Flotsam and then Some

...As Ms...

...The impression of perversity lying inert, waiting for something to be perverse about, is overwhelming...

...Conspicuous by its absence is any word from Robert Motherwell, whose comments would have been more interesting than anyone else's, especially given his acquaintance with and writings about the artist...

...He exhibited for the first time, at the Salon des Independants, in 1909...

...who donated to him the term "mobile...

...In 1918, he took off to Buenos Aires —he was wont to go out of circulation from time to time, somewhat mysteriously—returning to France in 1919...

...Duchamp began painting on his own at 15 and, upon leaving school, joined his brothers in Paris...

...This was the year he drew a mustache and goatee on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa (one wonders why he funked the original), adding the caption "L.H.O.O.Q...

...The curator throws in a buffa of her own by likening his "preoccupation" to Matisse's with color and light...

...The show—so lovingly compiled and annotated—exudes an air tainted with impotence, evasion, voyeurism, mea-gerness, and slyness...

...Raymond, whose Cubist-influenced sculptures make him for some people the only interesting member of the family, was gassed at the front in 1916...

...Staggering through the mass of memorabilia, trying to glimpse wall labels between the heads of diligent, note-taking students, I was reminded of the old adage that the middle classes are distinguished by their habit of making the trivial seem important and the important trivial...

...Visitors should not, however, make this their sole reason for attending the show: There's only a replica of the door here with nothing behind it—even the holes are simulated—for the original in the Philadelphia Museum of Art is too fragile to move...

...Done in total secrecy, it took from 1946-66 to construct, and was not exhibited until after the artist's death...

...In a 1966 interview with Pierre Cabanne, however, Duchamp said that his father helped all of them financially until his death in 1925...

...The peep-show features a naked girl, her "pubes strangely smooth in contrast to the splendid abundance of her [blond] hair," lying on a bed of twigs and holding up a small lamp...

...Exempted from military service for unspecified reasons of health, Duchamp advanced on New York in 1915...

...Another suggestion was to invent a fictitious biography, having him born in, say, Brooklyn, and continuing with japes of the kind he himself seemed never to tire of-though Woody Allen he was not...

...On Art FLOTSAM AND THEN SOME BY VIVIEN RAYNOR During a conversation with associates about the melancholy duty of reviewing Marcel Duchamp (Museum of Modern Art, through February 24), I was advised that the best course would be to have two pages of this magazine left blank...

...Barely off the boat, he became close friends with the Arensbergs, on whose art collection he was to exercise so great an influence...

...She also records his invention of a category of trivia he called "Infra-mince," for distinctions like that "between the space occupied by a clean, pressed shirt and the same shirt dirty...

...The contention that he gave up art altogether in 1923 has since been disproved by myriad objects, drawings, optical games on film ("Anemic Cinema"), bookjackets, and endless trifles written and drawn...

...One can envision all too vividly how chic he must have been in so culturally "starved" a milieu...

...Especially, one might add, if they're named Duchamp...

...d'Harnoncourt observes: "These function as Duchamp's private method of destroying art [for himself] by replacing good or bad taste in the selection of an object with pure indifference...

...That this unmaster of the 20th century (1887-1968) spent the greater and more successful part of his life in the United States has always seemed appropriate to me, for he was such a marvelous package deal...

...The idea of a great star comes directly from a sort of inflation of small anecdotes...

...Jacques, despite being considered a minor figure, is noteworthy for his beautiful, densely hatched etchings and perhaps too prettily colored paintings...

...In the background is a landscape with lake and waterfall...

...In any case, this is the quality that Duchamp displayed from the beginning, as when he suddenly seemed to have felt that Impressionism was receiving too much attention and so reverted to—or tried to —the Renaissance method of glazing over grisaille...

...By 1913, Duchamp was turning away from conventional forms of expression, having succumbed to the scientific bug then sweeping the Western world like influenza...

...An example of animated Cubism, painted the same month that the Futurist exhibition arrived in Paris, it paralleled the Italian development, yet its overall brownness places the work closer to the parent school...

...These usually deal with subjects in a Cubistic way, but he was also a prime mover in an early minor heresy from Cubism, known as Section d'Or...

...He died of uremia at age 42, one month before the armistice...

...Briefly, the first was begun in 1915 and "brought to a state of incompletion in 1923," only to be cracked accidentally a few years later...

...The second comprises a very large old wooden door with a brick surround...

...In the Cabanne interviews, he was petulantly uninterested in the great men of history, "whether they are named Napoleon, Caesar, or you-name-him...

...That Duchamp's two most important works, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass) and Being Given, are virtually indescribable has not deterred Richard Hamilton and Octavio Paz, respectively, from writing about them for what seems like eternity...

...According to Duchamp's own account, in Paris he was not nearly as involved in the contemporary scene as he was to be in New York...

...The final and heavy-handed joke is Duchamp's triumphant entry into the museums he spent his life attacking, when he wasn't putting down their "optical" contents...

...Not vigorous enough to be called erotic, this accumulation does exhibit a seedy kind of sexuality...

...There he spent less than a year in desultory study at the Academie Julien before reverting to working alone...

...what is behind the door can only be seen through two peepholes...

...Indeed, he still is, even now that he rests in peace in Rouen, with his family, under the legend: "Besides, it's always the others who die...

...Today Duchamp looks so "'20s-brittle" that it is hard to understand the effect he had on so many people, who were themselves brilliantly creative, charming and sensitive...

...Still, Alexander Calder says that he was "always very fond of Marcel...

...By all accounts, he was excellent company and must have had a ball carousing, writing, exhibiting, helping organize shows, playing chess, and generally egging on the native avant-garde...

...But around 1910 he met Apollinaire...

...It amounts to little more than his having known everyone who was anyone, having influenced everyone, and having been adored by everyone...

...The catalogue contains many testimonials, even if some artists appear to have dodged the hommage issue by sending along pictures of their relevant work instead...

...This is nevertheless impossible to summarize in any but the most superficial terms, for Duchamp's life, like his oeuvre, was strangely shapeless...

...With his seminal bicycle wheel mounted on a stool-"something pleasant to have in the studio"—he embarked on a course leading to the Readymades, of which the urinal signed "R...

...The impeccably produced catalogue for the exhibition (341 pp., $25.00), edited by Anne d'Harnon-court and Kynaston McShine, provides among many other things a thorough chronology...

...It included, too, his idea for harnessing "little wasted energies," such as laughter, the fall of tears and the exhalation of tobacco smoke...

...Evidently Willem de Kooning had nothing to add to his 1951 remark that Duchamp is "a one-man movement...

...Although it may sound as if a good time could be had here by all the family, such is not the case, or at least it was not for me...

...His two older brothers, who also became artists, assumed the names Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp Villon, allegedly in response to the distaste of their father, a Dotary, for the profession they had chosen...

...All in all, Duchamp took the jokes and amusing inventions that are standard among the nimbler-witted sophomores of every generation and laid them out in a kind of bird feeder, at which scholars and the avant-garde have been pecking ever since...

...the title notwithstanding, it consists of vaguely mechanical and web-like shapes effected in oil, varnish, wire, foil, and dust on two glass panels, sandwiched between two other glass panels, the whole thing measuring 109V4 inches by 69lA inches...

...a movement for each person and open to everybody...

...Mutt" is without doubt the most well known...

...The way he fiddled with movements until he discovered his own by default must be a great comfort to the inept...

...The editors of the catalogue, whether out of coyness or on the assumption that everybody understands the pun, have either neglected to translate it or buried it so deep in the text that I was unable to locate it...

...a butterfly"—and shortly later formed what was to be a lifelong friendship with Francis Picabia, who went on to become a Dadaist...

...Duchamp," the catalogue notes primly, "has controlled the conditions under which the spectator experiences [the work...

...Uttered in French, the letters form a sentence meaning "She has a hot tail...

...Out of this, of course, came Nude Descending a Staircase, and it appears to have enjoyed as much notoriety in the Paris of 1912 as it did in the New York Armory Show of the following year...

...After drifting through Impressionism, Fauvism and Cezanne, he arrived at the new movement of Cubism...