Artists: Pop’s Dado

In the 1940s, Picasso was almost every painter’s ghostly father. In the ’50s it was Hans Hofmann who schooled the abstract expressionists. Now, with the ’60s rage for pop, who should turn up to be the grandada of the new generation but Marcel Duchamp, at 77 the century’s most indestructible enfant terrible. As far back as anyone can remember, Duchamp has exulted in controversy. In 1913 his Nude Descending a Staircase, described at the time as “an explosion in a shingle factory,” was the belly blow of Manhattan’s Armory Show. He dabbled in dada in interbellum Paris by drawing a delicate mustache and goatee on a Mona Lisa reproduction. As a surrealist masquerading under the pseudonym of Rrose Selavy (c’est la vie), he exhibited his portrait on a perfume bottle, submitted a urinal titled Fountain to a 1917 salon, where it was hidden behind a screen.

There seemed no end to Duchamp’s antic art. He hung a snow shovel, announced that it was a “readymade” work of art, and whimsically called it In Advance of a Broken Arm. He filled a bird cage with marble sugar lumps and titled it Why Not Sneeze. He made viewers dizzy with swirling patterns driven by electric motors, shocked gallerygoers with a foam-rubber breast labeled Please Touch, brought critics up short by stating that his grand design, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, on which he worked from 1915 to 1923, was intentionally left unfinished. Then, in 1923, in his grandest gesture of all, he announced that he was abandoning art for a worthier occupation: playing chess.

String & Scribbles. Duchamp’s Solomon Grundy career became legend, all the more quixotic because his two brothers, Painter Jacques Villon and Sculptor Duchamp-Villon, went on to make careers in art that placed them near the top of their generation. By comparison, Marcel Duchamp seemed like a naughty boy who ties enigmatic, impudent, possibly lewd messages to balloons, then lets them fly off into the blue yonder. But now, 42 years after he abandoned art, his messages have come down to earth. Far from being gibberish, the scribblings now seem cryptic formulas for the future.

Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase was bought in 1913 for only $350. Now valued at $250,000 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is perhaps one more example of the public catching up with revolutionary art. But its technique of multiple exposures bridges the gap between Muybridge’s galloping horses and Gjon Mili’s stroboscopic studies of dancers. And even Du champ’s greatest folly—dropping pieces of thread on the canvas and varnishing them where they fell—dramatized the importance that chance plays in painting, and seems an extraordinarily lucky hunch to a generation familiar with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.

Boxes & Coffee Grinders. One of Duchamp’s newfound admirers, Pop Painter Jasper Johns, likes to remind scoffers of the cartoon caption, “O.K. So he invented fire—but what did he do after that?” In terms of sheer production, Duchamp is but a pint-sized Prometheus. His lifelong catalogue lists only 208 works. He once miniaturized all of his work that he thought worthwhile, and packaged this portable museum in dispatch cases (200 of them were sold). But as his current exhibition at Manhattan’s Cordier & Ekstrom gallery* gives ample proof, his work struck the sparks that set others afire.

In retrospect, Duchamp’s ready-mades paved the way for the esthetic appreciation of machine-made objects. These off-the-shelf items presage pop artists’ use of beer cans and soup cans as objets d’art. His art in boxes anticipated the present-day boxes of Louise Nevelson and Joseph Cornell. Even his dazzling eye bafflers that spun at 33 r.p.m. are the ancestors of today’s kinetic op art. And critics are far from convinced that all the ideas have been mined from his Bride, etc., the first industrial collage, a 5-ft. by 9⅔-ft. sandwich of windowpane within which snipped tin and copper forms (the suitors) float without overlapping, obediently awaiting the operation of a rotating coffee grinder that can, yet never will, unite them with the abstract floating bride.

Duchamp was clearly cut out to be an intellectual in the realm of art. As a young man, he experimented with painting in the manner of Toulouse-Lautrec, the Fauves, and even the cubists, only to abandon each. He rejected the romantic concept of the artist in smudgy smock and flowing cravat, abhorred the veneration of art given to official “masterpieces,” decided that “oil painting is old hat and should be discarded forever.” As the naturalists of Courbet’s day had proved that anything could be a subject for art, Duchamp set out to prove that art could be made of anything. By taking all kinds of man-and machine-made objects, from bottle dryers to plumbing fixtures, removing them from their context, and exhibiting them as art, he made his point. And having made it, he quit.

”I gave up painting,” says Duchamp today, “because I felt it was too retinal. It didn’t go beyond the eye.” A visitor to the U.S. since 1915 and citizen for the past decade, Duchamp and his second wife, Alexina (“Teeny”), nowadays play once a week at New York’s London Terrace Chess Club. “Breathing is my prime occupation,” he declares with a twinkle. “I am a respirateur.” He is content to be a wry and impish commentator, and from his septuagenarian’s viewpoint, he sees much to cheer.

icniV ad odranoeL. “The proof of good painting comes when intelligence is part of it,” he believes, and adds: “Abstract expressionism was not intellectual at all for me. It is under the yoke of the retinal; I see no grey matter there. Jasper Johns, one of our lights, and Rauschenberg are much more than that; they have intelligence in addition to painting facilities. A technique can be learned, but you can’t learn to have an original imagination.”

Recently a photographer asked Duchamp to sign his autograph book. He explained to the artist that, since those he photographs are his hosts, it was a sort of a guest book in reverse. Duchamp whipped out a pen and, writing backwards, jotted down his signature in a perfect mirror image. For what it is worth, this was also Leonardo da Vinci’s favorite device, in his notebooks, for keeping his secrets to himself.

* Composed of 125 items purchased en masse by Mrs. William Sisler, it will travel this month to Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, then to the Baltimore Museum of Art, Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, and then to London’s Tate Gallery.