Marcel Duchamp (review)

Most readers of the William Carlos Williams Review will be familiar with the by now infamous story of Williams’s first encounter with the avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp (in which the sophisticate Duchamp scoffs at the “yokel” Williams’s compliment of one of his paintings). Williams explains in his Autobiography that, from this moment on, he was determined to repay Duchamp by one day “laying him cold” with his own to-be-perfected art (A 173). As Henry M. Sayre has noted, however, Williams’s initial skepticism about, even hostility toward, Duchamp’s radical modernism eventually transformed into real admiration. Sayre writes, “This change in attitude reflects [. . .] not just Williams’ growing appreciation for modern art, but also his assimilation of modern art’s poetics—and Duchamp’s in particular” (4–5). I think we may also see that Williams, like Duchamp, was specifically interested in the poetics of the “given.” That is, Duchamp and Williams (despite the initial friction between urbane avant-gardiste and “yokel” pediatrician) share an appreciation for the existence of the pure, unanalyzed “thing.” As Williams writes in the Descent of Winter, “That thing, the vividness which is poetry by itself, makes the poem. There is no need to explain or compare. Make it, and it is a poem. This is modern” (CP1 302).

Questions about the general “poetics” of modernism, the blending of the verbal and visual arts, and the significance of Marcel Duchamp for both modernism and postmodernism are also important issues in Caroline Cros’s new biography, Marcel Duchamp. Her book is the most recent publication in Reaktion Books’ fascinating Critical Lives series (other titles in the series include Franz Kafka by Sander L. Gilman, Michel Foucault by David Macey, Guy Debord by Andy Merrifield, Jean Genet by Stephen Barber, Pablo Picasso by Mary Ann Caws, and the recently published Walter Benjamin by Esther Leslie). The Critical Lives series’ focus on experimental artists/writers thus acts as an avant-garde answer, so to speak, to the more traditional Penguin Lives series. This is an applause-worthy initiative, and Cros’s Marcel Duchamp is an indisputably well-researched, concise, and often enlightening addition to the series.

While Cros’s biography is relatively short compared to Calvin Tomkins’s seminal Duchamp: A Biography, and Alice Goldfarb Marquis’s Marcel Duchamp: Eros, C’est La Vie: A Biography, it also boasts some truly original points of focus. For instance, Cros dedicates an entire chapter to “Collaboration” and therein elucidates Duchamp’s numerous artistic alliances. Cros traces this fondness for partnerships back to Duchamp’s early collaborations with his sister, Suzanne Duchamp. As Cros writes, “[t]heir playful collaboration encapsulated perfectly the camaraderie he generously and faithfully cultivated throughout his life” (70). Cros quotes from a number of Duchamp’s letters to Suzanne, and this correspondence does indeed reveal a charming aesthetic relationship of mutual give-and-take.

Cros also spends an entire chapter discussing Duchamp’s unusual preoccupation with the details of exhibiting (he was a key designer of at least three seminal surrealist exhibitions). Building on Lewis Kachur’s research, she suggests convincingly that such gallery work constitutes another intriguing example of Duchamp’s commitment to art-that-is-not-art. As she explains it, “[B]y wisely agreeing to play the role of ‘idea giver’ or ‘ambience maker,’ Duchamp kept to his strategy of renouncing and waiting, which did not prevent him from expressing himself, however minimally” (106). Duchamp’s interest in gallery/exhibit design is, in many ways, a logical extension of his aesthetic personality. Cros recalls that Duchamp went to great, even obsessive lengths (he ransacked, for example, the stationery shops of Paris in order to find paper that matched the stock of his original notes) to build his museum-in-a-suitcase called Box in a Valise. I love thinking about Duchamp’s inspired whims—spending countless hours puzzling together his fractured Large Glass, or patiently cultivating dust in his studio; or idiosyncratically measuring the shapes of fallen string—and how these...