Other Andrew Otwell Art History papers

© Andrew Otwell, 1997

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

Chapter 2.

Ford, Breton, and the Contents of the Duchamp View

Although drawn to the evocative imagery of the Surrealist poets, the American poet Charles Henri Ford never felt comfortable using automatic writing techniques. He believed that a poet should carefully craft her works, even though Surrealist techniques could inspire new ideas.[1] Similarly, Ford had little interest in the revolutionary politics so important to French Surrealism in the 1930's. Historian Dickran Tashjian has recounted the uneasy friendship between Ford and André Breton. He has shown that ultimately Breton could not accept Ford's deviations from Surrealist technique and politics. Ford, for his part, was never comfortable within Surrealism's overbearing heterosexuality.[2] Ford wrote to his friend and collaborator Parker Tyler of his first meeting with Breton in Paris. "I told him if I appreciated his lyricism inspired by 'la femme' it was only because I substituted the symbol of the Other Sex," he wrote and mocked Breton as "Miss Breton" for his long hair and "velvet knee pants and silk stockings. . . ."[3] When Ford returned to the United States and started View in 1940, it was with a sympathy for Surrealism, but certainly not a commitment to it.

Nevertheless, it was to View that Breton first turned for support upon his arrival in the United States in 1941. Without the established network of little magazines and café culture of Paris, Breton found that America was not interested in following his lead in the Surrealist movement. Ford and View provided Breton with his first official American forum: an interview with fellow Surrealist Nicolas Calas in the "Surrealist Number" issue (October - November 1941) of the magazine.[4] Despite collaborations on special issues on Max Ernst in April 1942, Yves Tanguy in May 1942, and on the Duchamp issue three years later, Ford was wary of allowing Breton to participate in the operation of the magazine. Historian Marticia Sawin has written that "Breton knew from long experience the important role a publication could play in holding together a group and attracting new adherents, and having control of a publication was crucial to the carrying on of his work in the United States."[5] Knowing this, Ford would not allow Breton to assume control of View, nor would he be wooed away to be editor of the Surrealist's new magazine in June 1942, VVV. Ford later said that he had "never wanted to toe the line . . . . [Breton] wanted me to be the editor [of VVV] and I knew he would be looking over my shoulder, so I said. . . I think I'll continue with View."[6] For his part, Ford could never have effectively carried out Breton's wishes for a magazine. Besides, he was nearly as experienced at publishing as Breton. While still in high school Ford had produced a regular magazine, blues, that had received praise from William Carlos Williams, and contributions from Williams and Gertrude Stein.[7]

When Breton did start VVV, the unspoken rivalry between the two men increased. While VVV lasted only three issues between 1942 and 1944, Breton produced a magazine that was more lavishly designed, contained more articles and illustrations than View, and often boasted four-color printing.[8] American David Hare was the nominal editor of the magazine, with Breton and Ernst as "editorial advisers." Duchamp became an adviser after the first issue and designed the cover for VVV number 3, the "Almanac for 1943." VVV also relegated its advertisements to a section at the back of the magazine, unlike View, which typically spread them throughout. However, by the last issue in 1944, Breton had lost any interest he may have once had in expanding Surrealism to reach an American audience. He left no question as to the European origin and bias of the magazine; virtually all of the contents of the final issue are in French, even the photo captions.[9]

There was even some overt anti-View feeling among the group around Breton, which in 1942 also included Matta and the American Gordon Onslow Ford. Onslow Ford wrote in that year to a friend that "André [is] at full strength - sabotage of the click [sic] around View (Calas, [Kurt] Seligmann, etc.)."[10] Even Nicolas Calas, who had helped Charles Henri Ford with the early issues of View became increasingly strict about adhering to Breton's "official" Surrealism. He and Ford literally came to blows over issues of politics and technique one evening in 1942, ending their friendship if not their working relationship.[11] Soon after, in the first issue of VVV, Calas mentioned View in his "Review of reviews." His paragraph on View's April and May 1942 Ernst and Tanguy special issues--to which both he and Breton had contributed--damned Ford's efforts with faint praise: "View in the last two numbers at least does give the impression that the magazine functions as an organ of advanced art."[12] Even Breton's "Declaration VVV," which appeared at the front of each of the three issues of VVV, seemed to attack Ford's magazine. It read in part: "V which signifies the View around us, the eye turned toward the external world, the conscious surface some of us have not ceased to oppose . . . ."[13] Perhaps Breton implied here that Ford and View unnecessarily concentrated on the merely visible and surface world that he himself had fought in art.

By the late 1940's View's focus shifted away from Surrealism as the movement lost its fashionable appeal in the United States. Ford's keen eye for new directions in literature pointed him towards the emergence of existentialism in Paris. By early 1946, the magazine had begun to focus on contemporary French literature and published Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and other French existentialists. The final issue of View appeared in March 1947, just two years after the successful Duchamp issue.

Ford and the Duchamp Special Issue

The Duchamp issue was a major achievement for Ford and View. In letters to his parents and sister, Ford mentions it several times. The Duchamp issue comes up in passing first in an October 1944 letter, one of many that include more mentions of advertisement sales and other business matters than of content. Ford wrote to his father in late December of 1944, just before the first planning meetings with Breton, Duchamp, and Kiesler: "View is more successful than ever - which means more work and the raising of more money. It will cost us $10,000.00 this year to publish it . . . ."[14] Ford's financial optimism carried over to the issue itself when Breton signed on: "After the xmas View were planning a special number on Marcel Duchamp which will be sensational. André Breton is collaborating on this number . . . ."[15]

Once work had begun on the issue, Ford became even more convinced of its worth and value to View's reputation. In January of 1945 he wrote to his sister, "The Marcel Duchamp View, believe it or not, will be even more remarkable than the last number - more pages, more reproductions, really an important and impressive issue."[16] He called it "magnificent" once it appeared,[17] and his sister reported that it "took my breath away . . . ."[18]To Ford himself, however, the aesthetic success of the Duchamp issue was less important than its sheer presence on the shelf next to VVV (which would not have another issue after 1944). He was proud that it had "more ads and pages than any [other issue of View to date]. Everyone thinks View frightfully important now. We've practically absorbed VVV."[19] Even the cocktail party Ford threw for Duchamp when the issue came out "was a sensational success . . . . Everyone was very impressed [with the high attendance] and from a purely business point of view it was a good idea."[20]

In letters to his family and friends, Ford often appears more interested in the business side of running View than the creative one. To him, part of that business was the competition between him and Breton for advertisements, sheer number of pages, and sales. It was a competition that Ford clearly won in the end. Years later, he curtly reminded an interviewer comparing the magazines that VVV "got out 2 or 3 issues and View lasted for 7 years. So VVV didn't really take off . . . ."[21] Ford was careful, however, to balance his business interests with his personal relationship with Breton. In fact, statements by him and by managing editor John Myers imply that the decision to allow Breton to collaborate on the Duchamp issue was a strategic one. Among the exiled European artists with whom Ford was friendly, including Ernst and Tanguy, Breton still carried a great deal of influence, and Ford knew that to ostracize him entirely would be risky. View, Inc.'s other venture in the 1940's was book publishing; through it, Ford had published books of poetry including Breton's Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares. An interviewer asked Ford in 1980 if the Duchamp issue and book of poetry were intended partly to "ingratiate" Breton. Ford responded "Well, perhaps . . . but I forgot what came first, the Breton poems or a special number on Marcel Duchamp which was totally collaborated on by Breton and whoever . . . ."[22] John Myers remembers that "a sigh of relief went up after the Duchamp issue came out. The coterie surrounding Breton was pleased--something that was not easy to accomplish . . . ."[23]

The Duchamp issue seems essentially Breton's production, if only by virtue of the table of contents. Calas, Sidney and Harriet Janis, Kiesler, Julien Levy, and James Thrall Soby, who each contributed essays, were all quite sympathetic to Surrealism and were friends of Breton's. Calas, Breton, Sidney Janis, and Julien Levy had also contributed to the Max Ernst special issue in April 1942, the other View that Breton had worked closely on. In any case, as the letter to his relatives indicates, Ford clearly profited from the inclusion of these authors from among the "coterie surrounding Breton." The new essays by the Janises, Calas, Levy, Soby, and Leon Kochnitzky fit very well around Breton's "Lighthouse of the Bride."

Contents of the Duchamp View

Much of the Duchamp View is devoted to explaining Duchamp's work and his influence in modern art. Breton's pieces, along with Kiesler's "Les Larves d'Imagie d'Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp," are the most significant in terms of establishing Duchamp's position in 1945. It remained for the rest of the contributors to fill in Duchamp's past and to present an overview of his works. Often the authors cover similar subjects, unlike the varied analyses of Max Ernst or Yves Tanguy in View's special 1942 issues on them.[24] I believe that this positioning of Duchamp was deliberate, in that it served to establish and reinforce a specific understanding of Duchamp. Breton had written "Lighthouse of the Bride" in 1934 in order that "one's understanding of Duchamp's work and the fact that one sees its furthest consequences can only be the result of a deep historical understanding of the development of this work."[25] The organization and contents of the Duchamp issue suggest that it was intended to provide this kind of understanding of Duchamp. However, the issue certainly has an agenda: the articles locate Duchamp as a unique bridge between the Cubist and Futurist art of the 1910's and Surrealism, a view of the artist that had been briefly posited by Breton in his 1941 essay, "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism."

The issue opens with Charles Henri Ford's poem "Flag of Ecstasy" printed over a 1920 Man Ray photo of the Large Glass entitled "Dust Breeding." Duchamp had allowed dust to collect on the partially-completed Large Glass to produce the color and texture of some elements in the lower half he called the Sieves; the photo was taken during this period.[26] Ford's poem contains often violent and erotic imagery and suggests that Duchamp's work exists on a higher plane from such things. Ford begins each line with the word 'over': "Over the towers of autoerotic fantasy/ Over the dungeons of homicidal drivers . . . ."[27] This repetition reinforces the positioning of Duchamp as an avant-garde icon by the authors in the rest of the Duchamp View.

Robert Desnos's "Rrose Sélavy: 1922-1923" is a collection of aphorisms in French made up of short questions and punning, nonsensical sentences, many of which were originally published in Littérature in 1924, as discussed in the previous chapter. Desnos indirectly suggests the connection between Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy in one sentence: "Rrose Sélavy connait bien le marchand du sel." "Marchand du sel" is itself a pun on "Marcel Duchamp" invented by the artist. Elsewhere in the Duchamp View, Gabrielle Buffet makes clear that Sélavy was Duchamp's own creation. Desnos's interest in Duchamp was discussed in the previous chapter; it seems to have been based on the French poet's admiration for Duchamp's own skill at creating puns. In the context of the Duchamp View, however, it seems likely that Desnos's aphorisms, given the dates 1922-1923, were intended as part of Breton's call for a "deep historical understanding" of Duchamp. As such, they could contribute to a careful absorption of Duchamp into the history of Surrealism.

Nicolas Calas was a Greek-born poet and a young member of the Surrealist group in Paris. In New York after early 1940, Calas contributed to many of the early issues of View, including an invective against Salvador Dali in June 1941, an interview with Breton in October-November 1941, and several responses to attacks leveled on Surrealism in the magazine Partisan Review.[28] Calas also contributed to the Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy special issues of View in 1942. In the Duchamp issue, Calas' "Cheat to Cheat" describes Duchamp's art as an elaborate "cheat" of traditional aesthetics and assumptions about art. Calas holds Duchamp's readymades in particular as examples of the artist's "free morality" and willful challenge to norms. The opening question of this essay, "Where is Duchamp?" recalls Breton's "Testimony 45," which introduced the Duchamp View and called for an investigation of "the difficult problem of where the personality of Duchamp is situated . . . . "[29] Calas's essay suggests that Duchamp cannot be located in a single position, but that the artist moves effortlessly "between an ascetic studio and a bohemian world, Duchamp is moving endlessly. . . ."[30]

Robert Allerton Parker, a poet who had contributed the essay "Explorers of the Pluriverse" to the "First Papers of Surrealism" exhibition catalog in 1942, discusses mostly Duchamp's early works and the Armory Show scandal that surrounded Nude Descending a Staircase in "America Discovers Marcel."[31] Parker also provides some biographical details about the artist's youth and early career.

Several of the View essays are personal reminiscences by Duchamp's friends that together serve to establish a chronology of the artist's life. American photographer, filmmaker, and artist Man Ray, who had been a friend of Duchamp's since their participation in the New York Dada group in the late 1910's and early 1920's, contributed "Bilingual Biography."[32] This piece is series of short recollections, including one of Duchamp's own Rrose Sélavy aphorisms, that often focus on Duchamp's interest in chess. Man Ray's piece also alludes to several works from the Dada period, such as the 1917 Fountain (fig. 15), and makes reference to some of Duchamp's other activities, such as his 1920 founding with Katherine Dreier of the private museum, the Société Anonyme.[33] In this way it adds to the full historical picture of Duchamp in View. Man Ray had been close to the Surrealists since the early 1920's in Paris and, like Duchamp, he moved with relative ease and detachment between Dada and Surrealism, remaining just outside the inner circles of participants in each.[34] Breton had included him with Duchamp in a footnote to the first "Manifesto" as one of several artists who "had not heard the Surrealist voice."[35] Though this designation suggests that Breton evidently mistrusted Man Ray's individualism in 1924, as he had Duchamp's, the Surrealist leader soon came to laud his works. Breton gave several long paragraphs to Man Ray in the 1928 "Surrealism and Painting."[36]

Two other short pieces add a personal note to the Duchamp View. The writer Ettie Stettheimer, Duchamp's friend during the artist's first New York stay in of 1915-1918, provided "A Portrait" under the pseudonym Henry Waste. This short piece was an excerpt from Stettheimer's novel Love Days (Susanna Moore's) of 1923 and describes a young Frenchman whose loves, like Duchamp's are art and chess. The artist discusses some pictures he had made that were "in form Cubist--but there is an ulterior intention which removes them from Cubism."[37] The poet Mina Loy was also a friend of Duchamp's during that period and was an instigator of avant-garde activities in America.[38] Loy's contribution, "O Marcel: or I Too Have Been to Louise's," had originally been published in 1917 in The Blind Man, a Dada magazine on which Duchamp had also worked. Loy's piece is a stream-of-consciousness essay that suggests snippets of an overheard conversation. In a short note Loy recalls that she wrote the piece "at the Ball where I saved Marcel"; according to Loy, Duchamp had climbed up a precarious rope made of paper. Loy's essay provides a glimpse of the Duchamp's sense of humor, explored rather dryly by the Janises in their essay some pages later.

Julien Levy's "Duchampiana" (also the title of the four-page spread that includes the articles by Waste, Loy, Parker, and Levy) is another personal account of an experience of Duchamp's work. Levy was a gallery owner in New York from 1931 to 1948, who gave many of the early Surrealist painters their first one-man shows in this country and was close to many Surrealist artists.[39] Levy owned Duchamp's Réseaux des Stoppages painting (fig. 16) for some time. After an anecdote from his friendship with Duchamp in Paris, he discusses the fascination the work held for him and compares its allure to Duchamp's cryptic French and English puns. Levy also notes the connection between the network of lines on the canvas and the parts of the Large Glass that Duchamp derived from it.

The articles above are brief; none are more than two pages. However, together they provide the reader with salient biographical points and introduce most of Duchamp's key works, which appear in reproduction throughout the magazine. In this way they contribute to the "deep historical understanding" Breton felt was necessary to apprehend Duchamp's work. Several longer articles also appear in the Duchamp View. These articles explore in more depth individual works or groups of works. Close readings of these articles reveal that they collectively paint Duchamp as an immediate progenitor of the Surrealist movement--as Breton had done in 1941--by concentrating on certain works or by restating Breton's ideas. As we have seen, Breton's statements on Duchamp in "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism" defined a Duchampian version of Futurism and labeled those ideas as proto-Surrealist. The major articles in the Duchamp View largely accept this narrow definition and contribute to a subtle revision of Duchamp's place in Surrealist history.

Leon Kochnitzky, who had contributed a piece on the painter Leonor Fini to the June 1942 View, wrote "Duchamp and the Futurists" as part of View's regular column on art. This article is the most direct translation in View of Breton's ideas in the 1940's about Duchamp's work. Kochnitzky--who later published on topics ranging from art of the Congo to the history of the saxophone and wrote at least one short opera--presents Duchamp as the artist who found a "fully human solution to the problem" of overly intellectualized Cubism around 1910. Although Kochnitzky contrasts Duchamp's ability to solve this problem with the Futurists' failure to do so, he essentially arrives at the same conclusion that Breton had in 1941: that Duchamp directed art towards the subconscious and dreams through his accent on personal ideas. "For this very reason," Kochnitzky concluded, "Duchamp's painting is a full expression of a personality, which the best Cubist picture, confined as it is in the world of intellect, is not. The definite solution to the problem was to be given by Surrealism . . . . Duchamp's works may be considered a step in the right direction."[40] This conclusion is a near-exact repetition of Breton's own. As noted in chapter 1, Breton had written in "Artistic Perspective" in 1941 that Duchamp had used forms similar to those of Futurism to criticize the movement's lack of emphasis on personal need and that the introduction of need into art had led Duchamp "naturally" to Surrealism.

James Thrall Soby contributed "Marcel Duchamp in the Arensberg Collection," a survey of the works owned by Walter Arensberg, the patron who had known the artist since his stays in New York from 1915 to 1918 and who had purchased many of his works. Soby, in 1945 the assistant director of the Museum of Modern Art under Alfred Barr, had published an early history of modern art since Picasso that was little more than a defense of Surrealism and a related movement, Neo-Romanticism.[41] Soby also published monographs on Dali, Tanguy, and the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, Charles Henri Ford's lover. In View, Soby sets Duchamp alongside the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico "at the fountainhead of the most sustained and productive movement in contemporary art . . . Surrealism." Soby calls Duchamp "a true metaphysician of the uprising," a label that carefully defines Duchamp's role as a rebellious intellectual, just as Breton had done in the first section of "Lighthouse of the Bride." Without stating outright that Duchamp was a Surrealist, Soby implies that he contributed to the goals of that movement. In fact this was not the case. Breton's "Surrealism and Painting" of 1928--which discusses de Chirico extensively and Duchamp not at all--suggests that Breton's first encounters with the painters he would later label Surrealist, such as Max Ernst, revealed to him that visual artists had arrived independently at aesthetic goals similar to his own.[42]

Soby then discusses several of Duchamp's early paintings in turn and notes that the artist's main innovation in painting was the addition of visual perspective and illusory space to late Cubism. Soby writes that the artist showed a "reluctance to lose the object completely in the Cubist labyrinth" and that the problem of depicting space was central in all of Duchamp's paintings. Further, Soby states, Duchamp developed an interest in motion from his exposure to Futurist art, although his interest in visual problems rather than social ones allowed him to impel avant-garde art forward in his work more than most Futurist artists.[43] In this Soby, like Kochnitzky, departs hardly at all from Breton's 1941 analysis of Duchamp's relationship to Cubism and Futurism: the artist used the forms of those movements more carefully and critically than other artists. By concentrating on the formal visual qualities of Duchamp's paintings and by reinforcing Breton's conclusions about them, Soby's article reaffirms the Surrealist leader's positioning of the artist as a predecessor of the movement.

Gabrielle Buffet, ex-wife of the Dada artist Francis Picabia, who was one of Duchamp's closest friends, had written "Coeurs volants"["Fluttering Hearts"] for Cahiers d'Art in 1936.[44] The article, reprinted as "Magic Circles" in the Duchamp View, alludes to Duchamp's Dada past, with an emphasis on his rejection of accepted aesthetics in his optical works. Buffet's article contributes to the archival approach of the Duchamp View as a document from nearly a decade before 1945. In fact, the structure of her essay seems closely modeled on "Lighthouse," beginning with an examination of Duchamp's artistic personality before undertaking a short survey of some works and concluding with a discussion of the notes for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.

Buffet examines the motif of the circle Duchamp's œuvre and attempts to tie it to his search for an "anti-masterpiece." In a statement not dissimilar to the thesis of Breton's 1922 Littérature essay on Duchamp, Buffet notes that Duchamp single-handedly relegated Romanticism, Impressionism, Cubism, and later movements to "the category of ethnographical records."[45] Similarly, Breton had written in 1922 that these same movements formed a "tree . . .[that] simply asks to be felled" by an artist such as Duchamp.[46] Buffet also states in "Magic Circles" that Duchamp could "detect and register, with the sensitivity of a seismograph . . . the very first vibrations of human evolution [in art]."[47] Buffet's essay was originally written in 1936, just one year after Breton's initial publication of "Lighthouse of the Bride" in Minotaure. Her analogy of the artist as a seismograph recalls Breton's own carefully chosen epithet of Duchamp as the "most sensitive recording instrument" in "Lighthouse," a similarity that seems too close to be coincidental.

Buffet's statements reinforce Breton's ideas and contribute to the overall characterization of the artist in the Duchamp View as an artist consistently opposed to accepted aesthetics. Her essay emphasizes that Duchamp's personality was "aimed not only against the customary processes of aesthetics, but also against all the admitted notions about daily life . . . ." She cites both Duchamp's interest in the scientific and mechanical and his apparent decision to abandon art in 1920 in favor of playing chess as examples of the lengths Duchamp was willing to go to distance himself from the expected role of the artist. Significantly, Buffet discusses for the first time Duchamp's experiments with optical effects, such as his 1921 Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) and his 1925 Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics). According to Buffet, Duchamp produced art, particularly the optical works and the readymades, that was a willful negation of tradition and the work of his peers.[48] This idea would have fit neatly with Breton's determination--both political and artistic--in the "Prologomena" that artists must "take a public stand against every kind of conformism."[49] In 1945, Buffet's ten-year-old analysis of Duchamp's "willfully scandalous, deceiving, cruel even" art would have legitimized Breton's call for opposition to conformity in the arts.

One essay in the Duchamp View departs somewhat from the relative accord of the rest of the issue. Sidney and Harriet Janis were art collectors in New York; in the 1950's their gallery held an important series of shows of Dada art.[50] Sidney Janis had written the foreword to the 1942 "First Papers" exhibition, in which he explained the basic principles of visual Surrealism.[51] The Janis's View article on Duchamp, "Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist," emphasizes Duchamp as a pure Dada artist, an interpretation that looked towards the "rediscovery" of Duchamp by artists in the 1950's influenced by Dada.[52] The Janises begin by labeling him an "anti-artisian and anti-artist" and the "arch-rebel of 20th century art . . . ." To the Janises, Duchamp was "always an active dadaist . . . he is anarchic in the true sense, in revolt even against himself."[53]Breton had called in 1942 for opposition to any system, and we have seen that several of the View articles described Duchamp as the model of such opposition. Though the Janises' article adds to this view of Duchamp as oppositional, it characterizes his work in a way that the other authors do not--by tying it to the Dada movement.[54] The Janises place a great deal of importance on the readymades, including the Bottle Rack, In Advance of the Broken Arm, With Hidden Noise, and others, interpreting them as kinds of contemporary "mechanomorphic fetishes." This view of these works seems to carefully straddle the line between a Surrealist view of the works as modern talismans endowed with nearly magical qualities and a Dada interpretation of them as conflations of man and machine. It may, however, overemphasize an aesthetic admiration of the works that Duchamp did not intend, despite the Janis's admission that in the works an "esthetic result is not an objective, it is intentionally disregarded."[55]

The Janises break Duchamp's oeuvre into three categories: movement, "machine concept," and irony. These categories, they state, explain Duchamp's works from an anti-art perspective; he uses each in order to subvert expectations and to create new forms. They conclude that Duchamp's "techniques and philosophic ideas . . . [are] aids to the reexamination of esthetic concepts of contemporary culture, and its relation to culture in general." This statement is similar to Breton's vision of Duchamp as subverting art from within. The Janises, though, continue to find the social criticism of the Dada movement in Duchamp's works. They find that his use of irony, as in the Large Glass, "transcends individual doubt and frustration to become a commentary on the universal predicament of man in his world."[56] This social purpose for Duchamp's art is at odds with Breton's view of him as the consummate individual, creating art that refuted standards regardless of the result.

We have seen in this chapter that many of the View contributors based their interpretations of Duchamp upon Breton's own, and that the collective portrait of Duchamp in the issue was one that carefully characterized him as a progenitor of Surrealism. Breton's "Lighthouse of the Bride" had provided the first substantial examination of the Large Glass and clearly influenced thinking about the artist a decade after it was written. More or less as a group, the View authors aided Breton's attempt to co-opt specific aspects of Duchamp's works, such as the supposed Futurism of the Nude Descending a Staircase. In contrast, Frederick Kiesler offered a genuinely individual interpretation of the artist's work to the Duchamp View. His "Les Larves d'Imagie d'Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp" and his relationship with Duchamp over more than a decade are the subjects of the next two chapters.

Chapter 1 Chapter 3

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