marcel duchamp – greg.org

Los Ladrillos de Étant donnés

a black and white photo of a rustic wooden door set into a flat brick arch on a rough stucco wall, the exterior view, the only one permitted, of marcel duchamp's etant donnes at the philadelphia museum of art — Marcel Duchamp Exterior of Étant donnés, 1946-66, as installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Mixed-media assemblage, published by Michael R. Taylor via

I realize that he spent twenty years working on Étant donnés, so why does it still surprise me that Marcel Duchamp sourced the door AND the bricks for the arch from BF Spain?

a grainy black and white snapshot of a small white woman in a black summer dress posed next to a large rustic wood door in a larger brick arch doorway and wall, in a rural village in spain, from the archive of marcel duchamp and his wife teeny's visit in the early 1960s, now at the philadelphia museum of art — Marcel Duchamp, snapshot of exterior door of *Étant donnés* in its original setting, with Teeny Duchamp, La Bisbal, early 1960s, collection The Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives, published by Michael Taylor, via

The door came from a town called La Bisbal, where Marcel and Teeny went doorscouting in the early 1960s, I guess? It was only in the summer of 1968, though, that Duchamp selected 150 bricks for the doorway arch, to be shipped to the US by a contractor in Cadaqués, his regular vacation spot. [Presumably, Duchamp was trying to match the crumbled brick wall already included in the work, which frames the nude mannequin and landscape. presumably brought back from Spain at some earlier date.

a black and white photo of a rustic wood door from spain, with a row of three square brick-patterned vinyl tiles above it, right up against an absolutely generic modern office building door and doorway, a december 1968 documentary photo by denise brown hare of marcel duchamp's last artwork etant donnes, before it was moved to the philadelphia museum of art — Denise Browne Hare, 11th St installation of Étant donnés, with vinyl brick tiles, December 1968, from a documentation portfolio published for the first time in 2009 by Michael Taylor via

Until the bricks arrived, Duchamp put up a row of brick-shaped vinyl tiles as placeholders in the 11th St studio where the Étant donnés diorama was constructed (or reconstructed, because he’d already had to move it once).

Duchamp, of course, never took delivery of the bricks. He died in October 1968, and in anticipation of the disassembly and move of Étant donnés, Teeny had it photographed by Denise Browne Hare in December.

The bricks, meanwhile, went on their own convoluted journey, and the shipping and customs delays getting them caused weeks of drama for the Philadelphia Museum, which was rushing to secretly install the work before word got out—and before Teeny left to Spain for the summer.

It’s so chill now, but the entire saga of Étant donnés is buck wild, from the secrecy of its creation; the logistics of its acquisition and installation; the sheer institutional freakout over its existence, voyeur/creeper and nudity factors; and the paranoia and draconian constraints over its documentation and reproduction.

They all culminate in the tragicomedy of, of all people, Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp’s dealer and the editor of his catalogue raisonné, WHICH WAS READY TO GO, only finding out about the existence of Étant donnés as it was being dismantled in NYC and shipped to Philadelphia, and literally writing the CR text on it at the museum as soon as it opened to the public. He then proceeded to politely rage for permission to photograph the work for the second edition of the CR, which the museum was absolutely too terrified to do. Schwarz was forced to reproduce bootleg snapshots taken through the work’s peephole.

The sweet irony is that all this extraordinary detail is laid out in full in Michael R. Taylor’s 2009 book, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés. The Genesis, Construction, Installation, and Legacy of a Secret Masterwork, published on the work’s 40th anniversary by the Philadelphia Museum. I have a copy somewhere, but it’s so much easier to read on this heroic Slovenian artist’s website [shruggie emoji].

Dark Duchamp Christmas

a dark and starkly lit black and white photo of a charlie brown christmas level scrawny on a wooden stool, an undated photo from marcel duchamp's studio, via yale

Christmas came early because @nobrashfestivity did some welcome work tidying up this photo of a Christmas tree on a stool in Marcel Duchamp’s Paris studio. The Beinecke still says no date, and I didn’t know it when I posted it in 2021, but in 2008, flickr user leiris202 dated this photo to 1907, which would be six years before the legendary original Bicycle Wheel Duchamp got his sister Suzanne to photograph, so he could backdate his 1915 re-creation.

When You’re Pontus Hultén They Let You Do It

Being Pontus Hultén must have been absolutely amazing, the king of all he surveyed. He was the founding director of at least three modern art museums and one of the most influential figures in 20th century art. A groundbreaking curator, a friend to major artists, and a stone cold crook.

Hultén made the first re-creation of Tatlin’s lost Memorial to the Third International for an exhibition at the Moderna Museet, which, great.

With permission from Duchamp, Hultén made exhibition copies of Duchamp sculptures, including the first copy of the Large Glass, for the Moderna Museet in 1961, which Duchamp signed as recognized copies on his visit to Sweden. No problem, but watch this space.

In 1968 Hultén bought hundreds of actual cardboard Brillo boxes, from Brillo, for a Warhol exhibition, and had a few made of wood in Stockholm, maybe 10-12, and not more than 15, with, if not Warhol’s permission, then his awareness. OK.

a red and blue on white wood cube sculpture of a brillo box, made in 1990 by pontus hulten who, when he sold them, told people they were from 1968, on a white pedestal against a white wall, being sold by a guy in denmark at multiplesinc dot com — More power to the Danish Banksy dealer who got Marian Goodman’s domain name, and who is holding out hope that he can recoup on this Pontus Hultén Malmö Type Brillo Box. Hang in there, Hultén may turn out not to be a crook!

But then in 1990, after Warhol’s death, Hultén had 105 more Brillo boxes made in Malmö, which he said were made in Stockholm in 1968. He donated or sold these boxes all over the place until his death in 2006, based entirely on his association with Warhol, and his own assertions of authority. He sold 40 to Duchamp dealer Ronny van de Velde with certificates of authenticity saying they were from 1968. But Warhol never authorized these, and he definitely didn’t do it after he was dead. It turns out many people in the Swedish modern art world knew Hultén’s Brillo racket. Not OK.

An entire investigation and report on the various fabrications of Brillo boxes was conducted by the Warhol Foundation in 2010, which declared all the Hultén boxes to be Hulténs, not Warhols. (This, after Hultén got the Warhol Authentication Board to approve and add 94 1968-I-mean-1990 Stockholm/Malmö boxes to the catalogue raisonné in 2004.) Shady, a bummer for a few collectors, but kind of hilarious.

a torn fragment of a grimy envelope from 1920 has a sketch of four corner elements coming together at a cross intersection, with what look like pins or screws holding each arm together. in french is written haut bas, av., arr., top, bottom, front, and back. this diagram by marcel duchamp was stolen by museum director pontus hulten in 1960, and recovered in 2018 — up, down, front, back: Duchamp’s 1920 sketch for Rotary Glass Plates, jacked by Pontus Hultén in 1960 from Yale University Art Gallery.

But in 1960 Pontus Hultén also straight-up stole at least four Duchamp drawings from Yale University Art Gallery. Katherine Dreier had donated Duchamp’s 1920 sculpture Rotary Glass Plates to Yale in 1941 as part of the Société Anonyme. Hultén visited the sculpture for what Yale’s extraordinary provenance note for this sketch on an envelope of the Rotary Glass Plates says was to consider it “for inclusion in an exhibition.”

What he was doing was studying how to refabricate it. The 1961 exhibition, Movement in Art, for which Hultén and Ulf Linde fabricated all the Moderna Museet’s Duchamps, including a Rotary Glass Plates. [Actually, Linde made the Large Glass; Hultén made Rotary Glass Plates with Per Olof Ultvedt and Magnus Wibom.]

in a warmly lit gallery at yale, a white woman behind a stanchion with her hair pulled back like a soccer player leans down to align her vision with the axle of marcel duchamp's sculpture where five spinning glass plates create the optical illusion of concentric circles. the x-based apparatus has a motor at back. the axle is supported at eye level for a shorter person. duchamp made this in 1920, and katherine dreier donated it to yale in 1941. it is rarely turned on, though, and perhaps the man in front of the stanchion in this photo, wearing an all dark suit, is one of the yale engineering professors who restored the sculpture in 1999. a crowd in the background is perhaps waiting for this white lady to finish so they can take a turn. — After some engineering professors restored it in 1999, Yale turned on *Rotary Glass Plates* for a two-day Duchamp/Johns symposium in 2000. image: Yale Bulletin

Yale writes that “Hultén reportedly removed the sketch, along with three others, from the artwork’s storage box.” I think it illustrates how to clamp the painted glass plates to the central axle on which they rotate. Hultén apparently gave the sketch to Linde as a birthday present, and his widow, along with Duchamp scholar Paul B. Franklin, returned it to Yale in 2018. No word what or where the three others are, but Yale clearly has some idea.

a black painted apparatus on an x-shaped frame holds five glass plates along a spinning axle, with motor at the back. here the timelapse photo depicts the plates spinning so that the stripes painted on them create the optical illusion of concentric circles. the pompidou made this 1979 replica of duchamp's 1920 sculpture, rotary glass plates, under shady museum director pontus hulten, who stole sketches for it from yale university in 1960. — Marcel Duchamp? Rotative Plaques Verre, 1920/1979, a purchase by the Centre Pompidou

It turns out Hultén made another Rotative Plaques Verre, in French, for the Pompidou in 1979. In 1980 Hultén’s Pompidou published a facsimile set of 289 Duchamp notes and scraps with Paul Matisse, Duchamp’s step-son, with the originals in the collection. Nothing in there seems obviously stolen from Yale.

[Shoutout to rare and amazing artbooks dealer Yoshi Hill for posting the buck wild archive entry to his Instagram yesterday.]

Send Twombly Duchamp Nudes

a framed cy twombly work on paper, 30 x 40 inches, is a medium grey background with noticeable brushstrokes, and a cascade of figure eights and fragments thereof in white crayon, descending from the upper left to the lower right, the same direction as duchamp's nude descending a staircase, of which this was once considered a study, which would make it kind of figurative, which might explain why it was de-titled when it sold at sotheby's in nov 2024 — Cy Twombly, apparently not titled *Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase* after all, 1968, oil and crayon on paper, 30 x 40 in., sold yesterday by the estate of Lothar Schirmer at Sotheby’s

When it was published in the 1999 catalogue of his own collection, Cy Twombly’s publisher Lothar Schirmer listed the title of this amazing 1968 drawing, which he’d acquired directly from the artist in 1968, as Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase.

marcel duchamp's nude descending a staircase tracks the cubist, overlapping, fractured motion of a human figure painted in beiges as it descends from upper left to lower right, against a darker brown background. at the philadelphia museum of art — Marcel Duchamp, *Nude Descending a Staircase* (N0. 2), 1912, collection Philadelphia Museum of Art via Sotheby’s

When Schirmer (RIP) sold it yesterday at Sotheby’s, however, it was listed only as Untitled. And whoever wrote the lot essay for the Twombly wanted to connect it to Duchamp’s painting so bad, they began the essay with a picture of it.

And they said, “Untitled also pays homage to art historical forerunners and their attempt to capture movement in space and time,” without naming Duchamp. And then they quoted Suzanne Delehanty,

Like shadows of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, figure eights, frequent personages in Twombly’s cosmos of signs, borrowed perhaps from the mathematical symbol for infinity, multiply, recede and climb through the surface of a 1968 oil and crayon on paper to express, as does the 1912 nude, an abstraction of motion in space-time.

trying to call Twombly’s symbols and signs personages without surrendering their status as abstract marks. [Delehanty’s text is cited as coming from the collected writings on Twombly edited by Nicola Del Roscio in 2002, which elides its origin as a catalogue text for Twombly’s 1975 show at the ICA in Philadelphia, the city of Duchampian love.]

Discussing this and a couple of other related works on paper in his catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe mentioned Duchamp exactly once, before going on at length about the Futurists:

That language of flow and fracture draws directly on the early modern fascination with the “cinematic” decomposition of forms in motion, in Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase,1912) and most notably among Italian Futurist artists, particularly Giacomo Balla.

It feels like a confluence of aversions: to figuration, to referencing other artists’ work, or to referencing Duchamp’s works specifically, but it feels acute in the detitling of this particular drawing. Looking at Duchamp’s painting had an impact on Twombly’s most significant body of work, which he apparently referenced many times. And Twombly went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanently installed down the hall from Duchamp’s. I, for one, would love to see something more on this connection than a passing namecheck.

Duchamp Sac du Bouche-Évier

The timing of Duchamp’s Bouche-évier multiple is a bit unclear to me. He Macguyvered the drain stopper for his bath in 1964, but didn’t have the editions of it cast in bronze, steel and silver—100 each—until 1967. So he was coming off his Pasadena retrospective, and in the middle of his Schwarz readymade fabrication-palooza. So minting his own coin or medal must have felt last icing on the selling-out cake.

None of which is that interesting, tbh, and with 300+ out there, the stoppers turn up all the time. What I’ve never seen, though, is one with an original leather pouch. It certainly is.

Marcel Duchamp, Bouche-évier, 1964, APII in bronze with sac, selling 21 Nov. 2024 at Cottone [liveauctioneers]

In Advance of a Sale of In Advance of a Broken Arm

Behold, Joseph Kosuth’s Marcel Duchamp: *In Advance of A Broken Arm (Fourth Version)*, 1915/1964, ed. 1/8, published by Galleria Arturo Schwarz, Milan, being sold in November 2024 at Christie’s

We have some idea about the 17 urinals—17 or so, I haven’t kept up. But where are Marcel Duchamp’s shovels? Arturo Schwarz produced editions of eight replicas of 14 Duchamp readymades in 1964, originally offered in a complete set for $25,000. Were there really only eight? In Advance of a Broken Arm (Schwarz, 1964) is listed as the fourth version. Where are the previous ones?

[The most concentrated source of info on Duchamps comes, unsurprisingly, from Francis Naumann, who has been researching and trading in Duchamp’s works for decades. Check, for example, his 1999 book, The Art of Making Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which steps through Duchamp’s physical production chronologically. Or Naumann’s readymade market recap from 2003.]

I think there are 16 shovels to account for. 12 exist; 2 are exhibition copies; and 2 are lost. Here they are in roughly chronological order [of where they ended up]:

On The Politics Of Collecting

On the New Books Network podcast, library scientist Jen Hoyer has an invigorating conversation with Eunsong Kim about Kim’s new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. Kim looks at the structural inequities of the systems that determine what gets preserved and valued: archives, museums, philanthropic ventures.

In the raking light of her critical literarary scholarship, Kim examines the contours of Henry Clay Frick’s art collecting after the 1892 Homestead Strike, and the intensive campaigns by Marcel Duchamp and the Arensbergs for the most advantageous museum placement of their collection. And much more!

New Books Network: Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting [newbooksnetwork]
The Politics of Collecting [dukeupress.edu]

Shame, OTOH

Richard Hamilton, *Kent State*, 1970, 13-stencil screenprint, 727×1020 mm, ed. 3034/5000, selling at Bonham’s 26 July 2024

Speaking of mediated political violence, in 1970 Richard Hamilton photographed a TV screen showing a BBC news report of the National Guard shooting at Kent State.

When he decided ‘that art could help to keep the shame in our minds,’ Hamilton made a 13-layer screenprint of an image of freshman Dean Kahler, who was left paralyzed by the gunshots. The print preserves the shape of the television screen and, published in a signed edition of 5,000 aspired to the ubiquitous reach of broadcast TV itself.

The example above, 3034/5000, is being sold—again—at Bonham’s with another Hamilton work, an offset print of Marcel Duchamp, at a slightly lower estimate than the last time.

A Kent State was also included in Galerie Buchholz’s 2022 show of Richard Hamilton works in New York. They’re always available for whatever people feel like paying at the moment. If only shame were so easy to come by.

The Large Plexiglas

*Large Sleep* (1965) and *Large Kiss* (1966) installed at *Andy Warhol: A Retrospective*, 1989, via MoMA

Tracking that Round Jackie took me back to MoMA’s 1989 Warhol retrospective, and now I wonder why I never think about Warhol’s Plexiglas sculptures.

Large Sleep and Large Kiss are two of at least five examples of Warhol screenprinting frames from a film onto Plexiglas. He made them a couple of years after the films, as he was supposedly retiring from painting. According to Marco Livingstone’s essay in the MoMA catalogue, Warhol also made Plexiglas sculptures of frames of Empire, Couch, and Henry Geldzahler.

Does Warhol’s *Large Henry Geldzahler* [?] look like the 1997 VHS copy of the movie? image via artsy

Was MoMA the first place these were ever shown? They look so much like Duchamp’s Large Glass it’s crazy that no one seems to have made the connection until 2017, when Thomas Morgan Evans published 3D Warhol, the first book on the artist’s sculpture. Warhol’s intersections with Duchamp were dense: a Bôite-en-Valise, Richard Hamilton, the Pasadena retrospective, Mark Lancaster, Screen Tests, “retiring,” and, here, making Large Glass-looking sculptures with Large in the name.

Warhol’s *Large Sleep* installed at the Whitney in 2018, photo: Ron Amstutz

So it’s a little weird that MoMA’s 1989 catalogue reproduced them without their frames, essentially negating their sculptural nature and throwing them squarely back into Warhol’s image pool. Livingstone traced their origins to the acetate transparencies used to make Warhol’s screens, which sometimes decorated the walls of the Factory. It’s not wrong, but still.

Warhol’s *Mylar and Plexiglas Construction*, 1970, installed at the Whitney in 2018, photo: Ron Amstutz

Though they’ve been on view at the Warhol Museum over the years, the 2018-19 Whitney/SFMOMA retrospective was probably the biggest audience for Large Sleep in 30 years. But who even noticed, when Mylar and Plexiglas Construction was hogging the spotlight? What. Was. Going. On?

Warhol’s *Mylar and Plexiglas Construction*, 1970, via Whitney

If Large Sleep was a throwback to Duchamp, Mylar and Plexiglas Construction somehow throws forward to Koons. Warhol made this flaming Minimalist monument the year after Stonewall, the year his Rain Machine (Flower Waterfall) sculpture debuted in the US Pavilion at Osaka 70 World Expo; and the year before James Bidgood anonymously released his cellophane fantasy film, Pink Narcissus. Morgan Evans says that this was functional and made for the Factory. But unlike the film-related sculptures, this one got out; it’s in a private collection somehow, somewhere.

“*Untitled (Mylar and Plexiglass Construction)*, 1970s. Three rolls of colored Mylar, each mounted on cardboard tubes, Plexiglas slabs, rollers, and pegs, 46 x 36 3/4 x 12 1/4 in.” via Warhol Foundation

[a few still-fixated days later update: In their bio of the artist, the Warhol Foundation included an image—uploaded in 2021—of the bottom element of the Whitney Mylar and Plexiglas Construction as its own thing, with a date of “1970s”. The patterns on the Mylar match, so it’s not some rogue second or fourth construction. I’m going to have to visit the CR, I guess.]

Rauschenberg’s Mona Lisa

Robert Rauschenberg, *Untitled (Mona Lisa)*, 1952, 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in., collage on paper, image via RRF

Via tumblr user @poloniumtherapy comes this most Combine-ish Rauschenberg collage to predate the Combines, now titled Untitled (Mona Lisa), from 1952. It belongs to a series, North African Collages, which Rauschenberg made during his work and travel through Morocco with Cy Twombly. Most were made on shirtboards; though the size fits, this collage is on paper, not paperboard. It is not one of the 28 collages remade as enlarged facsimile prints in 1991 under the title, Shirtboards—Italy/Morocco. The Rauschenberg Foundation says 38 of these collages are known to exist. [Plus one known to be missing; in 2015 I wondered if it was underneath an early Johns.]

The putti with the surveying equipment are European. The moon jellyfish engraving is French. The gothic columns are European, and the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa. The strongest link to North Africa here, at least aesthetically, is the page of Arabic text collaged on the lower right corner. Its source is unidentified, but it talks about the “General Assembly” and how “tomorrow is the real opening day of the Seventh Session.” Assuming that’s the United Nations, the Seventh Session was the first one held in the UN’s new headquarters in New York. It opened on October 14, 1952, right around the time Rauschenberg and Twombly arrived in Casablanca.

Craig Starr apparently included Untitled (Mona Lisa) in a show called “Souvenirs: Cornell Duchamp Johns Rauschenberg.” But since it ran from October 2020 through March 2021, I can only take his word on it. It’s a great grouping, though. Cornell, of course, helped Duchamp fabricate the Series B of his Boîte-en-Valise, which, of course, included a Mona Lisa.

Barbara Visser, Fountain (2023)

Still from Barbara Visser, *Alreadymade* (2023). © Barbara Visser / Tomtit Film & VPRO.

I haven’t even scrolled down to read the article, but this caption alone is already my favorite thing of the week. I hope Barbara Visser does a documentary on Richard Prince’s Instagram portraits next.

A Dutch Artist is delving into the murky [sic obv] attribution of Duchamp’s Fountain [artnet]

The Doors

an unidentified photo of Duchamp’s 1938 installation, with paintings hung on one of two revolving doors he put on either side of the perforated iron brazier that provided most of the light. ganked from Elena Filipovic’s dissertation

Another thing I learned from Christopher Murtha’s thesis on Sturtevant’s engagement with photography and installation in the making of her Duchamps works is about the doors.

Specifically, I never really noticed or heard that much about the revolving doors Marcel Duchamp used as exhibition devices in the 1938 Exposition internationale du surréalisme he designed/curated at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. As Murtha pointed out, Duchamp later considered other elements from the show to be artworks—1200 Coal Bags Suspended From The Ceiling Over a Stove, for example—but the doors didn’t get the same treatment. Despite, as I see below, Duchamp’s well-documented interest in doors—and Large Glass works that, you must admit, look rather doorish.

Alreadymade: A Thesis On Sturtevant’s Duchamps

Another example of Sturtevant’s *Duchamp Sculpture de Voyage*, 1969, from Chris Murtha’s 2021 thesis, “Double Documents: Imaging and Installation in Sturtevant’s ‘Duchamps'”

You know how in 2017, the White House reporter was like, “I’ve been working on this investigation for a year, and he…just…tweeted it out”? This is the diametric opposite on every vector: I was noodling for a couple of hours on a blog post about an auction lot, and he…just…wrote a masters thesis on it.

After posting some thoughts Friday about the Sturtevant repeats of Marcel Duchamp’s photographs of Readymades, I heard from Hunter professor and Sturtevant whisperer Michael Lobel, who shared the fascinating research one of his former students had done on these very artworks, and much more.

Chris Murtha’s 2021 thesis, Double Documents: Imaging and Installation in Sturtevant’s “Duchamps” is the first close look at Sturtevant’s use of photography and installation. These mediums are inextricable from the artist’s decades-long engagement with Duchamp’s work, and Murtha traces how they function both as aspects of art production, and as modes of exhibition and distribution.

Sturtevant’s Extrapolated Boîte-en-valise

Lot 92: Sturtevant, *Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm*, 1967, gouache on photo on cardboard, I think, 20.5 x 15.2 cm, selling at Bonham’s Cornette de St Cyr on 10 Dec 2023 [update: sold for €10,240]

In 1967, Sturtevant restaged Duchamp’s photos of his Readymades in his studio, in her Parisian apartment. And then she repeated Duchamp’s reworking and retouching of the photos for his Boîte-en-valise. And she mounted them on cardboard and added captions & titles.

The Art Of Katherine Dreier

Katherine S. Dreier chillin’ in her library with Marcel Duchamp in his art handler drag, leaning against the broken Large Glass, in 1936. image via Guggenheim.org

While it is sort of shocking to see a 49-year-old Marcel Duchamp dressed like an art handling street urchin as he leans against his masterpiece in its original home, this is exactly how I always picture the owner of that home—and that masterpiece—Katherine S. Dreier: a genial and traditional patron, just chilling with her amazing artist friends and their work.

Katherine S. Dreier, *Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp*, 18 x 32 in., acquired in 1949 by the (second) Museum of Modern Art

But Dreier made work, too. Her 1918 Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp is up at MoMA at the moment. And a 1940-41 painting, Explosion, is on view at Yale, which also holds Dreiers as part of the Société Anonyme collection. But she’s discussed and remembered much more as a collector and patron, and what discussions I can find about Dreier’s work are locked up in old, undigitized tomes.

*Zwei Welten*, 1930, 28 x 32 in., from the Société Anonyme Collection at Yale University Art Gallery

Though painted more than a decade later, Zwei Welten (Two Worlds), donated to Yale in 1941, seems to depict similar forms in similar space. In Paris, Duchamp’s brother Jacques Villon adapted Zwei Welten as a lithograph. Dreier had an abstract language she liked, I guess. Before that, there was a chapel mural of Jesus, so she had range. Or rather, she had a journey.

*Spinning Wheel*, 1920-26, 32 x 30 in., donated to Yale in 2020

Things are on the move now, too. This painting, Spinning Wheel (1920-26), ambiguously dated but specifically titled, was acquired by an alum in 2015, who donated it to Yale in 2020. Dreier’s was not a precisionist abstraction.

The most intriguing Dreier painting is the one we can’t see. A negative exists in Yale’s collection—dated 1941, with no known prints—for a photo of a[nother] portrait of Duchamp, which is provocatively labeled, “her missing painting.” I would very much like to see it.

“her missing painting”: Katherine Dreier’s [other] portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1918, 60 x 23 in., as reproduced in The Société Anonyme, 2006.

[next morning update: eagle-eyed hero Bryan Hilley remembered seeing an image of this missing Duchamp portrait in the 2006 YUP catalogue of the Société Anonyme edited by Jennifer Gross. It was apparently five feet tall, and the date was 1918, sot the 1941 date above must be for the photo of it by Joe Schiff.]