A paper sculpture study of Why not Sneeze by Rrose Selavy, and accompanying labels
I forgot until I heard Michelle Kuo mention it again on Modern Art Notes Podcast, but one of the real discoveries of the Marcel Duchamp retrospective was the large vitrine stuffed with studies, preparatory materials, and extras from the Bôites-en-valise.
There are various photos and experiments with folded photo sculptures of Why Not Sneeze? by Rose Sélavy (1921), on the way to making the sliced, curved, pop-up book-style photo that ended up in the deluxe edition.
But there’s also a papier-mâché model of Fountain. Can you just see Duchamp carefully crafting this tiny toilet, with his little bowl of slop at his elbow, while nazis roam the streets of Paris?
But my favorite things, or the things I was most surprised to see, were the labels. Stacks of labels for every object in the Bôite. Oh, no, unused labels where there ended up being no place to put them. Like for Fountain.
Ironically, the clearest image I can immediately find that shows both the labels attached to the matted reproductions and the curved 3-D photo of Sneeze is at Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, where I decline to “rent this image file” of a 1941 work with a claimed copyright of 2023. Peggy Guggenheim, for whom Duchamp reserved ed. I/XX, and to whom Duchamp smuggled all the ingredients for 50 Bôites while posing as a cheese merchant, and who packed them with her collection for shipping to the US.
So thanks, at least, Peggy Guggenheim, for getting these graphic design is my passion labels out of Europe, and affording us the opportunity to deduce the specific functionalities of each line’s different typefaces. These might be what I, too, fiddle with making during a nazi occupation.
The Brooklyn Rail has a whole smorgasbord of Duchamp-related content tied to MoMA’s show. But my favorite still has to be the October 2022 recollections of art historian Carroll Janis, who was working alone in his family’s gallery one morning in 1950 when Duchamp came to sign the urinal Sidney Janis had procured for exhibition.
For the whole time this has been in my tabs, I’ve been thinking about the elaborate, almost performative way Duchamp approached this signing and designation. But as I was writing this, it occurred to me that Janis got the first [non-bôite] replica of Fountain in 33 years, not in New York, where the original supposedly came from, but in France: “[A]s no suitable replacement could be found in New York, Duchamp suggested that Janis look in Paris on his summer visit there at the Marché aux Puces (flea market). Janis found one and shipped it back to New York.”
He sure did, and it’s now in the Philadelphia Museum. And there’s a great museum photo of the underside, with the signature[s!] and the labels.
But now I think back on a whole thrumming history of Duchamp studies where incredulous scholars scoured the early 20th century porcelain fixture catalogues of the J.L. Mott Iron Works and beyond, failing to identify the exact model of urinal Duchamp said he picked up on Sixth Avenue. Why did Duchamp think or know a suitably identical urinal would be found in les puces? Did he get the first one in France, too?
Sturtevant, Fountain, no date, painted plasticine, 7 x 5 x 4 cm, at Thaddeus Ropac Milan
Sturtevant was using the work of Marcel Duchamp from almost the beginning of her public career in the 1960s, so this kawaii, undated, Bôite-en-Valise-size [but Stieglitz photo-shaped] plasticine Fountain could have been from anytime, really. Or anytime before 1997, when it appears in a collage of Stieglitz-style photos and distorted photocopies.
Sturtevant, Duchamp Untitled, 1997, photo and lasercopy collage on paper, 33.5 x 29 cm, via Thaddeus Ropac Milan
Marcel Duchamp [& Alison Knowles], Color Swatch, 1968, screenprint, 7 ½ x 5 ¾ in., unique, selling at Christie’s in May 2026
When this little Duchamp was sold at Grisebach in 2016, it was, Untitled (from Coeurs Volants), and Alison Knowles was only listed in the provenance.
It’s a color test for the Something Else Press screenprint edition of Coeurs Volant, a collage Duchamp made for Christian Zervos which was printed on the cover of Cahiers d’Art in 1936. Printed and signed in the spring of 1968 before the Duchamps left New York for Spain, it turned out to be the last work Duchamp put out before his death on October 2nd. [Obviously there was Étant Donnés, and he did make some 3D drawings of a fireplace in the house in Cadaqués, but the point here is, on the ground in NYC, it seemed like his last work.]
Andy Warhol’s Marcel Duchamp Coeurs Volants, 1968, 24 x 18 in. framed? ed. 11/24, sold at Rago in 2022
Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts) (1967) -> 15 x 22″ Silk Screen on Black Coloraid Paper Alphabet Edition of Twenty Four. Color Swatch, 4 x 5″ Silk Screen on Black Coloraid Paper by Alison Knowles signed by Marcel Duchamp. Collection Wolfgang Feelisch, Remscheid
Through Daniel Spoerri, the Something Else Press arranged to meet Marcel Duchamp. This screen print was preceeded by a four by five color swatch showing two circles one red, one blue. He selected this color swatch one day while we are having tea at his tenth street apartment in New York. There were eleven color swatches, each showing blue and red circles but in different intensities. He selected one and lefted it out on table saying “Oh, that’s it.” I put the others in my brief case and we kept talking. Teeny Duchamp walked by the table, saw the color swatch and said “MARCEL, when did you do this?” He asked for a pencil, smiled and signed the color swatch. This color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp’s last readymade! I kept this little swatch for about a year and then sold it to a collecter in Remsheid. Richard Hamilton, to whom I gave a copy of a final print, called this work a piece of memorabilia, not a readymade. Duchamp died the following year but I am sure he would have agreed. I like the story very much because it describes the process as important as the product according to a master.
Which, a lot going on here, starting with Richard Hamilton of all people being kind of a bitch about Duchamp memorabilia, especially after getting a copy of the print. But they’re both not wrong, and I’m sure Duchamp would have approved of the mess.
I don’t think I’m so into Knowles’ takeaway from the story, though I am very interested in what she took away from the meeting, namely the other ten other color swatches that she made, and Duchamp touched but didn’t sign. That Duchamp memorabilia sets my heart aflutter.
But let’s put all that aside and conjure up in our minds the world inside the sentence, “the color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp’s last readymade!”
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?
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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 Platessays 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.]
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.
Marcel Duchamp? Rotative Plaques Verre, 1920/1979, a purchase by the Centre Pompidou
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, 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.
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.
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?
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 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!
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.
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.]
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.
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.
