said that there are more similarities than differences. The waistcoats were authored by a man who claimed to have left the artworld in order to play chess while the dresses were designed by a man who believed himself to be an artist within his own métier.102 And thus it is interesting to note that Duchamp once said that he preferred the term ‘craftsman’ to that of ‘artist’: The word ‘art’ interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I’ve heard, it signifies ‘making’. Now everyone makes something, and those who make things on canvas, with a frame, they’re called artists. Formerly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer. We’re all craftsmen, in civilian or military or artistic life.103

In this passage, Duchamp discerns no difference between craftsman and artist and suggests that anyone’s work might be understood in reference to making, including civilians and even military personnel, and consequently, by logical extension, fashion designers.

Elevated from their commodity origins to the status of singular objects within the museum, Duchamp’s waistcoats and Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Mondrian’ haute couture dresses have been presented in various exhibitions for the viewer’s aesthetic pleasure. Within the institutional frame of the art museum, the differences between these objects are ‘infrathin’, a concept that Duchamp articulated in his final set of notes to describe sensations that are barely perceptible, such as the faint sound of velvet trousers

Reading the Readymade

The Thingly Quality of the Readymade

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rubbing together (as discussed in the previous chapter). As this analysis has shown, these objects have many similarities, most notably that as readymades they were worn and anticipate the body as the mode of activation. However, there are four Duchamp waistcoats in comparison to an unknown number of Saint Laurent ‘Mondrian’ couture dresses which raises questions about their relative status as unique and singular objects. There were at least six versions of the dress with variations in how the blocks of colour and black grid lines were laid out. Which of these ‘Mondrian’ couture dresses is considered the original? Is each considered an original within the series? How many dresses have survived and where are they?104 What about the unknown number of customized variations of the ‘Mondrian’ dresses?105 Both the Duchamp waistcoat readymades and the ‘Mondrian’ dresses carry the aura of their creator in the form of the signature or label, but is the aura enhanced if the editions are limited in number and can be readily traced? In his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin considers the effects of mechanical reproduction on the emergence of new forms of art, in particular photography and cinema, on the aura of the artwork. Framing the notion in historical terms, Benjamin suggests that ‘the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity’ and links the creation of value to the idea of authenticity.106 Benjamin also identifies exhibitions as a form of secular ritual in which the aura of the original is heightened by the possibility of mechanical reproduction. It is the idea of the singular, original object that is the focus of his argument, and, as Naumann points out, the readymade disrupts the notion of singularity associated with the artwork.107 In Kamien-Kazhdan’s analysis of the remaking of the fourteen readymades reproduced by Arturo Schwarz in 1964 as a series of editioned replicas, she argues that these replicas complicate the notion of originality since these objects, as substitutes for the lost originals, share and possibly even exceed the status and value of the originals.108 These objects were not selected with indifference, but were meticulously constructed reproductions, supervised by Duchamp, and their aesthetic qualities were enhanced by the careful replication process that gave ‘rigorous attention to historical detail’.109 Although these replicas initially provoked the disapproval of colleagues like Robert Lebel, ultimately museums and galleries were not averse to displaying the replicas.110 The aura of the original readymades remained intact, and was possibly even enhanced, in the remaking of the replicas. Troy maintains that Walter Benjamin’s analysis of reproduction underpins the ‘central problem for modernism itself’ since multiples can attain the status of original works of art.111 She unravels the myth of originality and authenticity in the domains of fashion and art in the early twentieth century by exposing the overlapping strategies in the marketing of haute couture dresses by Poiret, Vionnet and other designers with the marketing of easily reproducible modernist works by cubist painter Pablo Picasso and the readymades of Duchamp. She writes: ‘At stake in both domains [of fashion and art] were the originality, authenticity, and aesthetic aura of the individual object, which are essential to the establishment of any fashion, whether in dresses or in vanguard art production’.112 Troy compares the production of multiples in art to that in haute couture and writes: ‘not only is any original couture creation based on a model designed for reproduction, but in order for that model to become an established fashion, it must first be circulated in the form of multiple copies’.113 Troy argues that both domains of art and fashion harness marketing strategies to create demand.

Troy’s argument echoes that of Rosalind Krauss who similarly explored the modernist myths of originality and authenticity that have been actively promoted within aesthetic discourse. Using the examples of Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and other artists, Krauss argues that the myths of singularity, originality and authenticity have been constructed and promoted through cultural practices. She writes: The theme of originality, encompassing as it does the notions of authenticity, originals, and origins, is the shared discursive practice of the museum, the historian, and the maker of art. And throughout the nineteenth century all these institutions were concerted, together, to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original.114

Reading the Readymade

Krauss defines singularity as a function of the beholder and as dependent upon a ‘re-cognition made possible only by prior example’.115 Aside from the waistcoat series, Duchamp did not seem to concern himself with these issues, since many of his works were replicated, as was noted earlier. Duchamp’s waistcoats and Saint Laurent’s ‘Mondrian’ dresses are iconic works that exude the aura of their creators long after their passing – even though neither was made solely by their hand. When viewing these objects in person, not only are their differences infrathin but both the waistcoats and the ‘Mondrian’ dresses project a palpable sense of something else. Heidegger described this something else as the thingly quality of art and suggested that this quality is self-evident even to the ‘shippers or charwomen in museums’.116 Similarly, Duchamp scholars Jacob Lund and Jacob Wamberg identified the thingly quality of the readymade, noting that ‘the readymades bring attention to what we could call the thingness of art’.117 Ultimately, it is this something else that the viewer responds to in reading the readymade waistcoat or dress as a work of art. Other scholars have likewise observed that some objects may exert a thingly or metaphysical presence that acts as a gravitational pull. In his seminal essay on ‘Thing Theory’, Bill Brown acknowledges the power of a thing to captivate and to enchant, and suggests that it is not the thing itself, but what ideas it represents and what actions it inspires that are worthy of examination.118 Thing theory does not distinguish between the objects as high art, craft, kitsch or utility object, but it is in analysing our relationship to things that we can unravel their meaning to us. In an exhibition, we are in motion, stopping to interact with objects that attract or please us in some way, and moving past ones that do not. Certain objects may precipitate a moment of enchantment, reflection or connection, akin to ‘a sort of trance uniting spectator and masterpiece’.119 An object – a painting of shoes by Van Gogh, a readymade shovel by Duchamp or a ‘Mondrian’ dress by Saint Laurent – may make claims on our attention, captivating us and drawing us closer and into its web, but each of us experiences this sensation in relation to different things. I suggest that we are more likely to feel the power of things in the context of a museum, since we encounter ‘real’ things that have been inscribed with cultural value. The architecture of museal spaces, as well as the rituals of entry and deportment of museums, sensitizes us to an experience that is markedly different from the everyday. In the museum, we expect to look at and engage with things that have been selected and ordered in service of a curatorial narrative. These things have been fetishized through modes of display, and touching is prohibited, denying us the sensual pleasure of

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their form. Our encounter is mediated through the specific context of presentation in terms of the spatial configuration of the site and the strategies of display. These factors may serve to enhance the aesthetic qualities of an object and its thingness. In the end, whether viewing Duchamp’s waistcoat as an art object mounted in Perspex or a ‘Mondrian’ dress, our interpretation of that thing – as a work of art or as an article of clothing – is our own. As John Dewey wrote with prescience in 1934: ‘every individual brings with him, when he exercises his individuality, a way of seeing and feeling that in its interaction with old material creates something new’, such that ‘as a work of art, it is recreated every time it is esthetically experienced’.120 There are many kinds of spectators: some want authoritative interpretation; some are indifferent; and some are willing to embrace ambiguity. Thus, if we accept Duchamp’s creative act as an equal partnership with the spectator, the decision as to whether or not the snow shovel, the waistcoat, or a ‘Mondrian’ dress is a work of art is ultimately a personal and deeply consequential one.

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Notes

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1 Marcel Duchamp, ‘The Creative Act’, reprinted in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press), 78. 2 Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 418. 3 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) and The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2008), 158–162. 4 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 165. 5 Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, The Journal of Philosophy 61 (October 15, 1964): 574. Emphasis in original. Danto mentions readymades in connection with Andy Warhol but does not mention Duchamp in his essay. 6 Danto, ‘The Artworld’, 581. 7 Danto expands and refines his position on the appreciation and interpretation of objects like Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and Duchamp’s readymades in subsequent publications. See Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 8 George Dickie, ‘Defining Art’, American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (July 1969): 255. 9 Ibid., 254. 10 George Dickie, The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (New York: Haven Publications, 1984). 11 Other philosophers have similarly argued that the artefact becomes art when it is recognized as such by the museum or other social institutions like the artworld. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 328. In this work, Bourdieu defined the museum as an institution that gives legitimacy to the artistic field. 12 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995), 13. 13 Letter of Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, 15 January [1916], New York, in Marcel Duchamp, Affectionately, Marcel, the Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000), 43–44. 14 As Helen Molesworth has observed, the emergence of the readymade as an idea over time aligns with the rise of twentieth-century consumerism and mass consumption. See Helen Anne

Reading the Readymade

Molesworth, ‘At Home with Duchamp: The Readymade and Domesticity’ (PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, January 1998). 15 Letter of Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, in Duchamp, Affectionately, Marcel, 44. 16 Jacques Derrida quoted in Nancy J. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 26. 17 Thierry de Duve, ‘Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism’, in The Duchamp Effect, trans. Rosalind Krauss (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 107. 18 Ibid., 108. 19 Letter of Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, 15 January [1916], in Duchamp, Affectionately, Marcel, 43–44. 20 Marcel Duchamp, ‘Apropos of “Readymades”’, in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1989), 141. Ellipses added. 21 Marcel Duchamp interview with Georges Charbonnier, Marseille, 1961 quoted in Adina KamienKazhdan, Remaking the Readymade: Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica (London: Routledge, 2018), 77. 22 See entry for ‘Comb or Peigne’, Toutfait.com: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 23 Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 379. Emphasis in original. 24 Ibid., 380. 25 Ibid., 388. Emphasis in original. 26 Duchamp, ‘The Creative Act’, 77–78. 27 Ibid., 78. 28 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 90. 29 Ibid., 104. 30 Eco must have been aware of Duchamp’s work when writing the book since he quotes a passage by Georges Mathieu that mentions ‘Duchamp’s meta-irony’ (in a discussion about the role of chance in contemporary art). Eco, The Open Work, 89. 31 Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 8. 32 Ibid., 6. 33 Ibid., 7. 34 Ibid., 13. 35 Ibid., 14. 36 Duchamp quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (New York: Artbook, 2013) 31. 37 Duchamp’s first readymades, the bottle rack and the bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, were thrown away by his sister Suzanne; the umbrella stand and parasol included in the 1916 exhibition at the Bourgeois Gallery in New York were ignored; and the infamous urinal signed by R. Mutt presented to the Society of Independent Artists in 1917 was lost after it was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz. 38 George Heard Hamilton, ‘In Advance of Whose Broken Art?’, in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 74. 39 Ibid. 40 Elena Filipovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2016), 159. 41 Ibid., 7. 42 Ibid., 6. Emphasis in original.

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43 44 45 46 47

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Ibid., 8. Ibid. Emphasis in original. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 177. George Baker, ‘Leather and Lace’, October 131 (Winter 2010): 125. For example, Raymond Lecuyer complained that ‘the display apparatus that (in the shadows) accompanies the presentation of several canvases and panels is so voluminous and so provocative that painting plays no more than the vague role of accessory’. Raymond Lecuyer quoted in Adam Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-Garde 1925–1941: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 177. 48 For example, in the 1938 Exhibition of Surrealists, visitors would have encountered water in the courtyard and main gallery, the sight of strange, mutilated female bodies, the dust dropping from the ceiling, the head-splitting soundtrack and the tight spaces where bodies rubbed up against each other. See Louis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Adam Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-Garde 1925–1941: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). 49 Marcel Duchamp quoted in Tomkins, Duchamp, 308. 50 Jean-Paul Martinon, ‘Introduction’, The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-Paul Martinon (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 4. 51 Jean-Paul Martinon, ‘Theses in the Philosophy of Curating’, The Curatorial, 26. 52 In his interview with Tomkins, Duchamp recounted that his design for these exhibitions was ‘done with a spirit of real playfulness’. See Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, 37. 53 Duchamp quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), 71. Ellipses added. 54 Marcel Duchamp quoted in Filipovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, 158. 55 Filipovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, 207. 56 Ibid., 202–210. Louise Arensberg died in 1953 and Walter Arensberg died in 1954. 57 Katherine Dreier died in 1952. Filipovic notes that Dreier initially wanted to create a house museum in the country but that Duchamp dissuaded her from doing so. See Filipovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, 205. 58 Filipovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, 205. 59 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 10. 60 Germain Bazin quoted in Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 20. 61 De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 391. 62 Ibid., 389. 63 The catalogue record and image of the PÉRET waistcoat (Object #B98.0454) can be viewed online at https://www.imj.org.il/en/collections/219721, Accessed 20 November 2020. 64 The catalogue record for the BETTY waistcoat (Object #1983-0032-229) can be viewed online at https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/38502, Accessed 20 November 2020. 65 The maker label is in cursive script and includes flourishes which make the surname difficult to discern. Pereira is a common surname in Portugal but the surname might also be Pereiraz, Pereiras, Pereiraj, or even Tereiraz, Tereiras or Tereiraj. An online search for other garments with these maker names was unsuccessful. The conservation report and documentary photographs of the waistcoat were kindly provided to me courtesy of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The museum did not have any further information about the label. Email communication with Lizzie Bisley dated 22 December 2020.

Reading the Readymade

66 Object Condition Report #B98.0454, The Israel Museum, dated 3 June 2012 by Irit Lev Beyth. 67 Although the horizontal dimensions of the waistcoats are similar at 61.2 cm in width for BETTY and 60 cm in width for PÉRET, the BETTY waistcoat is longer at 58.3 cm compared to 44 cm for PÉRET. These dimensions are as noted on the catalogue records for these objects; I was unable to examine the objects in person to confirm the measurements. 68 See, for example, Song Bok Kim, ‘Is Fashion Art?’ Fashion Theory 2, no. 1 (1998): 51–71. See also Nancy J. Troy, ‘Art’, in Fashion and Art, ed. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (London: Berg, 2012), 29–41. In this essay, Troy argued that this series of dresses by Saint Laurent was instrumental in the process by which artist Piet Mondrian’s work came to be more widely known. 69 Yves Saint Laurent’s sketches for this collection show six sleeveless dresses, each designed with a matching coat. Accessed 9 November 2021 at https://museeyslparis.com/en/biography/ lhommage-a-piet-mondrian. 70 Yves Saint Laurent quoted by Cable Fairchild News Service, ‘King Yves Reigns Supreme in Paris’, Women’s Wear Daily (New York), August 3, 1965, 1. 71 Carol Bjorkman, ‘St. Laurent is a Sensation: Carol Says: Opening is “Succes Fou”’, Women’s Wear Daily (New York), August 3, 1965, 1. 72 See ‘The International Collections: In Paris’, Harper’s Bazaar (New York), September 1965, 251. 73 Gloria Emerson, ‘Saint Laurent: Two Stars of Paris’, New York Times, August 15, 1965. 74 In an interview with Angela Taylor during his three-week tour of America in November 1965, Yves Saint Laurent noted that he had ‘seen numerous cheap copies of his famous Mondrian-inspired dresses in store windows’. Yves Saint Laurent quoted in Angela Taylor, ‘“I Hate Mondrian Now,” St. Laurent says’, New York Times, November 12, 1965. The YSL ‘Mondrian’ dresses are still being copied today, with multiple versions available at a range of price points. 75 The Vogue patterns issued in February 1966 inspired by the Yves Saint Laurent Homage to Mondrian collection included a sleeveless dress similar to dress #80 with a red block on the shoulder (Vogue 1557), a dress with long sleeves (Vogue 1556) and a dress with short sleeves (Vogue 1567). 76 Aside from the YSL Foundation in Paris, other museums owning one or more YSL Mondrian dresses include The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young) in California, FIT Museum in New York, the Kyoto Costume Institute in Japan, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. 77 Haute couture is differentiated from the mass-produced ready-to-wear or mass production or prêtà-porter through the use of hand-sewn techniques for embellishment and finishing as well as in the fitting of garments to a specific individual. See the website for the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. Accessed 10 October 2017 at https://fhcm.paris/en/the-federation/. 78 At Christie’s Auction House a YSL Mondrian wool dress labelled Yves Saint Laurent, stamped 10576, sold for GBP30,000 on 1 December 2011. See https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/a-mondriandress-yves-saint-laurent-1966-5519724-details.aspx. Accessed 23 November 2020. 79 In examining these dresses in The Met’s collection on 7 December 2018, I was able to observe that each colour block was carefully stitched together to create the grid-like pattern. Although the blocks appear to be rectangular, there is a very slight widening towards the bottom of the rectangle to create an A-line shape for the dress. As custom-made couture garments, the dresses were made for different clients and are not identical. 80 This dress, Object #C.I.69.23, was a gift of Mrs William Rand; see https://www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/83442. Accessed 23 November 2020.

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81 Carol Bjorkman, ‘St. Laurent is a Sensation: Opening is Succes Fou: C’est Mobile and Mondrian’, Women’s Wear Daily (New York), August 3, 1965, 1 82 Anonymous, ‘The International Collections’, Harper’s Bazaar (New York), September 1965, 251. The caption underneath this photo indicates that versions of the ‘Mondrian’ dresses were available for purchase at department stores Bergdorf Goodman or I. Magnin. Such dresses would have been ready-to-wear rather than couture models, since they would not have been custom made for the wearer as was required by the Syndicale de la Haute Couture (now known as the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode). 83 This dress, Object #C.I.68.60.1, was a gift of Mrs Disque D. Deane; see https://www.metmuseum.org/ art/collection/search/97172. This ‘Mondrian’ dress most closely matches #77 on the YSL sketches, but does not include the block of red on the upper shoulder. 84 In discussing my observations with curatorial staff, it was not evident to us which dress had the original lining. 85 The dresses do not include the labels of department stores Bergdorf Goodman or I. Magnin. 86 Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut quoted in Troy, Couture Culture, 26. Ellipsis in Troy. 87 Yves Saint Laurent began his career at the House of Dior and took over following Christian Dior’s death in 1957. Dior often named his works after flowers, people or places such as the 1947–1948 evening dress called Rose France in reference to his favourite flower and the colour of the dress. See Alexandra Palmer, Christian Dior: History & Modernity, 1947–1957 (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 2018), 7, 96, 105. Other designers like Lucile and Paul Poiret assigned dresses names that were often poetic, lyrical or suggestive; see Troy, Couture Culture, 98–99. 88 Each of the dresses and its matching coat was numbered (91, 77, 78, 81, 80, 102) and the name of the model (such as Muriel, Bridgett) was written on the sketch as well. Saint Laurent’s sketches and selections for fabrics can be seen on the Musée Yves Saint Laurent website. Accessed 9 January 2020 at https://museeyslparis.com/en/biography/lhommage-a-pietmondrian. 89 In September 1965, The Gazette reported that a young Canadian designer named Michele Rosier had been ‘selling her two-color jersey dresses all over Europe when Saint Laurent added a few black lines and came out with his Mondrian collection’. See ‘Parisienne Pioneers Pop Style’, The Gazette (Montreal), September 14, 1965, 31. The previous month, in the New York Times reporting about Saint Laurent’s collection as the ‘hit of Paris’, Bernadine Morris commented that in 1961 Anne Klein had designed dresses ‘divided into colorful squares and rectangles separated by strong black lines just like a typical Mondrian painting’. See Bernadine Morris, ‘Mondrian’s Art Used in Fashion’, New York Times, August 14, 1965. In her study of the Mondrian dresses in relation to art, Nancy Troy observed that in 1945 New York fashion designer Stella Brownie created dresses inspired by Mondrian that were reported upon in the journal Art News. See Troy, ‘Art’, 33–34. 90 When first compiling The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Arturo Schwarz indicated that the location of the Betty waistcoat was unknown; it would later turn up in the collection of the New Zealand Museum Te Papa Tongarewa as one of the objects accepted as a bequest of Betty Isaacs. For an explanation as to why this waistcoat was believed to be lost for many years, see Marcus Moore, ‘Attracting Dust in New Zealand Lost and Found: Betty’s Waistcoat and Other Duchampian Traces’, toutfait.com The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, December 1, 2007, updated May 10, 2019. 91 This does not preclude the collection of such information, but as far as I know, no one has yet attempted to create such a record.

Reading the Readymade

92 The museum has presented several exhibitions of fashion in which the designer has been described as an artist, including Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011). See also my interview with former Costume Institute curator Harold Koda. See Ingrid Mida, ‘A Conversation with Harold Koda about Fashion and Art’, Fashion Projects, November 7, 2011. Accessed 25 November 2020 at https://www.fashionprojects.org/blog/3062. 93 This includes: Haute Couture, 7 December 1995 – 24 March 1996 at The Met; Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design, 6 December 1983 – 2 September 1984 at The Met; The Ceaseless Century, 9 September – 29 November 1998 at The Met; The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, 6 May – 9 August 2009 at The Met; The Art of Fashion: The Radical Sixties, 1 December 1990 – 24 February 1991 at the Kimbell Art Museum; and 25 Years: 25 Couturiers, 9 September – 7 December 1975 at the Denver Art Museum. 94 The installation photos for this exhibit show a painting that is often assumed to be by Mondrian. See, for example, Judith Clark, ‘The Costume Institute 1972–1989: Re-Styling History’, in Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, ed. Lisa Immordino Vreeland (New York: Abrams, 2011), 239. The text by Clark and the caption for this photo misattribute this painting to Mondrian when it is, in fact, by Burgoyne Diller who was influenced by Mondrian. Burgoyne Diller, Second Theme, 1938–1940, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Object #63.72. I offer my thanks to Nancy J. Troy for pointing out that Burgoyne Diller’s work is often mistaken for that of Mondrian. 95 Additional installation photos from this exhibition show that dresses from other collections by Yves Saint Laurent were also exhibited hung on the wall in a similar fashion, including two dresses created in tribute to artist Tom Wesselman from autumn–winter 1966. Accessed 9 January 2020 at https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16028coll14/id/4966. 96 Richard Martin quoted in Alice Mackrell, Art and Fashion: The Impact of Art on Fashion and Fashion on Art (London: Batsford, 2005), 153. 97 Judith Clark, ‘The Costume Institute 1972–1989’, 239. As noted earlier, the painting hung in this installation was not by Mondrian but by Burgoyne Diller. 98 It is interesting to note that the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibits their YSL Mondrian dress adjacent to a Piet Mondrian painting. In such a case it could be possible to survey museum-goers as to their interpretation of the dress as a work of art, but this is beyond the scope of this project. 99 Nina Hyde, ‘YSL’, Washington Post, December 6, 1983. Accessed 9 January 2021 at https://www. washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1983/12/06/ysl/0952dbbf-dee8-479e-8019-5da58b852276/. 100 George Bellows quoted by Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost, 71–72. 101 Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost, 72. Naumann cites the article: ‘His Art Too Crude for Independents’, New York Herald, 14 April 1917, 6. 102 Saint Laurent once said of his work: ‘I just tried to be an artist in my own métier’. Yves Saint Laurent quoted in Mackrell, Art and Fashion, 148. 103 Duchamp quoted in Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 16. Ellipsis added. 104 Some dresses may have been worn and discarded by their wearer when they were no longer in fashion. The market for vintage items like this did not materialize until the 1980s. 105 Yves Saint Laurent customized at least two dresses by adding sleeves. The designer added sleeves at the request of Mrs Rosemary Daly, an early patron of the couture house. See ‘Yves Saint Laurent Mondrian Dress’, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers. Accessed 7 February 2019 at https://www. lesliehindman.com/yves-saint-laurent-mondrian-dress/ This dress was sold at auction to a private collector on 7 April 2016 for US$27,500 exceeding its pre-sale estimate of US$4,000–6,000. See ‘YSL Mondrian Dress’, Antiques and the Arts, April 14, 2016. Accessed 8 January 2021 at https://

161

106 107

108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

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118 119 120

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www.antiquesandthearts.com/ysls-mondrian-dressbrings-27500-at-leslie-hindman/. The Victoria & Albert Museum has a long-sleeved dress in cream and black silk crepe (Object #T.74-1982); this dress resembles Vogue Pattern 1556. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 220–221. See Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost, 382. Naumann argues that one of Duchamp’s most important contributions relates to the technical and conceptual implications of reproducing a ‘unique work of art’ in multiples. Kamien-Kazhdan also traces other reproductions of Duchamp’s works for exhibition or sale by the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1950, a 1960 Duchamp exhibition in Stockholm, and a retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in California in 1963, as well as Richard Hamilton’s reconstruction of The Large Glass in 1965–1966. See Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade, 69–109. Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade,155. Frances Naumann notes that Lebel ‘objected to the inclusion of these works in any Duchamp exhibition’. See Naumann, The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost, 388. Troy, Couture Culture, 256–257. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 259. Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition’, October 18 (Autumn 1981): 58. Ibid., 62. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 145. See Jacob Lund and Jacob Wamberg, ‘Introduction: Duchamp’s Readymades – A Re-evaluation’, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 57–58 (2019): 5. Although Lund and Wamberg do not cite Heidegger, their use of the term thingness to describe the readymade is notable. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28, no.1 (Autumn 2001): 5. Duncan, Civilising Rituals, 20. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Berkeley Publishing, 2005), 113.

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Figure 6.1  Mark Kauffman, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp being viewed through his masterwork The Large Glass, 1966. Getty Images.

End-Game

Each of them gives his particular note to his interpretation, which isn’t necessarily true or false, which is interesting, but only interesting when you consider the man [or woman] who wrote the interpretation, as always.1 –Marcel Duchamp

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In this book, I have presented evidence that clothing and dressing/undressing are significant themes that recur in Duchamp’s life and oeuvre – including his drawings, his readymades and in the fashioning of his body. Although Duchamp’s waistcoat readymade series Made to Measure (1957–1961) has largely been overlooked, I have shown that this particular readymade series is a remarkable and deliberate effort to recalibrate the definition of the readymade to include clothing. The evidence in Duchamp’s last series of notes confirms Duchamp’s belief that art can be worn and that this waistcoat readymade series was a calculated extension of the parameters of the readymade. For Duchamp, the waistcoat readymades were art objects of deeply personal significance that transformed the wearer’s body into a kinetic art object. With this readymade series, Duchamp established a notable precedent for wearable art as a valid form of artistic expression. As the preceding chapters have documented, the waistcoat readymades are not the only objects by Duchamp that manifest links to the fashioned body. In contemplating the nuances of his drawings, Duchamp’s awareness of the fashioned body and early explorations of gender play come to light. In studying the photographs of Duchamp that circulated in the mass media alongside the images of his cross-dressing alter ego, his knowledge of the significance of clothing to the visual representation of the self becomes apparent. In examining the specific items of clothing worn by Duchamp and the related material traces of his management of his wardrobe, Duchamp’s evident pleasure in masquerade and his use of the three-piece suit as a uniform for public appearances are exposed. Thus, in considering the material traces of Duchamp’s fashioning of his body and identity in his work and life, a nuanced account and understanding of Duchamp’s oeuvre is presented. I maintain that Duchamp recognized and harnessed the intellectual, affective and sensory qualities of fashioning the body as a means of articulating identity in and through art, thereby also disrupting long-held mind/body binaries in Western art. Ultimately, I argue in concert with Duchamp’s son-inlaw Paul Matisse that the waistcoat readymade series represents ‘a striking and profound conceptual development’ that was a deliberate effort to recalibrate the parameters of the readymade.2 This series should be considered ‘a form of revolutionary action’, to use Duchamp’s turn of phrase, that serves to dismantle the long-standing prejudice against fashion as art. Fashion is not art’s other, but instead represents another form of expression that Duchamp equated to an aesthetic act in his final set of notes: ‘le fait de porter le pantalon, le port du/ pantalon est comparable à l’exécution/ manuelle d’une sculpture originale’, or the act of wearing the trousers, the trouser/ wearing is comparable to the hand/ making of an original sculpture.3 In other words, in the act of getting dressed, it is possible to fashion ourselves as an original work of art (or not). In writing this book, I have articulated the significance of Duchamp’s waistcoat readymade series in relation to ‘the so-called Duchampian revolution’ and thus contributed to the discourse on the relationship of fashion and art.4 This work establishes Duchamp’s waistcoat readymade series as a notable precedent for other twentieth-century artists who used clothing as forms of expression, including Andy Warhol with his Souper Dress (1966) and Joseph Beuys with his Felt Suit (1970).5 By analysing how the readymade is imbricated in the very production of clothing, and by considering the related evidence that articulates Duchamp’s engagement with clothing in his artistic fashioning of self, it becomes evident that Duchamp did not espouse hierarchical definitions that delimit clothing or the fashioned body as a significant artistic output. This corpus of evidence

ultimately facilitates a response to the questions asked by art critic David Carrier (as discussed in the introduction): ‘Is fashion art? If so, what kind of art is it?’6 Duchamp’s waistcoat readymades establish an unequivocal precedent for clothing as art, and therefore any object of fashion has the potential to be classified as a readymade. As the previous chapters have shown, Marcel Duchamp’s definition of the readymade was expansive, including not only urinals, bottle racks and combs but also waistcoats that were intended to be worn by the recipients. In light of the overwhelming evidence that points to Duchamp’s deliberate recalibration of the readymade to include clothing, we are able to decide for ourselves whether or not to complete the creative act and recognize a waistcoat or a dress as a work of art. In negating the boundaries between art and everyday objects, and in conflating art and life, Duchamp was an iconoclast who provocatively challenged the boundaries of how art was defined and presented, encouraging the spectator to be part of the creative process. Duchamp’s evident pleasure in provocation and subversion was documented in an interview published in the February 1963 issue of Vogue (New York). In discussing the riotous reception of his 1912 painting The Nude Descending a Staircase at the Armory Show, he said: ‘I was delighted to be a succès de scandale because for me it was a form of revolutionary action. You see if I were accepted with open arms that would be the opposite of what I wanted’.7 This is one of many such statements made by Duchamp that articulated his desire to provoke a response in the spectator. He was also open to the interpretation of his work by others, which he said was interesting and suggested that any interpretation reveals as much about the interpreter as it does about him.8 Perhaps Marcel Duchamp would have found my interpretation interesting. It is in the context of an art museum that commodities – urinals, shovels and waistcoat readymades as well as dresses – are distanced from their commercial origins and fetishized through modes of display, such that we are more inclined to read such objects as works of art. We may be drawn to certain objects that precipitate a moment of enchantment, reflection or connection. Any object – a painting of boots by Van Gogh, a readymade waistcoat by Duchamp or a ‘Mondrian’ dress by Saint Laurent – may draw us closer, claiming our attention and captivating us to experience its thingly quality. I suggest that it is this thingness that makes the experience of art a deeply personal one, which is perhaps what Duchamp anticipated all along.

Notes 1 2

Duchamp quoted in Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 42. Paul Matisse letter to Arturo Schwarz dated 9 November 1964, reprinted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), 808. Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, unpaginated. As I noted in my introduction, this phrase was used by Geczy and Karaminas in their anthology on

5

Fashion and Art to describe the impact of Duchamp’s artistic practice on the definition of art. See, for example, Aileen Ribeiro, Clothing in Art: The Visual Culture of Fashion, 1600–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 28–30. See also Peter Wollen with Fiona Bradley, Addressing

End-Game

3 4

the Century: 100 Years of Art & Fashion (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 1998). 167

6

7

David Carrier, ‘The Challenges of Fashion in a Museum’, in Hyperallergic 17 (November 2018). Accessed 17 December 2018 at https://hyperallergic.com/471639/contemporary-muslim-fashionsde-young-museum/. Marcel Duchamp quoted in William Steiz, ‘What’s Happened to Art? An Interview with Marcel Duchamp on Present Consequences of New York’s 1913 Armory Show’, Vogue (New York) 141, no. 4 (February 15, 1963): 112.

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8

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Duchamp quoted in Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 42.

Acknowledgements Given the vast amount of scholarship devoted to the life and work of Marcel Duchamp, it has been somewhat daunting to write this book. I certainly did not imagine that the trajectory of my academic career would include writing a monograph on this iconoclast. In some respects, my encounter with Duchamp has been somewhat fortuitous since my initial goal was to better understand the complex relationship between fashion and art. Exhibitions that presented fashion designers as artists, such as The House of Viktor & Rolf at the Barbican Gallery in London in 2008 and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011, compelled me to reconsider the role of fashion in disseminating prevailing ideas about culture and indeed in challenging the definition of art itself. I am grateful to several prominent museum directors and curators, including Harold Koda, Valerie Steele, Matthew Teitelbaum, and Natalie Bondil, who were willing to speak to me about the place of fashion in the art museum. As engaging as these conversations were, I still needed to learn more, which ultimately led me to Duchamp. In seeking to better understand the implications of the readymade on contemporary art, I discovered notable evidence of Marcel Duchamp’s entanglement with clothing in his life and work and it struck me that this aspect of his oeuvre had not been analysed with the same level of focus and rigour as the rest of his oeuvre. This book is the culmination of that intellectual journey. It is impossible to name all those who have aided or supported me in some way during the course of this project. Much gratitude is owed to Frances Arnold not only for embracing this interdisciplinary book for publication but also for her steadfast support, encouragement, patience and friendship throughout my writing career with Bloomsbury. I extend my sincere appreciation to the curatorial staff at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Israel Museum of Art, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for their willingness to assist me with my research and the publication of this book. I also appreciate the help of the Association Marcel Duchamp in Paris and Francis Naumann in New York. I am truly grateful for the very insightful comments and suggestions made by Jennifer Fisher and Marlis Schweitzer that served to improve the rigour of my analysis. I also extend sincere thanks to Markus Reisenleitner and Anna Hudson for engaging with my work, and to Nancy J. Troy of Stanford University for sharing her insights into the ‘Mondrian’ dresses by Yves Saint Laurent. I am also grateful to Rebecca Hamilton for help in procuring images, Virginia Rounding for her thorough copy-editing and Deborah Maloney for her acute attention to detail in producing this book. This book is dedicated to Irene Gammel. It is impossible to properly convey my deep gratitude to Irene Gammel, who validated my initial observations about Duchamp, reassured me of the originality of my ideas and nurtured my confidence at several critical junctures. Without her, this project would not have come to fruition and I feel an enormous debt of gratitude for her guidance and support. I also am indebted to Irene for encouraging me to publish this work. Her intellectual generosity and kindness merit acknowledgement and celebration in academic circles.

Acknowledgements

I must acknowledge the friendship and support of scholars like Mary Rubio and Lu Ann Lafrenz who encouraged me to pursue my academic interests. I also offer my heartfelt thanks for the kindness and patience of other friends and colleagues, especially Sarah Casey, who offered helpful words of inspiration and support during the most difficult moments of this journey. Very special thanks go to my very dear friend Maura J. Clark for her close reading and thoughtful comments on the draft chapters of this book which helped immensely in improving the accessibility of the book. I am blessed to have the love and support of my family, including my sons Mike and Jon and my husband Daniel. My husband is undoubtedly my most ardent fan and without his deep love and well of support this book would not exist.

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Image Credits Cover Cover of Vogue (New York), July 1, 1945. Photograph by Erwin Blumenfeld, Vogue, © Condé Nast. Figure  0.1 Cover of Vogue (New York), July 1, 1945. Photograph by Erwin Blumenfeld, Vogue, © Condé Nast. Figure 1.1 Marcel Duchamp, Singer in Evening Dress, 1908. Pen and black ink, watercolour on paper (15.5 × 11.8 cm). Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Germany, Art Resource. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 1.2 Fashion illustration of Men’s Formal Wear, 1909–1910. Costume Institute Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image in public domain. Figure 1.3 Fashion Illustration published in Journal des Demoiselles, 1 May 1908. Costume Institute Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image in public domain. Figure 1.4 Marcel Duchamp, Mid-Lent, 1909. Conté, graphite and ink on paper (61 × 48.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 1.5 Marcel Duchamp, At the Bar, 1909. Pen, brush and ink on paper (38.4 × 29.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 1.6 Marcel Duchamp, La Mère / The Mother, 1908. Black and red chalk, black ink on paper (58  ×  44.8 cm). Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Germany, Art Resource. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 1.7 Marcel Duchamp, News, 1908. Pen and watercolour. Bridgeman Images, New York. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 1.8 Ingrid Mida, Young Man 1909 after Marcel Duchamp, 2018. Figure 1.9 Ingrid Mida, Young Man Standing 1909–1910 after Marcel Duchamp, 2018. Figure  1.10 Marcel Duchamp, Cimetière des uniformes et livrées, No. 2 / Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (No. 2) [The Bachelors and Nine Malic Moulds], 1914. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Image in public domain. Figure 1.11 Marcel Duchamp, Morceaux choisis d’après Cranach et ‘Relâche’, 1968. Philadelphia Museum of Art:  Gift of Alexina Duchamp,  1969,  1969-97-1(1). © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). ­Figure 2.1 Irving Penn, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1948. © The Irving Penn Foundation. Figure  2.2 Pach Brothers, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1915 (published in Vanity Fair, September 1915, page 57). Courtesy of Condé Nast.

Figure 2.3 Photographer unknown, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Beatrice Wood, 1917. Getty Images / Photo12 / Universal Images Group. Figure 2.4 Photographer unknown, Artist Marcel Duchamp Wearing Fur Coat, New York City, February 26, 1927. Getty Images. Figure 2.5 David Gahr, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1965. David Gahr / Getty Images. Figure 2.6 Mark Kauffman, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp in his apartment behind a chessboard with pieces designed by fellow artist Max Ernst, 1966. Life Magazine / The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images. Figure 3.1 Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Photograph, Silver Gelatin Print 8.7 × 14 cm. AM2004-177, Photo Georges Meguerditchian, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, France. © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. Figure 3.2 Man Ray, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp as Rose Sélavy, 1920–1921. Getty Images / Bettman. Figure 3.3 Ad for Weil Paris, Gazette du Bon Ton, 1920, no. 4, page XXVIII. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Image in public domain. Figure 3.4 Model wearing winter coat, ca. 1920. Keystone France / Gamma-Keystone, Getty Images. Figure 3.5 Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp dressed as Rrose Sélavy, ca. 1923. Gelatin silver print, 22.1 × 17.6 cm (8 ½ × 6 15∕16 inches). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. © Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure  3.6 Marcel Duchamp, Belle Haleine – Eau de Voilette (cardboard box and brushed-glass perfume bottle), 1921. Private collection / Bridgeman Images. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 3.7 Ad for Rigaud Perfume, page published in Art – Goût – Beauté, Feuillets de l’élégance féminine, Février 1926, no. 66, 6e Année, page 8, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Image in public domain. Figure 3.8 Marcel Duchamp, cover of New York Dada, 1921, Letterpress and photoengraving, sheet 37.47 × 25.4 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Image in public domain. Figure 3.9 Models wearing 1920s fashions. Getty Images / Hulton Deutsch. Figure 3.10 Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité, 1915. Image in public domain. Figure 3.11 Photographer unknown, Denise Poiret, 1919. Getty Images / Keystone France. ­Figure 3.12 Photographer unknown, Florine Stettheimer, ca. 1917–1920. Image in public domain.

Figure 3.14 Photographer unknown, Portrait of Berenice Abbott, ca. 1920s. Getty Images / Keystone France.

Image Credits

Figure 3.13 George Grantham Bain Collection, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhaven, ca. 1920–1925. Photograph, glass negative (5 x 7 inches). Library of Congress, Washington. Image in public domain.

Figure  3.15 Page  60 from September 1915 issue of Vanity Fair with drawings by Clara Tice and photograph of Tice by unknown photographer. Courtesy of Condé Nast. 183

Figure  4.1 Rrose Sélavy mannequin by Marcel Duchamp, Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. Installation photo, Man Ray, 1938, print 1966. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. © Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 4.2 Unknown maker, Waistcoat, France, ca. 1780–1794. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.2007.211.1078. Image in public domain. Figure 4.3 Paul Nadar, Portrait of Théophile Gautier, ca. 1856. Salted paper print from glass negative (24.8 × 19.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image in public domain. Figure  4.4 Photographer unknown, Sonia Delaunay in her apartment, 1913. Snark/Art Resource, New York. Figure  4.5 Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) proudly show their ‘Futurist’ waistcoats in Turin, photography taken from the magazine L’Illustrazione Italiana of Christmas 1953, page 61, 14 January 1924 (b/w photo by unknown photographer). Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections, Florence, Italy / Bridgeman Images. Figure  4.6 Marcel Duchamp, TEENY, 1957. Private Collection. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure  4.7 Marcel Duchamp, PÉRET, 1958. The Israel Museum. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 4.8 Marcel Duchamp, BETTY, 1961. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / SOCAN, Montreal (2022). Figure 5.1 Yves Saint Laurent, ‘Mondrian Dress’ 1965/66 fall–winter. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Art Resource, New York. Figure  5.2 Terry Fincher, A model wearing a day dress from the Mondrian collection of French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, 23 August 1965. The collection was inspired by the paintings of Piet Mondrian. Terry Fincher / Express / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

Image Credits

Figure 6.1 Mark Kauffman, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp being viewed through his masterwork The Large Glass, 1966. Getty Images.

184

Index Page numbers in italic indicate figures. Abbott, Berenice 93, 95, 97 androgyny 32–35, 83, 88–100, 118 Arensberg, Walter 8, 112 Arensberg collection 146 Armory Show 7, 52, 167 art museum 140, 141, 147, 153, 167 art, wearing of 110, 117, 120, 125, 127, 130, 131, 166 Arts and Decoration 49, 54 artworld 8, 140, 141, 153 Auld Baillee tailor 58 authenticity 155 avant-garde 8, 74, 75, 77, 86, 112, 120 Azaguer, Georges 32 Baker, George 129 Balla, Giacomo 120 Ballard, Bettina 60 Barrett, Sarah (Sally) 125 Barthes, Roland 7, 48–49, 76 Baudelaire, Charles 32, 36, 50–54 belle époque, la 26, 32 Beaton, Cecil 3, 18 Bellows, George 153 Benjamin, Walter 67, 154 Berger, John 25, 60, 64, 76 Beuys, Joseph 5, 166 Blind Man’s Ball 74 Blumenfeld, Erwin 1, 2, 151 Boodro, Michael 11 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 10, 151 Brâncuși, Constantin 8, 56 Breton, André 51 Brown, Bill 155 Brummel, Beau 50 Butler, Judith 82, 98, 100 buttons, typefaced 123–124 Cabanne, Pierre 60, 75, 131 Cameron, Eric 5 capitalism, 5, 6, 10, 111 Carnegie, Hattie 2 Carrier, David 11, 167 Chaplin, Charlie 63, 83 Cocteau, Jean 90 collaboration 3, 8, 75, 116 Comstock, Anthony 95 Cornell, Joseph 60–61, 151 craftsmanship 142, 153

cross-dressing 75–83, 78, 82, 86, 88, 98, 117, 118 ­Crowninshield, Frank 52, 55, 56, 59, 95 Curator, role in defining art 144–146 Dalí, Salvador 3, 60, 115, 116 dandyism 49–52 Danto, Arthur 140 d’Aubigny, Julie 118 d’Aurevilly, Jules Barbey 49 de Duve, Thierry 140, 142–143, 147 Delaunay, Sonia 79, 117, 120, 121 Delsaut, Yvette 151 Depero, Fortunato 117, 120, 122 Derrida, Jacques 142 Dewey, John 156 d’Harnoncourt, Anne 33, 128, 131 Dickie, George 140–141 Diller, Burgoyne 152 Dreier, Katherine 61, 146 Doucet, Jacques 3 Drawing abstracted figures 35–39 comic illustrations 25–32 definition of 22 malic forms 35–39, 129 sketchbooks 24–25 Slow Approach to Seeing 23 work of the hand in drawing 25 Duchamp, Alexina ‘Teeny’ Sattler Matisse 123, 124, 125, 130 Duchamp Dossier 48, 60–61, 151 Duchamp, Marcel (Artworks) Allégorie de genre (George Washington) 15 At the Bar/Au Bar 30, 30 Belle Haleine Eau de Voilette 83–6, 84, 87 BETTY 126–127, 127, 147–8 Bicycle Wheel 110, 112, 114 Boîte-en-valise 5, 144 Bottle Rack 10, 110–112, 151 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 1, 2, 4, 22, 23, 36, 39, 40, 58 Chocolate Grinder’s Necktie, The 36 Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries No. 1 36, 37 Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries No. 2 37, 38 Comb 10, 142, 151 Couple of Laundress’ Aprons 4 Étant donnés (Given 1 The Waterfall 2 The Illuminating Gas) 4, 8, 17, 117, 126, 134

Index 186

Fountain 7, 8, 112, 114, 142, 144, 153 Green Box 36 In Advance of a Broken Arm 112, 142, 144 In Ample Fashion/La Mode Ample 29–30 Informations 31 Jacquette/Jacket 4, 22, 23, 39, 40 King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes, The 35–36 Large Glass see Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even Lazy Hardware 4, 134 L.H.O.O.Q. 39, 83, 151 Lovers, The 40 Manner of Delvaux 4 Mère, La/The Mother 31, 31 Mi-Carême/Mid-Lent 29, 29 ­Mode Ample, La/In Ample Fashion 30–31 Monte Carlo Bond 95 Mother, The/La Mère 31, 31 Morceaux choisis d’après Cranach et ‘Relâche’ 41, 41 Necktie, The 36 News 32, 33 Notes, published and unpublished 4, 12, 22, 23, 36, 110, 128–130, 144, 153, 166 Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) 7, 22, 36, 40, 52, 53, 74, 149, 167 PÉRET 125, 126, 147–8 Porte-Chapeau 4, 110 Portrait of Marcel Duchamp as Rose Sélavy 77, 78 Pulled at Four Pins 4, 16 Rrose Sélavy Mannequin 108, 110, 114–117 SALLY 117, 125, 128, 130, 131, 147 Sculpture for Traveling 4 Singer in Evening Dress 20, 22 Study of a Woman 35 TEENY 124–125, 124 Traveler’s Folding Item 4, 16, 110 Trebuchet 4, 110, 123, 142 Tzanck Check 23 Wedge of Chastity 4 Woman Fastening Her Garter 35 Young Man 33, 34 Young Man Standing 33, 34 Duchamp, Marcel as Adam 41 as a dandy 49–52 adoption of various guises 74 chess-playing 8, 65 cross-dressing (as Rose/Rrose) 75–83, 78, 82, 88 creative act, defining the 4, 13, 139, 143, 147, 156, 167 curatorial work 8, 115, 144, 145 detached demeanour 51–52 disdain of retinal art 8, 22 early life and family 7

laundry 39, 61 marriage 58, 123 physical appearance 35, 51, 52, 54, 61, 64 portraits of 46, 48, 49, 52–64, 53, 55, 57, 63, 65, 72, 74, 77, 78, 82, 164 quotations from 1, 21, 47, 73 (as Rrose Sélavy), 109, 139, 165 rejection by Salon des Indépendants 7 textile choices 129, 147 tombstone inscription 128 weight consciousness 50 Duchamp, Suzanne 110, 111, 141 Duncan, Carol 141, 146 Eco, Umberto 143 Everling, Germaine 58, 79 fashion definition of 6, 48 fashion in the art museum 5, 9–11, 140, 141, 149, 152, 167 haute couture 2, 10, 112, 141, 148–151, 153–154 fashion, in reference to ­bobbed hair 77, 95 fur 56, 62, 79 hats and headdresses 24, 32, 79, 90 makeup 48, 50, 75, 76, 79, 88 masks, clothing and fashion as 48, 129 Mondrian dresses (YSL) 138, 140, 148–153, 150 neckties 36, 61 raccoon fur coats 56 readymade suits 26, 30, 32, 111 shoes 32, 58, 60, 86, 93, 116, 140, 155 tailcoat 22, 40 tailored suit 48–51, 58, 59, 62, 86, 120 ready-to-wear 112 waistcoats 4, 5, 10, 110, 117–127, 124, 126, 127, 130–131, 147–148, 166–167 Filipovic, Elena 8, 9, 144–146 Fincher, Terry 150 Finkelstein, Joanne 48, 52 First Papers of Surrealism, (1942) 3, 145 flappers 88–100, 89 Foucault, Michel 98, 142 Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von 8, 90, 93, 96, 98 Futurists 120 Gahr, David 48, 61–62 Galerie Beaux-Arts exhibition, (1938) 3, 115, 145 garçonne, la 88–100, 89 Gautier, Théophile 50, 117–118, 119, 120 gender crossing 42, 52, 82, 86, 88, 98, 117 gender identity 12, 23, 36, 50, 84 gender parody 98

Hamilton, George Heard 113, 144 handling 25 Harper’s Bazaar 2, 14, 79, 144, 149 Hartt, Leon 3 Heidegger, Martin 12, 25, 140, 155 Hollander, Anne 40–41, 62, 64 Hopps, Walter 60–61 Hugnet, Georges 115 Hugo, Victor 118 identity 6, 22, 23, 26, 37, 48, 51, 52, 75, 82, 86, 98, 129, 166 illustrations 25–35 imagination 22, 23, 36, 39, 40, 42, 145 infrathin 129, 153, 155 International Surrealist Exhibition, (1938) 114–117, 145 intertextuality 7 Isaacs, Julius and Betty 126–127 James, Carol P. 5, 123 Janis, Harriet and Sidney 113 Jones, Amelia 5, 8, 50, 82, 86 Journal des Demoiselles illustration 26, 28 Kamien-Kazhdan, Adina 8–9, 114, 154 Kauffman, Mark 64, 164 Knopf, Alfred A. 40 ­Krauss, Rosalind 155 Kuh, Katherine 113 Lebel, Robert 2, 39, 51, 113, 114, 143, 154 Liberman, Alexander 2, 3, 59 Life Magazine 61, 64 Lippard, Lucy 9, 10 Loos, Adolf 62

Naumann, Francis 8, 51, 52, 123 neckties 36, 61 Nelson, Lusha 58–59 New York Dada 86, 93 Newman, Arnold 61 nudity, pictorial depiction 40–41 O’Keeffe, Georgia 60 originality 155 Pach Bothers portrait 52–4 Penn, Irving 59–60 Péret, Benjamin 125 perfume 83–6 Perlmutter, Bronja 41 Perry, Grayson 64 Petherbridge, Deanna 22, 24, 25 Picabia, Francis 8, 54, 55, 90, 91, 120 Poiret, Denise 90, 92 Poiret, Paul 9, 84 ­Pollock, Jackson 3 queer style 50, 82 ready-to-wear 112 readymade 4, 8, 9, 110 bicycle wheel 110, 112, 114 curators, role in defining 144–146 enunciation 147–148 history and etymology 110–114 institutions/museums, role in defining 146–147 perfume 83–86 recalibration 128–131 rectified 75, 77, 100 replicas of 154 signatures 141–142, 151 snow shovel 112, 144 spectators, role in defining 143–144 testing the parameters of 148–153 thingly quality 153–156

Index

mass media 3, 6, 10, 49, 51, 64, 75, 166 McBride, Henry 56 McShine, Kynatson 33, 51 Made to Measure series 4, 5, 10, 110, 117–127, 124, 126, 127, 130–131, 147–148, 166–167 Man Ray 8, 75–77, 79, 82, 86, 90, 93, 95, 108, 112, 115, 116 mannequin dressing 108, 114–17 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 120, 122 Martin, Richard 152 Maschek, Joseph 39 masquerade balls 74–75 Masson, André 115, 116 Massot, Pierre de 51 Matisse, Paul 125, 128, 129, 130–131, 166 mechanical reproduction 154 mimetic works 39–42 Molderings, Herbert 74, 77

Mona Lisa postcard 23, 39, 83, 147, 151 Mondrian dresses (YSL) 138, 140, 148–153, 150 Moore, Marcus 123, 126 Mossé, Sonia 115, 116 museums and institutions, role of in defining art 8, 10, 125, 127, 140–141, 146–155 museums 10–11, 140, 146–149, 151–153, 155 Israel Museum 125 Metropolitan Museum of Art 10, 90, 141, 149, 152–153, 169 Museum of Modern Art 2, 14, 15 93, 114 Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 127, 141, 147 Philadelphia Museum of Art 60, 146–147

187

urinal 7, 8, 112, 142, 153 waistcoats 4, 5, 10, 110, 117–27, 124, 126, 127, 130–1, 147–8, 166–7 for women 26, 111 rectified readymade 75 replication 114, 142, 154 reproduction 154 Rigaud perfume 83, 85 Roché, Henri-Pierre 74, 95 Rogue Ball 74 Rosine perfume 84

Index

Saint Laurent, Yves 10, 138, 140, 148–155, 150, 167 Sanouillet, Michel 31, 38 Sarazin-Levassor, Lydie Fischer 58 Schiaparelli, Elsa 3, 60, 116 Schwarz, Arturo 23, 26, 32, 35, 40, 114, 125, 130–131, 140, 142, 152, 154 Sélavy, Rose/Rrose 75–83, 78, 82, 88 mannequin 108, 114, 115, 116–17 Seligmann, Kurt 115 signatures 141–142, 151 singularity 155 Société Anonyme exhibition, (1920) 145 Society of Independent Artists exhibition, (1917) 95, 145 Sontag, Susan 56, 60, 62, 76, 143–4 spectators 2, 3, 4, 123, 139, 140–147, 155, 156 Steiglitz, Alfred 56 Stein, Gertrude 76

188

Stettheimer, Florine 8, 93, 94 Storr, Robert 10 suits, as emblem of masculinity 62, 64 Symons, Arthur 54 thingly 140, 153–6 The Blind Man 74, 95 Time Magazine 48, 49, 61 Tice, Clara 74, 95, 98, 99 ­Tomkins, Calvin 3, 7, 24, 74, 83 Tribout, Léo 33 Troy, Nancy, J. 9–10, 84, 154 uniforms 24, 36–37 Vanity Fair 52–54, 58–59, 95, 98, 99 View 112–113 Vinken, Barbara 24, 50 Vogue 1, 2–3, 61, 111, 112, 116, 123, 151 Vreeland, Diana 152 waistcoat readymade 4, 5, 10, 110, 117–127, 124, 126, 127, 130–131, 147–148, 166–167 Warhol, Andy 5, 50, 140, 166 Weil Paris 80 Wilde, Oscar 8 Wilson, Bettina 15, 116 Wood, Beatrice 8, 54, 55, 74 word play 32, 75–76, 83, 123

189

190

191

192