Other Andrew Otwell Art History papers

© Andrew Otwell, 1997

Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Conclusion
Illustrations
Bibliography

Chapter 1

André Breton and the 'Lighthouse of the Bride': Duchamp and Surrealism in 1945

The editors of the Duchamp View put the issue together carefully. However, it does not fit into the direction that the magazine took during the middle 1940's, away from Surrealism and towards existentialism and theater.[1] Although nowhere in the Ford Papers does the American mention that he ceded control of the issue to the French Surrealist leader André Breton, he clearly backed off and allowed Breton to compose the issue. In this way, the Duchamp issue was an attempt at a collaboration between Ford and Breton, two personalities who often bristled at compromising their creative independence. Breton's achievement with the Duchamp View, perhaps the richest of any issue of the magazine, indicates the degree of his respect for Duchamp. The magazine succeeds in its attempt to present a comprehensive monograph on a complex artist. However, Breton's statement in the summer of 1942 that "Duchamp is in New York. That is the most beautiful acquisition we have had. . ." may suggest another reason for the tone of the Duchamp View.[2] The issue may have been an attempt to co-opt Duchamp as a Surrealist and to bolster the sagging Surrealist movement in America by associating it explicitly with him. This interpretation is borne out by a close reading of the contents of the Duchamp View.

The relationship between Breton and Duchamp is a difficult one to assess. It grew over the course of almost half a century; only towards the end does it appear that a real closeness developed between the men. An assessment of the relationship is complicated by Duchamp's often vague attitude and statements. He had often shied away from a close friendship with Breton, although after the Surrealist leader's death Duchamp said that "Breton loved like a heart beats. He was the lover of love in a world that believes in prostitution."[3] It is not my intention to examine each contact Duchamp had with Surrealism, but rather to try to understand why, in 1945, View reprinted an essay by Breton that was more than a decade old and to suggest what meaning the essay could have had in relation to the position of Surrealism in that year.

Surrealism

Surrealism began in the second decade of this century in Paris as a literary movement. The original members of the Surrealist group, including poets Breton, Paul Eluard, Roger Vitrac, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, and others, intended nothing less than a renovation of language. These poets, all born at the end of the 19th century, reacted against the literary and philosophical tradition of that period that was largely embodied in the Symbolist movement. Literary and artistic Symbolism had based much of its imagery on the subjectivity of the artist and emphasized a mystical escape from reality into a realm of dreams, a "forest of symbols," as Baudelaire called it.[4] The young Surrealists, led by Breton, found inspiration in French writers who had begun to move away from Symbolism, including Isidore Ducasse (the Comte de Lautréamont), Pierre Reverdy, and Saint-Pol-Roux. Some Symbolist poets, including Rimbaud and Apollinaire, provided inspiration for the Surrealists as well.[5]

German literature and philosophy, as well, offered the young writers a new source from which to draw inspiration.[6] The writings of Sigmund Freud and, as Jennifer Gibson has shown, the work of the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, led the Surrealists to seek to access the irrational and the unconscious mind for creative purposes.[7] Psychology led them in particular to explore the imagery of dreams and to seek to emulate states of insanity in order to access the irrational mind.[8] Breton, who had worked in a mental hospital, wrote in in 1930 of his attempts at a series of "simulations" of mental disorders.[9] In 1932 he stated that "the surrealists must be autists."[10] Psychology and an interest in spiritualist trance states also led them to explore one of the most fruitful of Surrealist techniques, that of automatic writing, in which notes were made during a state of near-sleep. The Surrealists saw this technique as crossing the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness.[11] No less important to the Surrealists was the work of Hegel, whose writings on the primacy of concrete existence over abstract thought greatly influenced the Surrealists' renovation of the idea of the metaphor in poetry and art.[12]

The contribution of Surrealism, historian Anna Balakian has noted, was its "concept of art as a building process, not as an expression or statement of existence as it is, but as a modification or an addition to it."[13] Breton's hope for the movement "to transform the world, change life, [and] remake from scratch human understanding" lay in Surrealism's transformation of language.[14] A new concept of metaphor lay at the heart of this "modification" of reality. Breton wanted poetry to create new images, rather than to represent reality or to express thought and emotion.[15] To do this, new methods were required, many of which he detailed in the first "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924.[16] By doing away with the traditional idea of metaphor as analogy--"as blue as the sky"--and replacing it with unexpected juxtapositions of images that were not analogies but true equivalences, new images would result in the mind of the reader, such as Breton's "luminous like the interior of an apple from which a slice has been cut out."[17] Surrealist imagery and technique developed beyond this initial discovery, but the movement's ideas emerged largely out of it.

Breton's desire "to transform the world" took on explicitly Marxist political qualities in the late 1920's. He was against the French Communist Party's promotion of Social Realism as a monolithic art, however, and proclaimed his own intellectual and artistic freedom to be socially subversive while still subscribing largely to Communism's beliefs. Breton attempted to clarify his political position in the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1930. For the most part, however, the Communist Party dismissed Breton's declaration of individuality.[18]

Though Surrealism did not initially incorporate visual ideas, some artists seem to have felt the same dissatisfaction with tradition that the literary Surrealists did. Breton was aware of the works of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, whose works often visually juxtapose ordinary objects in unusual ways and set them in strange landscapes (as in fig. 24).[19] Breton also admired German artist Max Ernst's 1920 collages (such as fig. 23) and wrote that they "produced an entirely original scheme of visual structure yet at the same time corresponded exactly to the intentions of Lautréamont and Rimbaud in poetry."[20] In the works of these artists--and later in the work of painters Salvador Dali, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and American sculptor Joseph Cornell--Breton found the visual equivalent of Surrealism's new concept of metaphor. In them, as Balakian points out, the object was the basic unit of composition, as the word had been in poetry, of unexpected or impossible juxtapositions.[21] Balakian has characterized the relationship of objects as existing in "a new promiscuity," a phrase that captures exactly the fertile associative possibilities of Surrealist art.

Distorted visual images, as well, could depict hallucinatory states--or in Dali's case, states of paranoia--that evoke insanity.[22] Automatic drawing, like automatic writing, was practiced by Masson and others who saw it as a method to access the unconscious and to provoke new visual ideas.[23] Neither Surrealist art nor poetry, however, can be subsumed under a single definition. The otherworldly landscapes of Yves Tanguy (as in fig. 22), bear little visual similarity to Miró's abstract compositions (for example fig. 21). Yet both seek the Surrealist goal of the evocation of new images in the viewer's mind.

Breton and Duchamp before 1945

Robert Lebel was a friend to both Duchamp and Breton for more than twenty years and published the first book-length monograph on Duchamp in 1959. In a short essay on the relationship between the two artists, Lebel observed that, to Breton, Duchamp was "a legendary figure of the Cubist and pre-Dada era," a period Breton admired but to which he had no personal connection.[24] Duchamp's position as a living historical figure, complete with the notoriety his painting Nude Descending a Staircase (fig. 8) had brought at the Armory Show in 1913, could be intimidating.[25] Lebel even characterized Duchamp's position in Breton's mind as that of "an oracle who merely used art as he used language or gestures, to convey laconically the essence of his thoughts."[26] In this way, Duchamp seemed to occupy with ease a position that Breton hoped to attain. Breton's respect for Duchamp seemed especially noticeable in the 1940's. Breton's young protege Charles Duits remembered that "Il «abdiquait» . . . . Il était naturellement central, comme Duchamp était naturellement périphérique. Mais, quand celui-ci était présant, Breton refusait d'occuper sa place. Tous le regardaient, l'écoutaient; lui, il regardarait, écoutait Duchamp. Etrange humilité."[27]

But despite his "humility" before Duchamp, Breton may have wanted to bring the artist into the official Surrealist group.[28] Lebel notes that Breton had even dreamed about this problem. In the 1920's Breton and others published accounts of dreams in the periodical La Révolution Surréaliste. Breton was concerned with managing the problems within the Surrealist group and was distressed over how to secure Duchamp's participation in it. Lebel notes that this dream "intimates that Breton considered Duchamp's help indispensable to the Surrealist cause, but also feared that such help was not easy to get or to keep."[29] Breton wrote in the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" that Duchamp was one of the "disappointments" that must be recorded "in the horribly debit side of the ledger of life." Breton was saddened that Duchamp seemed to refuse to return to art from "an interminable game of chess,"and called him an example of a "mind loathe to serve but also . . . seemingly afflicted with a generous dose of skepticism insofar as it refuses to say why."[30] This, the only mention of Duchamp in the "Second Manifesto," suggests Breton's disappointment at not being able to bring Duchamp into the Surrealist circle and his frustration at Duchamp's lack of an explanation why he would not officially join. However, it is certainly significant that the "Second Manifesto" is largely a definition of the revolutionary Marxist political position of Surrealism. Duchamp's indifference to politics of any kind distanced him from the movement's political turn.

Duchamp was not the only artist Breton tried to absorb into the Surrealist movement. In his Surrealism and Painting in 1928, as Balakian has pointed out, Breton "is so overwhelmed with the Surrealist debt owed to Picasso, that he includes him in the surrealist fold and would like to have the label of cubist removed from him."[31] For Breton, Picasso's visual distortion of the object had prefigured Surrealism's linguistic distortion of it.[32] We shall see below that Duchamp, too, had approached the object in a way Breton may have appreciated. However, in Duchamp's case Breton was never clear; he never called for the label of Surrealist to be applied to the artist, for example.[33] Indeed, Surrealism may not have owed a "debt" to Duchamp as it had to Cubism. Often in Breton's writings on Duchamp he seems ambivalent and unwilling to pigeonhole the artist into a category. The varied interpretations of Duchamp in the View issue--to be examined in the next chapter of this thesis--suggest this uncertainty even in 1945.

Breton wrote about Marcel Duchamp just a year after formally meeting him in 1921.[34] "Marcel Duchamp" was the first critical essay about the artist. It appeared in the proto-Surrealist monthly Littérature in October of 1922 and portrayed Duchamp as occupying a unique position in art "in that the most recent groups are more or less acting on the authority of his name, although it is impossible to tell to what extent they have ever won his consent, since we saw him detach himself from them with perfect freedom . . . ."[35] The relevance of this statement to Breton's own movement would be borne out over the next several decades. The statement also indicates the overall tone of the essay: in 1922 Breton was aware of and respected Duchamp's position relative to the avant-garde, but avoided an examination of his works in favor of establishing a basic stand on the artist's personality.

In Littérature, Breton realized that his short essay was only the first of much future writing on Duchamp; this portrait of the artist himself is clearly meant as a prologue to investigations of his works. Breton admired Duchamp's unwillingness to accept the thesis of any other group: "In consideration of of what will follow, it would be advisable, I think, to center our attention on this disdain, and for this it will suffice to evoke the glass painting to which Duchamp will soon have given almost ten years of his life . . .[of which] the most beautiful legends are current."[36] It is interesting that in 1922 Breton would simply "evoke" Duchamp's 1915-1923 work, the Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (often called the Large Glass, fig. 1), since neither he nor many of his readers--perhaps none--had yet seen the work.[37] The Large Glass may have appealed to Breton in this context because, unseen, it had engendered "legends."

A second piece in Littérature also reflected the Surrealists' interest in Duchamp. Ten pages of Robert Desnos' short puns, aphorisms, and questions appeared with Breton's "Marcel Duchamp" in the magazine in October 1922. Desnos was a member of the original Surrealist group who seemed to have a special talent for going into a trace-like state almost at will and producing automatic speech, often in short phrases; the Littérature piece collected a number of them.[38] Many of these mentioned the name "Rrose Sélavy," such as "Rrose Sélavy demande si les Fleurs du mal ont modifié les moers du phalle. Qu'en pense Omphale?"[39]

Rrose Sélavy was the female alter ego Duchamp created for himself in 1920 (see fig. 4).[40] Duchamp signed Sélavy's name to several works, including Fresh Widow of 1920 (fig. 5) and the 1925 film Anemic Cinéma. Her name even appears as part of the title of the 1921 work Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? (fig. 6).[41] View reprinted some of Desnos' utterances as "Rrose Sélavy: 1922-1923" in the 1945 Duchamp issue. It seems unlikely that Desnos' 1922 automatic statements were a genuine attempt at absorbing Duchamp into the Surrealist group, though the reprinting of them in 1945 may have served just this purpose. In the early 1920's Desnos was more likely interested in Duchamp's own ability to produce puns, aphorisms, and turns of phrase[42]; "Fresh Widow" is a pun on "french window" and "Rrose Sélavy" is itself a pun on "eros, c'est la vie."[43]

Breton's writing on Duchamp was limited between 1922 and 1935. With the exception of "Phare de la marie" published in Minotaure in 1935, Breton did not produce a major statement about the artist. Duchamp appears only as a footnote in both the first "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924 and in Surrealism and Painting four years later.[44] This period also saw Breton consolidate the political position of the movement in the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism,"in which very few artists appear.[45]

"Lighthouse of the Bride"

"Phare de la marie," was the longest piece that Breton produced on Duchamp's work and the first detailed analysis of La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even). Published initially in 1935 in Minotaure (and followed by an analysis of the handprints of Breton, Duchamp, and others), the article antedates several important essays on Surrealism in the 1940's.[46] Breton made no changes to the content of the essay between the two versions. Written before Breton had seen the Large Glass, "Lighthouse" provides a history of Duchamp's works and an explanation of the functions of the various mechanisms in the work.

Breton had deciphered his interpretation from Duchamp's notes for the Large Glass project. Duchamp published these notes as the Green Box (which also carries the title of La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même) in 1934. The Green Box was a boxed set of facsimiles of 94 manuscript notes, drawings, and photographs inside a green-colored cardboard box (fig. 7).[47] Duchamp intended these notes as a guide to the Large Glass (fig. 1) and stated that a viewer should examine both together.[48]

Breton was always quite subtle in his positioning of Duchamp relative to Surrealism, and "Lighthouse" is no exception. The essay is somewhat restrained in tone and avoids directly labeling Duchamp a Surrealist artist. Since Duchamp and Breton were collaborating as editors of Minotaure in 1935, the Surrealist leader may have felt that Duchamp was closer to the movement than he had been previously. "Lighthouse" can be roughly divided into three sections. The essay first establishes the milieu into which Duchamp appeared and presents a discussion of Duchamp's artistic personality. It then surveys a number of his works, including the readymades, the ordinary objects Duchamp selected with no concern for their aesthetic value and signed as works of art.[49] The essay concludes with an analysis of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Breton believed that only a "deep historical understanding of the development of [Duchamp's] work" can allow one to comprehend its full ramifications.[50] That Breton himself undertook such a survey in 1934 suggests that he felt that he was uniquely qualified to impart this knowledge; that he reprinted it unchanged in 1945 implies that he continued to think the same.

Breton begins by describing the artistic context of the 1910's and 1920's. Cubism, he writes, offered a monolithic facade of greatness and dubious scientific goals. Its real achievement was little more than to prepare the way for a "tidal wave which soon came and put an end to it, not without upsetting from base to summit, far and wide, the artistic and moral landscape." Breton notes that "it is particularly important . . . to consider attentively the pace where the very first characteristic vibrations of that phenomenon chose to be recorded."[51] Duchamp was at the head of that destructive change. In this introductory section, as in his 1922 Littérature essay, Breton characterizes Duchamp as an individual in opposition to an outdated system. And although Breton goes on to praise the intellectual aspects of Duchamp's work, he carefully contrasts Duchamp's intelligence with the plodding "purely mental adventure" of Cubism.

Breton admires Duchamp as the "artist who has proven himself on this occasion to be the most sensitive recording instrument." Duchamp, more than any other artist, was sensitive to the "characteristic vibrations" of tradition giving way to new ideas.[52] This image suggests a similar one from Breton's first "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924. There, he described the true Surrealists (including poets Phillipe Soupault, Roger Vitrac, and Robert Desnos) as "we . . . who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments . . . (emphasis Breton's)."[53] The similarity of the analogies of recording devices in the two essays is hardly accidental.

As Jennifer Gibson has shown, the image of the "recording device" was common in Surrealism.[54] It often evoked Breton's fascination with a specifically French--and misleadingly incorrect--interpretation of Freud's idea of mental free association.[55] Gibson shows that Breton used several variations of the phrase, which was common in both 19th century discussions of the activities of spiritualist mediums and in 19th century French "dynamic psychiatry," to describe individuals engaged in automatic speech or writing.[56] The image of the "recording instrument," Gibson states, evoked for Breton the mediumistic trance state of simultaneous consciousness and unconsciousness.[57] Both Breton and psychiatrist Pierre Janet had observed that the moments between sleep and waking could elicit automatic speech in normal individuals, a technique the Surrealists took advantage of.[58]

In the first Manifesto of 1924, Breton had included Duchamp with other visual artists (such as Seurat, Matisse, Picasso, Picabia, and even Max Ernst) who "had not heard the Surrealist voice . . . . They were instruments too full of pride, and this is why they have not always produced a harmonious sound."[59] However, by 1934 Breton's increased knowledge of the artist's work allowed him to label Duchamp a "most sensitive" instrument. The epithet became standard in describing the artistic abilities of an individual; in 1936 Gabrielle Buffet would also use the term to describe Duchamp, as we shall see in the following chapter. Though Duchamp told Georges Charbonnier in 1961 that he admired Surrealism's pioneering use of the unconscious, nothing in the Green Box suggests that the artist had utilized automatic techniques.[60] Perhaps Breton's characterization of Duchamp as a recording device here should be seen in light of the Surrealist's view of the the artist as metaphysician. Balakian has written that the Surrealists believed the goal of the artist was "not to transcend the object but . . . to reveal it more fully."[61] This clarification of the subject of a work of art--as opposed to a purely symbolic interpretation of it--was central to Surrealism's conception of art as "a building process . . . a modification or an addition" to reality.[62] Balakian cites the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon's 1926 statement that "an object was being transformed before my eyes, it was not assuming an allegoric shape, nor a symbolic character; it was actually becoming that idea."[63] Similarly, the notes of Duchamp's Green Box illuminate the Large Glass to the reader without literally describing it. Balakian states that Hegel's explanation of knowledge as the combination of thought and object influenced the Surrealists in their desire to avoid symbolic representation of externals. She concludes, "the metaphysical experience, then, could be reached not through transcendence but through a successful tuning of mind with matter."[64] This belief led the Surrealists to seek the marvelous inherent in the everyday while avoiding any literal representation of a subject.[65]

Perhaps Breton saw Duchamp's Green Box notes as an expansion of the physical reality of the Large Glass that, while not themselves Surrealist in technique, successfully translate that reality into a new material form. (That this new form was primarily a written one, as opposed to a visual one, may have been significant to Breton.) Breton recalled his first realization of this possibility in the 1920's, "The external object had broken with its normal environment, and its component parts had, so to speak, emancipated themselves from it in such a way that they were now able to maintain entirely new relationships with other elements. . . ."[66] The Green Box notes represent the component parts of the Large Glass and expand upon the ideas in it, yet they exist independently from it. Further, the ninety-four notes in the Box can be rearranged endlessly in order to suggest "new relationships" with each other. The entire Duchamp View, in a way, reveals a marvelous external object--Duchamp himself--through fragments that together make up the "idea" of that object.

Breton had noted briefly in November 1922 that Duchamp and Picabia were the only artists at that moment "trained in the most complex mental gymnastics" necessary to induce repeatedly the creative state that automatism could aid in attaining.[67] If, through intellect, Duchamp could capture what Breton sought through mediumistic automatism, then Breton could accurately label Duchamp a "most sensitive recording device," not for his use of automatism, but because of his ability to record, reinterpret, and retransmit material reality in a manner that resonated with Surrealism's creative goals.

A survey of some of Duchamp's works forms the middle section of "Lighthouse of the Bride." Breton here emphasizes Duchamp's "determined intention of negation" as the unique power that he has to overturn the art of the past.[68] Originality, according to Breton, is based on this attitude, which not only implies the opposition to traditional techniques or ideas, but also the negation of one's own past. Duchamp, who "limits to approximately thirty-five the number of his activities in the field of plastic production," epitomizes absolute originality in each creative act. The readymades, in particular, were to Breton the "most dazzling" of Duchamp's works between 1915 and 1935.[69] Breton formulated here what became a widely accepted "definition" of the readymades as "manufactured objects promoted to the dignity of objects of art through the choice of the artist."[70] Initially, Duchamp's "readymades" were manufactured objects, such as a snow shovel or metal comb, that Duchamp chose and signed as works of art. By 1934 however, he had expanded the category from single objects to include what can be more accurately described as assemblages, such as Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? The first of the readymades, the Bicycle Wheel, appeared in 1911; the artist continued occasionally to select objects as "readymades" for the rest of his career.[71]

Breton's definition of the readymades as objects in defiance of accepted art forms recalls his so-called "dictionary definition" of Surrealism itself in the first "Manifesto." There, he stated that a work was Surrealist because it was "[d]ictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."[72] In "Lighthouse," Breton notes that the readymades, more than any of the artist's other gestures, embody the spirit of negation and his "complete contempt for all other media" unique to the artist.[73] To Breton, originality in art making also meant that the individual personality of the artist--as opposed to that of a group or a movement--was revealed. Breton's praise of opposition to the past and emphasis on individual originality loomed large part in his statements on Surrealism in the 1940's.

Breton's roughly chronological review of Duchamp's œuvre includes a short look at his early paintings before proceeding to a discussion of the Large Glass. For Breton, Duchamp had abandoned traditional painting techniques of the early works in favor of work which led him on "a fabulous hunt through virgin territory, at the frontiers of eroticism, of philosophical speculation, of the spirit of sporting composition, of the most recent data of science, of lyricism and of humor."[74] This initial statement on the Large Glass itself is especially important to Breton's analysis of the work. It not only places the Large Glass within the context of opposition to tradition, but suggests specifically Surrealist themes as its content.

Eroticism was a very significant idea in Surrealism, particularly so in the poetry of its early members.[75] Breton saw his movement as expanding upon the philosophy of Sade, among several others.[76] The creators of Surrealism intended it to be a kind of violent revolution against the social and artistic structures of the past based on fantastic imagery, not dissimilar to a "fabulous hunt through virgin territory, at the frontiers of eroticism, of philosophical speculation." Too, the movement was organized in part around psychology, a form of "the most recent data of science." Lyricism and humor, often black humor, were additional characteristics of Breton's vision.[77] The analysis of the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even in the "Lighthouse of the Bride" emphasizes these same themes.

Breton includes a numbered diagram of the Large Glass and indicates its various pieces. He concludes that "we find ourselves here in the presence of a mechanistic and cynical interpretation of the phenomenon of love: the passage of a woman from the state of virginity to that of nonvirginity taken as the theme of a fundamentally asentimental speculation," and again notes that the whole is held together by lyricism.[78] It is not surprising that Breton found lyricism in the Large Glass though the work has few, if any, intentionally lyrical elements. He had written in 1928 that "lyricism . . . is the basic element of every work of art that we admire. . . ."[79] Related to the Surrealist analogy, lyrical beauty in a work of art could elicit in the viewer a "convulsive" moment of recognition of her own powers of creation upon completing it mentally.[80] Just as Breton admired another Surrealist progenitor, the Comte de Lautréamont, for having written "beautiful like the fortuitous meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella,"[81] he could admire Duchamp's marriage of the "rigorously logical and the expected . . . to the arbitrary and the gratuitous" in the Large Glass.[82] Thus, though there is no real "lyricism" in the work, Breton believed that the complexity of the Large Glass (fig. 1) could trigger a similar intellectual response. The result was that "one very soon abandons oneself to the charm of a kind of great modern legend. . . ."[83]

That Breton emphasizes the theme of love is significant; it implies that the Large Glass had love in common with Surrealism as its most prevalent theme. "Probably only the erotic commentary . . . cannot be ignored now," Breton continues. To support the primacy of this theme, Breton concludes the essay with a lengthy note from the Green Box that describes the mechanical functions of the Large Glass in often sexual terms: " . . .the Bride, instead of being a mere asensual icicle, warmly rejects, not chastely, the bachelors rebuffed offers . . . . The whole graphical stress leads up to the cinematic blossoming which . . . is the halo of the Bride, the sum total of her splendid vibrations."[84]

Many interpretations of the Large Glass are possible and I will not presume to choose the most "important" one. While love, or perhaps more accurately dysfunctional sexual union, is a theme in the work, it is more important here to recognize that Breton chose it over any other. Breton's summary of the various parts of the Large Glass, based on the notes in the Green Box, reveals that he is certainly aware of, for example, the references to scientific experiments on visual perception Duchamp included in the work. He even states that "to this commentary [on love as the central theme] one should add several others: philosophical, poetical, expressing faith or suspicion, novelistic, humorous, etc."[85] As he had implied in the first section of the essay, Breton notes that themes of philosophy, lyricism, and humor--all quintessential Surrealist ideas--may exist in the work, but are less significant than the theme of love. Notably, Breton continued to find these themes essential in Duchamp's work in 1945. In the brief "Testimony 45" that introduces the Duchamp View, he wrote that Duchamp's position was at the intersection of philosophy, esoterism, utopianism, eroticism, and humor.

"Lighthouse of the Bride" in 1945

In "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism" in 1941, Breton discussed only Duchamp's early work, which he related to Futurism.[86] That Italian literary and painting movement was an important source for Surrealism, Breton writes, because it was the first movement "to place the accent on need . . . [instead of on] perception-reaction." That is, Futurism did not express the artist's response to exterior forms, but only his desire to create new ones; this could lead, as in Surrealism's juxtaposition of images, to an isolation of the object from its normal role and to assigning it a new, previously unimagined, one. According to Breton, Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase (fig. 8) was the "most accomplished expression of this way of seeing things . . . ." Futurism's expression of need was critical to later art, since it was often based on a desire to create mechanistic forms, or what Breton calls a "deliberate confusion between man and machine."[87] For Breton, Duchamp's Large Glass was the work that connected this attitude with Surrealism's use of personal need as the basis for creating art.[88] Breton wrote, "Once the artist [Duchamp] had achieved the desired reconciliation between man and machine, and in so doing had demonstrated that the latter could neither construct nor repair itself, neither perfect itself nor even destroy itself, unaided, he was then quite naturally led to Surrealism."[89] Duchamp, then, was the single artist who had distilled the most useful aspects of Futurist art and used them to criticize and conclude the movement itself before proceeding (naturally) to Surrealism. Breton's statement implies

Duchamp, however, always insisted that he had not been interested in Futurism in early 1912, when he painted the Nude. He said in 1967 that "there was no Futurism [in the Nude], since I didn't know the Futurists. . . . I had never seen them." Duchamp does admit a watercolor of later that year, Le roi et la reine entourés de nus vites (The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes), may have been "a bit Futurist, because by then I knew about the Futurists."[90] Margit Rowell has compared Duchamp's interest in depicting motion to the Futurists' similar one and found that their approaches were nearly opposite. The Futurists attempted to to paint the continuous movement of an object, while Duchamp was interested in analyzing the successive stages thorough which an object in motion would pass.[91] Duchamp accomplished this analysis, similar to the photographic studies of motion by Etienne-Jules Marey and the experiments in painting undertaken by Duchamp's friend Frantisek Kupka, through the reduction of form to basic shapes.[92] Duchamp said in an interview that "a form passing through space would traverse a line. . . . Therefore I felt justified in reducing a figure in movement to a line. . . ."[93]

Duchamp's examination of motion in this way seems to have little to do with the personal need or an interest in creating mechanical forms that Breton found Futurist art had contributed to Surrealism. The artist's interest in machines stemmed from an desire to find new methods from which to free himself from traditional painterly techniques and methods.[94] In fact, as Lawrence Steefel has pointed out, Duchamp's interest in the mechanistic in works such as Moulin à Café [Coffee Mill] (1911) or the two versions of Broyeuse de Chocolat [Chocolate Grinder] (1913 and 1914), was a way to distance his work from the very things that Surrealism treasured. The mechanistic represents, according to Steefel, a "distinct and rigid counter against the turbulent vastness of unchanneled association and unfiltered dream."[95] Duchamp had written of a "painting of precision, and beauty of indifference" in the Green Box notes as ways to avoid personal association in art-making.[96]

It is important that Breton does not discuss any of the Italian Futurists, such as Giacomo Balla or Umberto Boccioni, in either "Surrealism and Painting" or "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism."[97] In fact, in the latter essay, Breton seems to subtly emphasize the crucial theoretical differences between Futurism and Duchamp's paintings. After dismissing Futurism as having "produced very little first-class work in either literature or the arts," Breton recalls being "enchanted" by a "series of photographs, published some years ago in an American magazine, reproducing some of the successive postures assumed by a man during the course of one's night's sleep. It would have been even better if the sleeper's movements had been filmed without interruption and then screened in very fast motion."[98]The representation of motion through successive discrete images, absolutely anathema to the Futurist idea of depicting continuous motion,[99] was in fact Duchamp's conception. The Duchamp View may have alluded to the Duchampian interpretation of motion: the issue reproduces ten successive frames of Duchamp from Maya Deren's 1943 film "The Witch's Cradle" in which the artist sits in a chair as the camera rotates around him.[100] By making Duchamp the single Futurist in the legacy that produced Surrealism and by making his ideas stand for those of Futurism in general, Breton co-opted for his movement an important source for avant-garde painting. At the same time, this tactic allowed Breton to focus on the aspects of Futurism that he wanted: the "accent on need . . . that would aim to apprehend the object by primitive means and so be in a position to overthrow the tyrannical and decadent elements in the realm of vision."[101] Seen in this narrow way, Futurism--or what Breton decided Futurism was--did in fact lead through Duchamp to Surrealism.

In the "Lighthouse of the Bride," as in "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism," Breton emphasized that Duchamp's innovations were accomplished through self-criticism. Breton states this idea more explicitly in his short introduction to the Duchamp View called "Testimony 45."

It has been said that from the moment of its publication, it became impossible to think as if The Critique of Pure Reason had never existed. One can, likewise, ask oneself to what extent it will one day be considered legitimate to have continued painting as if La Mariée mise à nu had never been produced. The intervention of Marcel Duchamp continues, with the passage of time, to assume the character of a more and more imperative notice. It tends to denounce as obsolete and vain the greater part of recent artistic production . . . .[102]

Like Kant, Duchamp uses the devices and techniques of his field of endeavor to criticize it and to attempt to force it to a crisis. Breton's statement goes on to suggest that what is to follow in the Duchamp View is an attempt to understand his "imperative notice." The idea that progress could be accomplished through opposition to artistic or social norms was crucial to Breton in the mid-1940's. To Breton, Duchamp's intervention and criticism from within represented what he hoped to achieve in Surrealism at that time.

The reprint of "Lighthouse of the Bride" appeared in the wake of another essay by Breton, the "Prologomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Not." Breton had published the "Prologomena" in VVV in 1942. He was under pressure from Matta and others to produce a third Surrealist manifesto that would encompass new directions in Surrealist art. Even the critics had begun to tire of "traditional" Surrealism: according to a review of Breton's "First Papers" exhibition in the New York Times, Surrealism's message had become "merely a kind of academic exercise, exploiting over and over again superficial aspects and having no roots in more creatively summoned experience."[103] Artists like Matta, Kurt Seligmann, and the British painter Gordon Onslow Ford had continued to experiment with Surrealist painting. [104] Though Breton supported their continued experiments with automatic techniques, he may have felt threatened by Matta's influence over the younger artists. Breton also realized that these artists were relatively disinterested in the revolutionary social and political stance that Surrealism' was founded upon. However, he could no longer accept what he called the "still life deception" of the earlier Surrealist concept of the juxtaposition of incongruous visual images.[105] The result was that the "Prologomena" neither clearly sanctioned nor condemned Matta's group's experimentation, a position that few readers of VVV were happy with.[106]

Still, Breton was hopeful in the "Prologomena": "I dream of the magnificent workings of chance in the streets, even in New York."[107] Breton refused to accept the course the movement had taken and instead of calling for unity, encouraged isolation. Breton was unhappy that the original ideas of the group were apparently lost: "Surrealism is already far from being able to cover everything that is undertaken in its name, openly or not . . . . what is being done in any given direction bears little resemblance to what was wanted." The fame and commercial success of certain Surrealists, such as Dali, were destroying the principles of the movement, Breton implied. "The evils that are always the price of power, of renown, lie in wait even for Surrealism . . . . The precautions taken to safeguard the integrity of this movement . . . have not precluded the raving false witness of an Aragon," a founding Surrealist poet who had broken with Breton.[108] Certainly this statement would also include those artists, such as Dali, whom Breton watched profit from their art in the name of his ideas. He realized, however, that widespread conformity to the old Surrealist program would no longer do and that the dilution of Surrealism into American Art, such as the so-called "Magic Realism," disappointed him.[109]

In the "Prologomena" Breton called not for further adherence to a set of ideas, but for general disagreement. In 1930 Breton had written the famous statement that the "simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly . . . into the crowd."[110] Twelve years later in the "Prologomena" he wrote a subdued version of the same idea against acceptance of normalcy. "The fact remains, moreover, that at the end of twenty years I find myself obliged, as I did in my youth, to take a public stand against every kind of conformism and in so doing attack as well a Surrealist conformism that is all too obvious . . . . In 1942 more than ever the opposition must be strengthened at its very base."[111]

Perhaps Breton hoped to emulate Duchamp's attitude in some respects in this statement, written just months after the artist's arrival in New York. During the same twenty years, Duchamp had avoided conforming to Breton's movement, even before Breton himself realized the threat to innovation that a group could pose. Breton wanted Duchamp's approval, if not his participation, at this critical moment. The Duchamp View, just three years after the "Prologomena," neatly sets up Duchamp as a part of the origins and present of Surrealism and proclaims his innovations and refusal of all allegiances. Such a tactic would strengthen the Surrealist movement at a weak moment in two ways. First, the Duchamp View illustrates Breton's hope for immediate opposition to artistic norms. In "Testimony 45" Breton writes that Duchamp's "journey through the artistic looking glass determines a fundamental crisis of painting and sculpture which reactionary manoeuvres and stock-exchange brokers will not be able to conceal much longer." Breton forces the viewer either to join the opposition and admit that an artistic crisis exists or to remain on the side of the "reactionary manoeuvres."

Second, the Duchamp View details Duchamp's avant-garde credibility and associates it with the history of the movement. Reprinted essays such as those of Gabrielle Buffet and Mina Loy introduce a historical tone to the issue; none of the other monographic issues of View had reprinted earlier writings. Large parts of articles by Gabrielle Buffet, Julien Levy, and the Janises are devoted to telling and retelling the history of Duchamp's work. Presenting Duchamp in this way could lend significance to Surrealism's prior accomplishments and demonstrate that the artist had not criticized it through its own forms, as he had Futurism. These other essays and their roles in the Duchamp View are the subject of the next chapter.

Duchamp on Surrealism

Duchamp seems to have admired Surrealism primarily because it attempted to avoid the "retinal" or the purely painterly aspects of art which he saw as "completely nonconceptual."[112] For Duchamp, painting "since Courbet [has been] addressed to the retina. . . . The retinal shudder!" He believed that the Surrealists were among the very few who had tried to introduce conceptual elements into their painting, since they sought to depict something beyond the visual.[113] Duchamp told Alain Jouffroy in 1954 that "le grand mérite du surréalisme, c'est d'avoir tenté de se débarasser d'un contentement rétinien, de l'«arrêt à la rétine»."[114] He did, however, state that Breton was never wholly able to detach himself from looking at painting from the retinal point of view.[115]

Surrealism, in general, appealed to the "gray matter," which for Duchamp was its most enduring quality. In a 1961 interview with Georges Charbonnier he connected Surrealism's intellectual basis with its "extremely interesting" introduction of automatism as a creative technique.[116] Duchamp even acknowledged the importance of Freud in the 1961 interview, saying "c'est naturel qu'une œuvre comme celle de Freud puisse avoir un écho dans le domaine de l'art."[117] For Duchamp, this innovative intellectual side of Surrealism allowed it to assume a far more important role culturally than had other art movements. In 1961 he explained "[surréalisme] commençait comme un mouvement littérature, devenait un mouvement beaucoup plus général. Et il l'a été, et c'est pour cela qu'il dure encore. . . .le surréalisme est un mouvement qui englobe toutes sortes d'activités n'ayant presque rien à faire avec la peinture, ou les arts plastiques."[118] Similarly, for Duchamp in 1967 "the reason Surrealism survived [was] that it wasn't a school of painting. It wasn't a school of visual art, like the others. It wasn't an ordinary 'ism,' because it goes as far as philosophy, sociology, literature, etc." and agreed with interviewer Pierre Cabanne's description of it as "a state of mind. . . . a question of behavior."[119]

Despite his admiration for some aspects of Surrealism, Duchamp often downplayed his participation in it. He admitted that he had aided the Surrealists only two times to Cabanne and described only one: the "Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme" in 1938 at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris. For this exhibition Duchamp had installed 1200 coal sacks above the gallery space and had exhibited five works of his own (fig. 9).[120] Presumably Duchamp meant as the second time the 1942 New York "First Papers of Surrealism" show, for which he had designed both the Sixteen Miles of String installation (fig. 10) and the catalog (fig. 11).[121] However, Duchamp contributed to more Surrealist projects than just these two gallery installations.

For example, Duchamp had served as editorial adviser to both Minotaure and VVV--as well as to View--and had designed covers for each. In 1937 he had designed a doorway for Breton's Paris art gallery, Gradiva.[122] Duchamp assisted in the design of three window displays in New York promoting Surrealist publications. He worked with Breton and Surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann on a display for Denis de Rougement's La part du diable in January 1943.[123] In 1945, Duchamp and Breton designed "Lazy Hardware," a display for Breton's Arcane 17.[124] Later that year, the artist worked with painter Enrico Donati to install a window promoting the English translation of Breton's Le surréalisme et la peinture.[125] In 1947, Duchamp assisted with the planning of the "Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme" at the Galerie Maeght in Paris and designed the catalog cover (fig. 12). Though Duchamp was credited as co-presenter of the exhibition with Breton, he did not aid in the installation of the show; it was executed by Frederick Kiesler.[126] Duchamp also designed bookbindings for several Surrealist publications, including Breton's 1940 Anthologie de l'humour noir and his 1946 collection of poems Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (fig. 14).[127]

This last project bears some additional analysis. View Editions, View magazine's book publishing branch, published this short anthology of poems a year after the Duchamp issue.[128] For it, Duchamp designed a cover that depicted the Statue of Liberty in green, brown, and red dots on a blue background. Duchamp cut Liberty's face out and placed Breton's photo on the following page next to an image of a cherry tree branch, so that the poet's face appears through the hole when the cover is closed. Duchamp's cover seems to make Breton into a French symbol of freedom in America, much like the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty--the Statue's original title was "Liberty Enlightening the World"--was, for both America and France, a symbol not only of the two countries' cooperation during the American Revolution, but a symbol of the republican political ideals they shared.[129]

There seem to be several layers of irony at work in Duchamp's cover design. The artist represents Breton as an allegorical symbol rather than a literal fact of liberty. As we have seen, Breton had fought against literary symbolism--especially traditional symbolism such as a robed, torch-bearing woman standing for liberty--throughout his career.[130] The ironic humor of making Breton into an obvious symbol in the face of the poet's dislike of such devices was certainly not lost on Duchamp. Duchamp may have emphasized the banality of the symbol through the green and red on blue color scheme of the book's cover. These strong colors set against one another produce the optical effect of a slight vibration. This effect takes place entirely in the retina. For Duchamp, then, it may have been the sign of a very conventional artistic idea, though he had explored optical effects in an analytical way in in the 1920's.[131] Further, the Statue of Liberty historically represented political values directly opposed to Breton's own. The monument's designer had based the idea for the Statue on the writings of a political conservative who had defined liberty as nonrevolutionary and entirely rejected the idea of popular sovereignty.[132] Breton's Communist sympathies and tireless defense of individual intellectual freedom had their roots in a reaction to precisely these conservative political ideas. Again, Duchamp may have enjoyed the irony in casting Breton in the guise of these values.

Perhaps Duchamp's cover of Breton as a lighthouse--the Statue of Liberty's torch is illuminated--is a reaction to Breton's application of the rather blunt metaphor of the "lighthouse" to Duchamp's work in "Lighthouse of the Bride." There Breton had concluded that "one should keep it [the Large Glass] luminously erect, to guide future ships on a civilization which is ending." For Breton to put him in that position must have seemed pointless to Duchamp, who would never have sought such a role. It may have even reminded the artist of Apollinaire's similar statement in 1913 that "it will perhaps be reserved for . . . Marcel Duchamp, to reconcile Art and the People." To this Duchamp responded that "nothing could have given him the basis for writing such a sentence. . . . what a joke!"[133] Duchamp often distrusted the reactions of his contemporaries to his work, preferring to allow posterity to decide its value.[134] In interviews he regularly said that the public of fifty or one hundred years in the future was the only real judge of an artist's worth.[135] Perhaps Breton's judgment of his work in "Lighthouse of the Bride" led to Duchamp's reply in his Young Cherry Trees cover.

Introduction Chapter 2

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