The Many Forms of Marcel Duchamp

In 1905, Duchamp learned that, if he got certified as an essential “art worker,” his obligatory military service would be reduced from two years to one, and he returned to Rouen to apprentice with a copperplate printer there. (The knowledge he acquired at the printing house no doubt contributed to his interest in making books, cards, and other ephemera.) Then, after a year in an infantry regiment, he returned to Paris, settling in the artistic enclave of Montmartre, in 1906. By that time, his brothers had moved to the suburbs, where he frequently visited them. Duchamp never completely distanced himself from the idea or the reality of family, and his father, despite his initial skepticism about his sons’ vocation, provided a modest allowance. For most of his working life, Duchamp—who did not view art as a product and thus a means for gaining capital—was also helped by wealthy friends, former lovers, and collectors. (His second wife, Alexina, or Teeny, whom he wed in 1954, had been married to the gallerist Pierre Matisse and was a sometime dealer for Joan Miró and other artists, as well as Duchamp’s most steadfast benefactor and confidante. Teeny knew the value of a dollar.)

For a time, Duchamp worked as an illustrator, and the MoMA show has a fair number of his satirical early drawings, ink-on-paper observations about everyday life: a couple at a skating rink, a horse-drawn cab, a woman annoyed by being stood up. The image that jumped out at me, presaging, as it did, the artist’s fascination and engagement with the nonbinary, was a drawing from 1909. Titled “Ni Homme, Ni Femme, Pas Même Auvergnat” (“Neither Man Nor Woman, Not Even from Auvergne”), the drawing is a three-quarter view of someone wearing a frock coat and trousers, against a light background—a delicate depiction of a queer person living in their own undefined space. I think that Duchamp, who, in the early twenties, created an alter ego named Rrose Sélavy—a play on “Eros, c’est la vie”—had a nonbinary soul. (Man Ray photographed Duchamp as Rrose, in a stylish hat and fur stole.) “In 1920, I decided that it didn’t suffice [for] me to be a lone individual with a masculine name,” Duchamp said in 1960. “I wanted . . . to make another personality from myself.” Putting a mustache and goatee on the “Mona Lisa” for his great 1919 work “L.H.O.O.Q.”—a homophone for “elle a chaud au cul,” which Duchamp translated euphemistically as “there is fire down below”—performed the opposite feat, masculinizing the most famous female portrait in the world.

Duchamp’s other drawings are more Toulouse-Lautrec than anything else, though he lacked Toulouse-Lautrec’s eye—a reportorial vision that delighted in the show-biz choreography of Parisian life. Similarly, his paintings from 1910 and 1911 interested me only in that they were a bridge to something else. They’re clotted with barely digested Fauvist influences, not to mention late Cézanne and early Cubism. (Duchamp later referred to one of his portraits from this period as full of “technical wishy-washiness.”) His dark and somewhat confused 1910 portrait of his father gives you a glimpse less of Duchamp’s mind than of his brief foray into dutifulness: painting family portraits is how you become an artist.

But there is one piece from this time that nods toward the future. “The Bush” (1910-11) is a large oil-on-canvas work that depicts two nude women: one of whom, a brunette, stands, with her hand resting on the head of the other, a blonde, who is on her knees. (Duchamp is said to have used Jeanne Serre, who was then his mistress, as a model for the kneeling figure.) The women’s fleshiness, the roundness of their faces and bellies, is echoed in the fullness of the vegetation behind them. A note in the catalogue says that, with this painting, the artist began giving what he said was “an important role” to his titles, “which I added and treated like an invisible color.” “Bush” is a colloquial term for a woman’s pubic hair, and we can see the brunette’s pubic hair delineated in the painting. (The associations pile up when you consider that “the bush” is also, in English, a term for backwoods or hinterlands.) Is the blonde kneeling to pray? To show respect for her companion? Is Duchamp, that wonderful scrambler of ideas about gender, the brunette? And is the hand on the head a gesture of comfort or of benediction? One loses and finds things in bushes—perhaps even la jouissance.