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112 9 a parisian in america Like so many immigrants before him, Duchamp arrived in America by the narrows in the Port of New York. It was a springlike day, June 15, 1915, and he was met at the dockside by Walter Pach, the young American artist and art dealer who had befriended him in Paris. Amid newspaper reports of the arrival, Pach gave Duchamp quick entrée in the city, which would soon enough see him headlined as the “NudeDescending -a-Staircase Man.”1 Pach worked for the lawyer-collector John Quinn, who would help Duchamp during his first year in Manhattan. For the first few days, Pach put Duchamp up at his apartment, and then took him uptown, in effect, to Duchamp’s destiny. That destiny was the wealthy bohemian collector Walter Arensberg and his wife Louise. A Bostonian transplanted to Manhattan, Arensberg had been baptized into modern art by the Armory Show. During those Armory days in Boston, Pach had met Arensberg and spoke highly of Duchamp . Now, as New Yorkers, the Arensbergs offered their West Sixtyseventh Street address as a place for Duchamp to stay, easy enough as they spent the summer in Connecticut. Both Walter, a poet, and Louise, a musician, had ample inherited wealth, so a life of bohemian leisure and art appreciation suited them well. As fate would have it, Walter was also a chess aficionado. Duchamp’s first few months in New York at their wellappointed duplex were like a dream. After housesitting at one more apartment, Duchamp settled at the nearby Lincoln Arcade Building at 1947 Broadway, where many artists had studios, and now frequented the Arensberg home for their evening parties. At this early stage, Walter did not yet comprehend everything that Duchamp had actually imported to America—his notes, his ideas, his blague, and his Large Glass project. Very soon, though, Arensberg would inaugurate his lifelong support of Duchamp. It began with a deal: he would pay Duchamp’s rent in New York in exchange for his The Large Glass when it was completed. Arensberg had just entered his prime as an art collector. Both his a parisian in america || 113 and Louise’s investments—he was from a Pittsburgh steel-and-banking family and she a Boston textile fortune—were doing well. Arensberg’s conversion to modern art had been total, as was his decision to join the avant-garde. In no time, he became pivotal in the story of the art salons in bohemian Manhattan. During the Armory Show era, the salon that had been dominant was photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s circle, situated at his 291 Gallery (nicknamed for its Fifth Avenue address). It was a tiny center of cutting-edge artists, a group that Picabia had met in 1913, opening the way for him to illustrate covers for Stieglitz’s 291 magazine. The Stieglitz circle was not almighty, however. During the Armory, it began to be overshadowed by the more socially vibrant salon of New York heiress Mabel Dodge, a bohemian divorcee. She had arrived in New York after seven years in Florence, Italy, where she had held open house. She had also seen Gertrude Stein’s social salons in Paris. “I wanted to know everybody,” Dodge said of New York, “everybody wanted to know me. I wanted, in particular, to know the Heads of things, Heads of movements, Heads of Newspapers, Heads of all kinds of groups of people.”2 The Dodge salon produced America’s first literary art colonies. After the seasons of parties in Manhattan, her playwright friends would head for Provincetown , Massachusetts, and later to far-off New Mexico. When the Arensbergs first arrived in Manhattan, they were drawn to a poetry salon instead, a gathering held at the Greenwich Village home of Allen and Louise Norton, small-time publishers of the poetry journal Rogue. There, Arensberg met writers and chess players. Through them, he began to meet practicing artists. By the time Duchamp arrived in Manhattan , the Dodge salon—too elite for Duchamp’s tastes anyway—was unraveling, but Arensberg had launched his own, just a year old and on the rise.3 Arensberg was an unlikely founder, and certainly no revolutionary. He was known for maintaining a rumpled appearance. He had something like an open marriage with Louise, but for his modest behaviors, he never became famous in Manhattan in the manner of the flamboyant Mabel Dodge, an active bisexual who had a celebrated fling with the crusading journalist John...

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