Out of Balance

Going over my copy of Duchamp by Calvin Tomkins recently I came across something peculiar: A reference and attendant commentary by Tomkins to an episode in Duchamp’s life that struck me as singularly obtuse. Tomkins’ account is found on p. 306 of the hardcover edition in the context of Duchamp’s restoration of the Large Glass, which was badly damaged in transport from an exhibition: “A young artist-friend of Katherine Dreier’s named Daniel MacMorris, who had a studio near hers in the Carnegie Hall building, had asked Duchamp to sit for a portrait. Decamp did so during the two days he spent in New York, before his train left on August 2 [1936], and in the process he also obliged the younger artist by answering a number of questions about Nude Descending a Staircase. The famous Nude, Duchamp said, was not really a painting but ‘an organization of time and space through the abstract expression of motion.’ As he went on to explain, ‘A painting is necessarily a juxtaposition pf two or more colors on a surface. I purposely restricted the Nude to wood colorings so that the question of painting, per se, might not be raised.’ That much was consistent with Duchamp’s present thinking, although not, perhaps, with his intentions at the time he painted the picture in 1912. The real stopper came a little further on in the interview (which found its way into print soon afterward). ‘When the vision of the Nude flashed upon me,’ Duchamp is quoted as saying, ‘I knew it would break forever the enslaving chains of naturalism.’ Enslaving chains? Duchamp never talked that way, and the high-flown rhetoric makes us wonder how much of the interview is really in his own words. He had also told MacMorris (according to MacMorris) that he himself had become ‘only a shadowy figure behind the reality of that painting’–a plight that MacMorris tried to remedy by including a shadowy detail of the Nude in the background of his assertively naturalistic portrait of Duchamp.’”

Duchamp “never talked that way”, Tomkins says. And yet, in another interview, that Duchamp gave to Pierre Cabanne late in life, Duchamp referred to this same interview with MacMorris. Page 30 of the English-language translation of Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, titled Interviews with Marcel Duchamp: “Cabanne: You declared to Katherine Dreier that, when the vision of the Nude Descending a Staircase came to you, you understood that it was ‘breaking the chains of naturalism forever…’ Duchamp: Yes. That was what one said in 1945. I was explaining that, when you wanted to show an airplane in flight, you didn’t paint a still life. The movement of form in time inevitably ushered us into geometry and mathematics. ‘”

(Even though Cabanne apparently misidentifies just who Duchamp in the later interview was talking with in the earlier interview, we can be assured that this is the same interview. We have here reasonable proof that Duchamp did say something essentially like what appeared in the MacMorris interview. And the essential idea is this: That Duchamp understood and accepted that The Nude Descending a Staircase broke the chains of Naturalism forever. Whether this was said in 1936 or 1945, or to Katherine Dreier or or Daniel MacMorris is not an important point.)

Breaking the chains of Naturalism forever. I go into some detail here to demonstrate how important this was to Duchamp and the entire branch of Modernism which finds itself on the anti-naturalist side of the Naturalism/anti-Naturalism polemic. Duchamp apparently did talk in such “high-flown” terms when it was proper to do so. Is Tomkins unaware of the passage I cited in the Pierre Cabanne interviews? And that sentence! “With the Nude Descending a Staircase, the chains of Naturalism were broken forever.” Think on what this means. With a wave of the hand, Duchamp puts an end to an entire conceptual world, the world of Comtean Positivism, Socialist realism, Emile Zola and the entire Ruskinian dimension of art and philosophy, opening the doors wide to radical subjectivism and the Empire of the Self. The implications of this gesture still to be played out a hundred and 13 years after the appearance of the Nude.