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

CHAPTER FOUR Duchamp’s first experiments in esoteric and alchemical art, 1910–1912

CHAPTER FOUR Duchamp’s first experiments in esoteric and alchemical art, 1910–1912 The principal obstacle to linking Marcel Duchamp’s thought and art with Alchemy has been the lack of any substantial historical foundation. Alchemy is just one among various, potentially applicable facets of the Esoteric Tradition, but it can only be modern Occultism that would have proved pertinent to Marcel Duchamp. Mainly, a historical vacuum, the want of a credible cultural context, has proven the most glaring irritant for art historians dealing with prior interpretations of the esoteric as they attempt to explain Duchamp’s career as a whole. Generally absent in such discussions have been detailed analyses of the individual character and historic situation of various, often diverse components of the Esoteric Tradition.1 Also lacking, as Linda Henderson recognizes,2 has been any attempt to relate such seemingly anachronistic thought to the unquestionably progressive, meaning “modern,” ambitions of Duchamp’s avant-garde contemporaries. In the matter of Duchamp studies, the esoteric approach has usually led to an unacceptable mishmash, which William Camfield described with understandable distaste as “a freewheeling interpretation that stirs together aspects of Alchemy , the Cabala, Freud, Tarot cards, and all the gods of structural linguistics , from Ferdinand de Saussure to the present.”3 A more specific irritant has been the absence of a chronological analysis of when and how Marcel Duchamp might have wandered into this tricky subject matter. As shown here through extensive exposition, when (as a tentative première essai) was in April 1910, but an explanation of how becomes more complicated, for the development of Duchamp’s esoteric 97 98 ALCHEMIST OF THE AVANT-GARDE exercises over the next few years did not follow a linear trajectory. In 1913, just as Duchamp had embarked upon an increasingly profound study of his esoteric source materials, there appeared a bibliography in French listing hundreds of publications dealing with “the psychic and occult sciences”; if nothing else, that handy catalogue demonstrates a rich diversity of occult diversions available in France—including Alchemy, the Cabala, Tarot cards, as well as Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy—to anyone with an interest in such matters at that time.4 Even though the Esoteric Tradition embodies a largely indigestible intellectual mishmash, it does represent the essential ideological context for another historical artifact that has been posited (and rudely dismissed) in connection with Duchamp’s art and thought: Hermeticism. Hermeticism is nothing new within the Esoteric Tradition; the oldest of its texts, dealing with the physical practices of Alchemy, date back to the Hellenistic era.5 A complementary problem in much discourse about the Esoteric Tradition, especially that produced by its true believers, is a general lack of methodologically sound historical analyses of its more significant constituent parts. The traditionally trained historian would prefer that discussions of esoterica, which are often mere celebrations, would instead coherently examine the historically useful issues of moments of appearance, florescence, and decay, and the structural situation of esoteric expression in a given time and place. Besides being internally complex, the Esoteric Tradition is dynamic in the historical sense; to use its own terminology, it “evolves.” Such historical research would also benefit in discussions of Hermeticism and Alchemy, for which there is evidence of substantial differences between the ancient and modern varieties. Also typically omitted in interpretive studies of our particular artist have been detailed analyses of, for instance, the crucial historical role played by both the Esoteric Tradition and scientific, (materialist) innovation within the French Symbolist milieu of Duchamp’s youth. Without solid groundings in such broader cultural problematics, the esoteric interpretations applied to Duchamp have admittedly lacked a credible foundation in historical and documentable fact, and so have typically been rejected out of hand. Hopefully , this investigation will help fill these significant historiographic lacunae. It seems relatively easy to document the nature of, and even to pinpoint specific published sources for Duchamp’s first overt flirtation with the themes and iconography of the Esoteric Tradition. The key work demonstrating an early affinity for the Occult by Marcel Duchamp, then aged twentytwo , is his Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel6 (fig. 2). The canvas is known to have been executed in Neuilly in April 1910, at which time Raymond Dumouchel was a recently graduated medical student and one of Marcel’s oldest friends; they had known one another since their school days in the Lycée Corneille, where they first met in 1897. Rendered in the then...