I kept thinking about Jasper Johns’s plaster casts while seeing the Duchamp show at MoMA, maybe because Duchamp made plaster casts of body parts, and some of the best ones belonged to Jasper Johns.
The plaster cast of a breast in a wooden box is the first thing in that gallery, and next to it is a standing copy of the book, Prière de Toucher (also 1947), which he made with Enrico Donati. Holy smokes, doing 30 seconds of research, the Philadelphia Museum describes this as carved plaster, not cast? Is it not made with a mold set into a little tray for casting? Is it a relief carving, taken down from a thicker block of plaster?
The point is, right in front of these are two vitrines with early (1950) painted plaster casts related to the eventual nude figure in Étant donnés. There are two examples of Female Fig Leaf: one is from the Pompidou, a 2024 acquisition that once belonged to Teeny Duchamp; and the other is from MoMA’s collection, a 1998 gift of Jasper Johns. MoMA says Duchamp “gave these objects to friends and editioned them.” Did that include a 1950s Johns? His is electroplated copper over plaster.
Teeny’s Fig Leaf is described as an artist proof, and it bears traces of a label on the bottom, connecting it to the 1951 edition of 10. Since 1990 the Pompidou has had another Female Fig Leaf, from that edition, which was painted green by Man Ray. The Pompidou also has the five-piece plaster mold to make the edition. MoMA mentions no edition for Johns’s cast.
Three casts in the other vitrine: Not a Shoe, whose shape seems more related to the space between the model’s thighs; Objet Dard, whose phallic shape is related to a structural element of the Étant donnés cast; and the original Coin de Chasteté (1954), which Duchamp made as a wedding gift for Teeny. The Pompidou’s documentation shows the plaster and plastic pieces separated, revealing their positive/negative cast labial contours. The point of all this here is, the 1963 Schwarz bronze edition in the next gallery is loaned by Johns.
The last thing before entering that gallery, though, is another plaster cast, the weird With my tongue in my cheek (1959), a lumpy portrait of Duchamp’s cheek and jaw, completed by a profile drawing, one of three [unused] self-portraits made for the cover of Robert Lebel’s monograph on the artist.
As far as I can tell, Johns only actually met Duchamp in 1959, after his own show in 1958, and after traveling with Rauschenberg to see the Arensbergs’ collection of Duchamps installed in Philadelphia. So I don’t think these plaster casts are a story of influence, so much as affinity. Given the narrow circulation of his casts at the time, I imagine Duchamp was the first to recognize the similarity of his work to the plaster fragments Johns had been making in relative isolation. But Johns was also definitely interested.
[later today update] Peter Huestis reminded me of something I’d completely blanked on: that Johns incorporated Female Fig Leaf into his work. In the early 1960s, a period when Johns was often pressing or scraping objects on his canvases—rulers and letters come quickly to mind, but there are all kinds of things—he pressed the toast-shaped base of Female Fig Leaf into the top corner of No (1961), and he traced it in white on the right side of Arrive/Depart (1963/64), above.
Though I haven’t found it in other paintings, Johns reiterated the Fig Leaf imprint in No, an embossed lithograph with lead flair, which he produced in 1969 at Gemini.
In her catalogue essay for the 1996 MoMA retrospective, Roberta Bernstein discusses Johns’s engagement with Duchamp’s work in the 1960s at length. Though without a material examination of their shared interest in plaster casts per se, Bernstein does provide great context for Johns’s use of Female Fig Leaf as a pressing tool and artistic reference.