Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp

CHAPTER ONE an esoteric French adolescence for Duchamp: symbolist culture and occultism

CHAPTER ONE an esoteric French adolescence for Duchamp: symbolist culture and occultism Born in 1887, by the time a twenty-eight-year-old Marcel Duchamp left France for America in mid-1915, his career as an artist was already distinctively shaped. Before describing culturally pertinent specifics of his biography in chapter 3, we need to examine the distinctive cultural environment in which he absorbed his first perceptions of reality and art. The period-term for this milieu is Symbolism, designating the avant-garde culture reigning in France between 1880 and 1905. This is the true cradle of Modernism. As such, it requires serious consideration, especially since Symbolist thought, as we shall see, was itself profoundly influenced by Occultism in general and (as treated in chapter 2) Alchemy in particular. Such terms, given their quasireligious status, were then often capitalized—so was “Art.” A general appraisal of the evolution of modern culture after the French Revolution would have it that after the “Age of Reason” came the “Age of the Irrational.” The Age of the Irrational is still very much with us, and even though the current appellation refers to a “New Age”—but there is nothing at all new in the Occultists’ “Ancient Wisdom.” In a more specific sense, after the Age of Reason (which probably was only reasonable in certain, aristocratic quarters) came the Industrial Revolution, presenting its own painful paradoxes. As man advanced to greater mastery of the physical world, his always precarious hold upon the more intangible aspects of his relationship with the universe begin to slip. Security—mental, physical, financial and, especially, spiritual—seemed menaced on every side by analytical positivism and the social unrest brought about by the new economic systems. Romanticism , the cultural matrix of the period after 1800, aggravated the situation further. On the one hand, there was a widespread taste for the dramatic and 13 14 ALCHEMIST OF THE AVANT-GARDE unreal vie des rêves, or dream-life. On the other, there was an obsessive concentration upon the self. This emotional individualism typically manifested a heightened, even hysterical insistence upon the overwhelming importance of the individual’s every action. Historians and anthropologists universally accept that in circumstances of anxiety and uncertainty, superstition is likely to make a prominent showing. Its modern advocates, however, will not (or cannot) call it that; rather it is referred to as “esoteric knowledge ,” even “metaphysics.” Nineteenth-century France also produced the idea of the avant-garde. It is appropriate that the term, now standard in English and German, was originally French. It was borrowed from military usage, where it designated a sort of cavalry action, an armed reconnaissance, a perilous and fugitive sweep behind the front lines directly into enemy territory. In the first known statement using “avant-garde” to specifically refer to an advanced, contemporary art, the term designated radical activity operating concurrently in both the social and the artistic realms. This utopian association, to which a clear messianic connection was added, was to become a commonplace in twentieth-century art theory. According to Henri de Saint-Simon (Opinions littéraires, 1825), “It is we artists who will serve you as an avant-garde. . . . The power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas. . . . What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function, and of marching forcefully in the van of all intellectual faculties.”1 Nomen est omen: the larger program impelling the militant-esoteric front of the avant-garde is at once pseudo-militaristic, revolutionary, utopian—and mystical. In 1845, a little-known Fourieriste, Gabriel-Desiré Laverdant, published an equally little-known treatise, De la mission de l’art et du rôle des artistes. Laverdant’s is a precocious proclamation of the initiatory function of art, so transforming it into a prognostic instrument for radical social action leading to moral reform for society at large. According to Laverdant, Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the revealer. Therefore , to know whether art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, where the artist becomes truly of the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is itself going, know what the destiny of the human race actually is. . . . Along with the hymn to happiness [the...