Marcel Duchamp ~ Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F, 1960

Voice from the couch, "I went down to the Portland Art Museum and saw the Duchamp."
Me, "What did you think?"
Voice from the couch, "Liked it. I could actually see the images. The computer screen just didn't do it for me."
Me, "True."
Voice from the couch, "We saw one of those pieces at MoMA last year. The color chart one, upper right hand corner"
Me, "Color Chart? I guess I'll have to go back to the museum. I can't see it."

Back to the museum I went and found the Tu m' originally created in 1918 and now packaged in its reproduced form in the Boite-en-valise. Check out the upper right hand corner the next time you're at the museum. Or visit the Museum of Modern Art website and you'll find the video below. Watch it here (you'll hear one of MoMA's curators) or watch it there (and see many other videos).

Voice from the couch, "Be sure to tell them the size of the original." Good point. The original of Tu m' is 27 1/2 x 119 5/16 in. Quick math puts it at about 3 ft by 10 ft. When we saw this at MoMA, the bicycle wheel and the hat rack loomed above us with the color swatches projecting surreally from the canvas. And how could we forget the bottle brush, three safety pins, and one bolt.

Marcel Duchamp ~ Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F - Coffee Mill and Maria Martins

While "unpacking" Marcel Duchamp's Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F, 1960 (figuratively, of course) I read about his original journey out of France with all of the copies of his work that would later go into the various issues of the Boite – the original limited edition, and the subsequent Series. The Portland Art Museum's is labelled as part of Series F. The internet and legend has it that Duchamp had decided to return from France to the United States because of the advancing Germans in 1941. Duchamp is said to have posed as a cheese merchant and claimed the reproductions in his suitcase to be cheese, in order to smuggle his works through German checkpoints. If you look at Duchamp's life and work from the metaphor of chess that he loved so much, the whole idea of the Boites is like a series of chess moves – idea to have a miniature museum of his work, create reproductions, make announcement of the deluxe edition in 1940, decide to leave Europe, plan and execute removal of the "museum pieces", produce first edition and then subsequent ones with additional reproductions. It's quite a story and the best account I've found so far can be found by clicking here. It's a great read and you'll find out that Series F was put together by none other than Duchamp's stepdaughter, Jacqueline Monnier in Paris. So this piece is quite the world traveler.

You may wonder what this has to do with today's lead image of Duchamp's Coffee Mill (1911). I became fascinated with it when I saw it in the Boite (expanded version) and its relationship to Maria Martins. It turns out that at one point Maria Martins owned the original of this painting as part of her art collection. Martins was a world-renowned sculptor who during the forties was having an affair with Marcel Duchamp. They were artistic soul mates as well as lovers at the same time as she was married to the Brazilian Ambassador to this country. At some point their affair ended. They continued to correspond as artists and friends. That relationship was so strong that Duchamp made it a point that important pieces of his work were hers. The Coffee Mill was one of those pieces. Originally Duchamp painted it for his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon to hang in his kitchen. The Coffee Mill in the Boite is a pochoir reproduction that Duchamp favored for its accuracy. Perhaps one day, the display at the Portland Art Museum will change and the Coffee Mill will be shown so we won't have to just view it as a speck in the expanded version above. You could of course travel to the Tate in London to see the original that once hung in Raymond's kitchen and was owned by Maria Martins (photo on left). To view the Portland Art Museum's display as you'd see it today click here.

Marcel Duchamp ~ Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F, Rrose Selavy but no Chess

The image above is the expanded view of what I had seen yesterday of Marcel Duchamp's Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F, 1960 at the Portland Art Museum. PAM has consolidated the box so that it looks more like the image on the left. After writing the post on Saturday about Duchamp's affection for chess (Saturday seems like such a short time ago), I decided to go venture down to PAM and see if I could see any chess images in the Boite. Alas, that wasn't to be. There are any number of images - just about what you see on the left but not all of what is shown above. Not one of them has a chess theme. However, there is at least one piece of art not represented in either of these images. On the left hand hinged cover and on the side we can't see is Duchamp's Nude Descending the Staircase. The original of that piece was shown here at the Portland Art Museum back in 1913 just after it was exhibited in the Armory Show. You can read more about that here at Fifty Two Pieces, just click this link. Back to the Boite. What I did discover that intrigued me were the two pieces by Rrose Selavy. Rose, as you'll recall from earlier posts at Fifty Two Pieces was Marcel Duchamp's feminine alter ego. His other self was birthed in 1921 and soon started to create art work of her own.

First up is Why Not Sneeze Rrose Selavy? This piece either carries the attribution Rrose Selavy or Marcel Duchamp, depending upon which book, website, museum is being quoted. In either case, Duchamp or Selavy created this Readymade of 152 marble cubes in the form of sugar cubes with thermometer and cuttlefishbone in a birdcage. Unless you're at the museum you'll probably not see the tiny three dimensional cut-out of this piece. It sits almost like a small crown inside the red Boite itself. Click on the enlarged expanded version of the Boite above and you might make it out. It's mostly grays and not the wonderful representation to the left.

Selavy was also represented with the piece La Bagarre d'Austerlitz, The best view of this is to look at the expanded version, second row from the bottom, far right hand image. Hmmph, Voice from the Couch is saying. How can anyone possibly see that? He's right. You'll all need to visit the Portland Art Museum or the closest museum that has a Boite on display and examine it closely. Each series is substantially the same, but the contents of the series vary from series to series. The Portland Art Museum has Series F.

Rrose Selavy, Duchamp's alter ego, kept him busy from the moment she was created in 1921. If she wasn't busy making art, she was having her photo taken or image painted. Duchamp spent a great deal of time preparing himself for these photo shoots as well as any time he ventured out into the world as Rrose. Man Ray took a number of portraits of Duchamp and of Rrose Selavy. Here's one of Rrose and then a portrait done by Carlo Mariani in 1990 from Ray's image. Duchamp would certainly love the visuals here. Mariani portrays Duchamp as the feminine Selavy but retains more of his masculine features. And then Mariani put in the additional tweak of Duchamp/Selavy in a da Vinci Mona Lisa pose with the added starter of the mustache and goatee from L.H.O.O.Q. (also in PAM's Boite).

Chess and Conversation

My dad taught all of his children to play Chess when we were very young. We played each other and we played him, many, many times. He rarely went out, but when he did it was over to Dubersich's house for a game of Chess. One game took hours as they were rightly matched.
I know how to play Chess, but I never do. My last wonderful Chess moment happened five or six years ago when I challenged a good friend's beau to a match. This is the kind of guy that whips out a complete New York Times crossword in fifteen minutes, the kinda guy who can spend twenty minutes silently petting the cat and half an hour at a garage sale looking at records, but can't handle five minutes of small talk, and doesn't think he should have to. I didn't think I stood a chance against him but knew I had to win. He didn't know I had it in me, which worked to my advantage, I kicked his ass. It felt sweet like victory should.
Chess is not an easy game to play or win which is why everyone should know the game, it's a lot like life.
Duchamps suitcases are a lot like life too. Boxes full of compartments like little houses full of rooms, each one stuffed with reproductions of other things, toilets, art, vases all in miniature. The boxes are carefully constructed, like little houses, one after the other.
I can imagine Duchamp and his wife, the two of them cutting out the pieces. Maybe they went back and forth in conversation the way players at chess go back and forth taking turns harrassing the other with a move well played, like words well spoken. In Chess it is discouraging to your opponent both your good strategy and your thoughtless move. As in conversation, where both parties rely on thoughtful participation, if one strays down a random course unrelating she may leave the build up of the topic and the conversation will likely end. In Chess if you don't pay attention or think you have something completely different in mind, you may fall to your death in one false move.
In both cases unless the other player is made to follow his opponent's idea or is able to pull him back to his own course, the game will end. The better conversation and the better Chess game are almost always those that last longer. In either case, to make this work, each participant must always be thinking simultaneously about what is happening at that very moment and the thing which he is surely missing and attempt to find it before it finds him. And a good player understands where it is she is going without knowing all the moves that will get her there until she has to make them. She must make them at just the right moment.
The longer the conversation, the longer the Chess game, the longer the trip. We all agree we would like to have the longest trip here as possible, as long as it's a good one. Duchamp clearly agrees, as each valise takes a while to unpack.

Marcel Duchamp ~ Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F, seeking chess & John Cage

Marcel Duchamp has made previous appearances here at Fifty Two Pieces. Several weeks ago, I posted two of Florine Stettheimer's portraits of Duchamp. One included reference to his penchant for chess and the other what I see as a saint-like portrayal. It turns out in reading up on Duchamp this week that his brother taught him to play the game when he was eleven and living in France. Chess continued to be part of the rest of his life – so much so that in 1923 he reportedly gave up art to become a chess master and win the French Chess Championship - he did win a number of tournaments, just not that one. Although he didn't stop making art, chess did dominate his life between the years of 1923 and 1933. In an effort to bring about wider appreciation of the game, he curated a number of art shows dedicated to chess, included chess in his art and even made a chess board.

It's been said there are no coincidences in life. Recently I listened to an NPR podcast of Terry Gross interviewing John Cage. Who does Cage mention during the course of 20 minutes – none other than Marcel Duchamp. Cage and Duchamp were friends and chess was a focus of many of their visits. Many times Cage only played with Duchamp's wife Teeny because he, Cage, played so poorly. Cage recounts that sometimes Duchamp would nap while watching the two play. Other times he would be exasperated with Cage and his game. When Duchamp did agree to play, he would spot Cage a Knight (nice). In any case, Duchamp agreed to meet Cage for a performance of Reunion in Toronto in 1968. The two men played chess on a glass board with special sound hookups. The idea of the composition was to "bring together many sound systems, each activated by a different composer, like a coming together of people (Reunion)." Performed once, it was photographed by Shigeko Kubota who later issued a video with sound and her photographs of the event.


Since chess was such a major portion of Duchamp's life, I'm heading to the museum to see if there are any chess images visible in the Boite-en-valise as it's currently displayed at the Portland Art Museum.


And to end this post, here's my current favorite image of Duchamp.

Florine Stettheimer ~ Contemporary of Duchamp, O'Keeffe and Stein

Those brown eyes of Marcel Duchamp will pierce right through you and find your true identity, resistance is futile. Florine Stettheimer may not have met with financial rewards from her artistic work during her lifetime but artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Demuth all thought highly of her work. And Gertrude Stein benefitted from the success of Virgil Thomson's production of Four Saints and Three Acts based on Stein's libretto. Key to that success was Stettheimer unique set design.

Duchamp

Duchamp spent considerable time with Florine and her two sisters attending their Salon and giving them French lessons when he first arrived in America during World War I. The sharing of ideas during those years of friendship makes it easy to understand his affinity for Florine's symbol filled paintings such as the Cathedral series and her many portraits. Duchamp organized the 1946 retrospective of Stettheimer's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

O'Keeffe

Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe also gathered at the Stettheimer apartment. “She put into visible form in her own way, something that they all were, a way of life that is going and cannot happen again, something that has been alive in our city.” In 1938, Stettheimer and O'Keefe were the only women artists whose work was included in the exhibition of American art organized by the Museum of Modern Art to travel to the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. Stettheimer portrayal of Stieglitz has O'Keeffe appearing out of the background. It hangs in Nashville so if you're ever there you'll be able to see it in all of the glory of Stettheimer's color palette.

Stein
Stettheimer received much critical acclaim in 1934 for her work as set designer on Virgil Thomson's opera of Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts. Stettheimer utilized cellophane extensively in the scenery and costume design. Unlike most designers, Stettheimer created little figures to show how the costumes should be designed. This little maquette reflects the all black cast Thomson used to portray the European saints. It was after the success of Four Saints that Gertrude Stein returned to America for her lecture tour. Thomson's opera with Stettheimer's sets played a major role in Stein's level of celebrity.

Florine Stettheimer ~ Portrait of Myself

Florine Stettheimer really didn't like to have photos taken of her. So unlike her sisters Ettie (writer) and Carrie (crafter of dollhouses), there are not many photographic images of her available. To make up for that though, Florine did include herself in many of her paintings and did at least one self-portrait – Portrait of Myself, today's lead image. Florine lived a life of privilege. She and her sisters spent much of their lives in Manhattan and frequently visited Europe where Florine studied with various artists and schools. Her only solo exhibition in 1916 was somewhat of a disappointment to her so she chose to exhibit only occasionally in group shows after that. As a result not many were aware of her work while she was alive and after her death it has only been recently that she is being recognized at major museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art usually has an entire gallery wall devoted to her work. And of course, the Portland Art Museum has her Portrait of My Teacher. Below are photos of Florine (one of the very few in existence) and one of each of her two sisters.

Florine Stettheimer, ~ 1920

Ettie Stettheimer, 1932

Carrie Stettheimer, 1932

The three sisters entertained on a grand scale having parties and afternoon salons in their Manhattan apartment. Some of their well known friends were Carl Van Vechten, Francis Picabia, Leo Stein, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley. Stettheimer painted a number of their portraits including these two of Marcel Duchamp and Carl Van Vechten.
Marcel Duchamp, 1923

Carl Van Vechten, 1922
Most of us are more familiar with Duchamp than we are with Van Vechten. Picking out the symbols she used in Duchamp's portrait, I found reference to his cultural allegiances to both the United States and France and his love of chess. The woman in that painting it turns out isn't Stettheimer but his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. And of course the clock most probably is symbolizing his fascination with time and space.

Anna Crocker ~ An Homage and More Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is as much a signature piece for Marcel Duchamp as it is for Anna B. Crocker. Duchamp shocked the New York art world with it in early 1913 and Crocker did the same in November 1913 when she exhibited it at the Portland Art Museum. Almost like stop motion photography the nude traverses the painting leaving the viewer with a sense of how ephemeral time can be, an irreversible forward movement – unless of course you're John McCracken and time travel. Here's a piece of ekphrasis poetry in honor of the timeless nude. Following it is a Youtube video about Anna Crocker.

Nude Descending a Staircase by X. J. Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

Poem By Chad Sweeney, Fellow Duchamp Lover

The Sentence

The bones of Marcel Duchamp
laid end to end
reach all the way

to the bottom of this hill
where a little slab of concrete
bridges one

obscurity to another
and Mr. Duchamp seems pleased
the way I've places his jaw

in relation to the atlas
his wisdom teeth
commanding long sharp shadows

though it's noon
(the midnight of day)
and we've nowhere to go

and the oblique syntax of bones
repeats its inquiry
in the language of the world

This poem was published in the Best American Poetry 2008, chosen by guest editor Charles Wright. Chad Sweeney said "I wrote 'The Sentence' while staring at a bird marsh. I've always been intested in the communication between text and the plastic arts, and this image rippled mysteriously across the marsh- the bones of Marcel Duchamp stretched into a long sentence, as both lingual structure and sculpture, one of Duchamp's readymades pieced together from found objects. The drama takes place at noon, motionless noon crouched into negative capability, when the world is worlding, and forms pulse in a combination of protean grammar. Several months later I wrote about the bird marsh while staring at a junk yard."
If at first I thought I should draw a more complete correlation between this poem, and Anna Crocker, Sweeney tells me it doesn't need to be so. The Portland Art Museum has one of Duchamp's boxes, complete with miniature plastic and glass objects placed to signify his readymades. If ever you want to see one up close, while you stand under a Calder mobile, and read your Chad Sweeney.

Anna B. Crocker ~ Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase

Anna Belle Crocker was responsible for many good things happening at the Portland Art Museum. From the time when her tenure began in 1909 until she retired in 1936, she worked relentlessly on behalf of the Museum. Crocker had the foresight to bring national touring exhibits to the museum. Portlanders were exposed to the new avant garde art from Europe shortly after the 1913 Armory Show rocked the art world when it opened in New York. Because of her efforts, the Portland Art Museum mounted an exhibition in late November, 1913 that had Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 as its centerpiece. At that November show, Portlanders were able to see original prints and reproductions of the art works of Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso, some of the same artists that had been part of the infamous Armory Show. Crocker augmented Portland's exhibition with lectures by Frederic Torrey, the famous art historian and San Francisco gallery owner. Both Crocker and Torrey hoped to bridge these modernists with their artistic predecessors. That didn't completely work though. Both Portland newspapers ran less than favorable headlines. The Oregonian ran a classic for its critic's review: "'Picture' Resembles Wrecked Shingle Mill."

Portlanders did come and see this new art though. Rumor has it that businessmen would make daily visits to the museum to see Duchamp's scandalous piece of art. For those of you interested in curatorial decisions, Crocker hung Nude Descending a Staircase with a piece of blue cloth behind it. Some accounts say that the blue was dull, others remember it as turquoise. In either case, Crocker wanted the painting to stand out from the cream colored walls. For all of her forward thinking though she was quite proper in what she saw as the role of the museum and was said to be horrified when her successor had invited the local garden club to have their annual flower show in the sculpture garden just off the lobby of the museum. What would she think of the Portland Art Museum today? My take on Anna Crocker is that she probably would have not flinched at the Colescotts currently hanging just off the main lobby and that the weddings and other events would be just fine as long as they remained in the Grand Ballroom of the Mark Building. She was one beautiful, smart, strong woman. There are not enough adjectives to describe Anna Belle Crocker.