Artists: Peep Show

Marcel Duchamp lived his life with a touch of magic. He thrived on paradox, and invested contradiction with its own kind of inexplicable logic. His now-legendary Nude Descending a Staircase made him the succes de scandale of Manhattan’s 1913 Armory Show. Duchamp responded by giving up painting. Next, he presented an unlikely series of “readymade” objects, including a snow shovel and a urinal, as artistic creations, and saw that idea take root. Then, having shaken the pillars of traditional esthetics, he abandoned art altogether. In 1923, not yet 40, Duchamp settled down to a life of chess, pipesmoking, reflection—and grew even more famous.

He came out of his self-styled retirement only once, in 1938, to construct a valise containing each of his important works in miniature, really a portable Duchamp museum. He kept a studio, but visitors hunting for some clue that the aging enfant terrible was working again searched in vain. Duchamp died last October, having created little except for occasional graphics, a few objects and the inevitable puns he uttered, in almost 30 years.

Triumphant Denouement. Or so everyone thought. This week the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns the largest collection of Duchamp’s work, reveals that the conniving chess player had prepared one final gambit after all. On view is an entire room designed by Duchamp to accommodate a life-size environmental work on which he had secretly worked over a period of 20 years. He had even planned its installation at the museum, but the work’s existence was known only to his wife and a few friends.

For a man whose art is a twisted trail of surprises and double-entendres, the new piece is a triumphant denouement. It wraps all the themes of his previous works into one immensely charming paradox. The viewer enters a small white-walled room that is reminiscent of a grotto. On the far wall, a graceful brick archway frames a wooden door, silvery with age. Near the center of the door are two small peepholes that open onto a beguiling scene. There, lying on a bed of twigs and leaves is a delicate three-dimensional nude, her legs spread provocatively, her left hand holding aloft a glowing amber lamp, her head obscured save for one golden curl that flutters onto her shoulder. Beyond is a landscape in full autumn splendor, a small pond, a shimmering waterfall.

From a variety of materials, Duchamp created a surprising wedding of illusion and reality. He used pigskin for the girl, as well as a blonde wig, picked up twigs and leaves on forays into the countryside. The landscape is painted, but the waterfall was created by a play of lights. “He wanted to make a direct statement without words,” recalls Duchamp’s widow. “Something you look at and just feel.” The museum permits no photographs; the implications and the richness of innuendo must rest solely in the mind. What has one really seen? Is this a celebration of sex? Art? Life? Is eros, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder? And what of that strange sense of flesh, poignant and vulnerable as a falling leaf, poised against the spectacle of nature?

Critics and connoisseurs will undoubtedly spend years tracing the imagery through earlier works. For the average viewer, the power and the majesty of Duchamp’s last work lies suspended somewhere among its multiple metaphors and in the sage, sure wisdom imparted by an aging iconoclast that with every autumn comes the spring.