Art: Cubism to Cynicism

Probably the most famed cubist painting in the world is Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which now hangs in the Hollywood home of Walter Conrad Arensberg. Last week Los An-geles newshawks discovered the artist on the same premises. France’s Duchamp, 49, was making his first visit to California to see once again the picture that established his reputation.

“It is a piece of imaginative creation,” explained the morose, poker-faced painter pointing to his master work. “If people see a nude in it I don’t object. Anyway I long ago quit painting and took up chess. 1 was becoming a professional painter, and professionalism is always the death of Art. The old masters were professionals, which means that they were one-man factories. Art isn’t made in factories. … I find California a white spot in a gloomy world.”

As told by most critics, the story of Artist Marcel Duchamp is the story of a very brilliant young man with nothing much to say. Born in Rouen, the son of a well-to-do lawyer, he never had to struggle for a living, saw his two older brothers become respected, hard-working artists while he loafed at Julien’s art school.

In 1912 U. S. Artists Arthur B. Davies, Walter Pach and Walt Kuhn were busy organizing the famed Armory Show that was to introduce modern French painting to the U. S. Scouting for canvases, they went to the Duchamp brothers’ studio, found four by youngest brother Marcel. All were cubist abstractions painted in a monotone, but quick-witted Marcel Du-champ gave them intriguing names: The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes; Chess Players; Sad Young Man on a Train; Nude Descending a Staircase.

Year later when the exhibition opened in Manhattan’s 71st Regiment Armory, newspaper critics who were uncertain how to treat Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, leaped at the Nude Descending a Staircase as a safe object of ridicule. Daily stories announced that it had been hung upside down, that it was the work of a madman. The picture was promptly bought by the late San Francisco Art Dealer Frederic C. Torrey who sold it to Author Walter Arensberg.

Marcel Duchamp has hardly painted a picture since. Carrying French cynicism to almost pathological lengths, he entered a shovel in an art exhibition at the Bourgeois Gallery in 1917 with an elaborate essay on its artistic worth, later bought a bird cage, filled it with lumps of marble, called it Why Not Sneeze? and sold it to Painter Katherine Dreier’s sister. Enormously skilful with his fingers, he invented a number of mechanical and optical gadgets. From only one did he make any money. It was a series of colored disks to be spun on the turntable of a phonograph, giving different optical illusions. Chess playing for a while kept Duchamp from thinking too much about his own ineffectualness, but when he began to win tournaments against professionals he gave that up too.

Not long ago this cofounder of Dadaism told an interviewer: “My attitude towards Art is that of an atheist towards religion. I would rather be shot, kill myself or kill someone than paint again.”