Art: Artist Descending to America

U.S. art circles had already read of topflight French painters touring Germany as honored guests (TIME, June 29). They got an equally surprising picture last week of the artist’s life in war-torn France. Painter of the picture, done in the gayest of colors, was famed Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, whose Nude Descending A Staircase was the hottest artistic cause célèbre of its day (1913).*

In Manhattan, after a getaway from France with the help of Hollywood friends, cheerful Duchamp was comfortably installed in Patroness Peggy Guggenheim’s swank apartment. Generalized he: “The artists of Paris are flourishing.” He particularized:

> His brother, Painter Jacques Villon, sold 13 pictures at one exhibition. Germans and Frenchmen alike were buying paintings like hot cakes.

> Parisian art dealers at a sale in Unoccupied France bought a 350,000-franc Renoir, a 250,000-franc Modigliani.

> Unpersecuted, painting and sculpting and making the rounds of the Paris cafés just as usual were such familiar masters as Picasso, Derain, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Braque, Van Dongen.

> Top-flight Abstractionist Hans Arp had his passport to the U.S. ready, his tickets in hand, but postponed his going. He wasn’t sure whether it would be worth while, since he wasn’t guaranteed first-class passage.

Dadaist Duchamp’s account of his own flight sounded like a whimsically eventful Cook’s tour. He said he posed as a cheese merchant, got out of Occupied France without any trouble at all, finally got a U.S. visa in Marseille on the strength of an affidavit from a friend in Hollywood (Author Walter Conrad Arensburg, who bought his Nude Descending).

“From Marseille to Casablanca [Morocco] all our lights were burning,” he reported. “It was beautiful weather and the trip was perfectly darling.” His memory of the trip across the Atlantic this summer on the Portuguese ship: “I have crossed the Atlantic 13 times and this was the best trip of all. It was perfectly delicious. All the lights were on and we had dancing on deck every night. . . .” He said that both the Germans and the British authorized the voyage.

Painter Duchamp, who once entered a shovel in an exhibition with an elaborate essay on its artistic import, plans to get himself a little studio, paint “if I can get a new idea.” Meantime he is working on his “Monograph.” It consists of a collection in cardboard boxes of reproductions of his works since 1910. Eventually he intends to bind the boxes in beautiful leather cases.