One—
Fame:
A Prologue

Marcel Duchamp never shied away from fame, but when it first came he had it thrust upon him. Or rather, fame thrust itself on his name, for he himself was an ocean away. The place was New York, the time 1913, when four of his paintings were exhibited in the so-called Armory Show (officially The International Exhibition of Modern Art), organized by a group of American artists to seek a wider audience for the avant-garde. The show included work by nearly three hundred painters and sculptors, among whom it is easy to list most of the giants of modern art. Many attracted notice, and some sold well, but Duchamp was the person on whom the light of public attention fell most intensely. The reason had partly to do with how his pictures looked, but also with the title he gave one of them: Nude Descending a Staircase . The suggestion that an unclothed body might be shown not in some classical pose but engaged in an everyday activity excited people's curiosity.

What viewers saw once they stood before the picture shocked some and puzzled or disappointed others. Finding a human form in Duchamp's Nude (Plate 1) is not hard if we think the title tells us to look for one, but without the name the subject might be many other things. Inspired partly by multiple-exposure photographs, the painting

shows a body in a succession of diagonally descending positions, but the figure's motion has the effect of blurring or dissolving most of its organic features, which appear only as a series of lines, planes, and volumes. A determined spectator can make out head, shoulders, torso, hips, and legs, but geometrically abstracted, so that the body sometimes seems covered despite the titular nudity: a short round skirt over the hips? a straight one stretched out by the moving legs? We seem to glimpse a kind of puppetlike wooden doll—or is it a person in armor, its head invisible inside a helmet? There is little to satisfy the expectation, called up by the title's appeal to centuries of art history, that the nude is a recognizable—in most people's expectation female—human being.

Visitors to the Armory Show were fascinated by the picture; newspaper accounts reported that a crowd always surrounded it, making a good view hard to get. Few people found the work attractive or pleasing in an ordinary way; most who came were drawn by the mystery of how the title was related to the image. Some hastened to solve that puzzle in their own way, replacing Duchamp's label with names of their own. Punning viewers rechristened it "Food Descending a Staircase" or "The Rude ..." (the second title graced a cartoon of commuters hastening down subway stairs during rush hour), while more adventuresome ones saw in it "a lot of disused golf clubs and bags," "an assortment of half-made leather saddles," "an elevated railroad stairway in ruins after an earthquake," an "orderly heap of broken violins," or—the description that seems to have made people laugh the most—"an explosion in a shingle factory." It might not be amiss for Americans (and others) unhappy about the way taste has been manipulated by art hucksters since the days of the Armory Show to remember the rough bravery of these exhibition-goers of 1913, quick to seize the chance to talk back.

But Duchamp was not merely jibed at; he was celebrated too, and made famous. That all four of his pictures were sold, for prices that seem quaint now but were generous at the time ($324 for the Nude ), is not the main testimony to this, although it should not be forgotten either.^[1] His success encouraged him to come to New York in 1915, where he met patrons and sponsors whose support would help sustain

him for the rest of his life, above all Walter Arensberg (whose collection of Duchamp's works forms the nucleus of the large group now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Soon after he arrived, interviews and articles about him appeared in papers in New York and Boston (where the Armory Show traveled after closing in New York), causing him to recall later on, "When I arrived in New York, I realized that I wasn't a stranger at all." Wherever he went people perked up: "Oh! Are you the one who did that painting?" He was treated with curiosity, sometimes with bemusement or suspicion, but also with respect.^[2]

Duchamp's reception in New York changed his life. Until that moment he had appeared as an aspiring young painter like many another, and a pretty obscure one at that. He had exhibited some pictures in Paris and been referred to in a small book, On Cubism , by two painterfriends, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger; in 1913 the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire mentioned him as a promising youngster, but one who still had fairly little to his credit. His stature was not increased when he withdrew the Nude from the Paris Salon des Indépendants in March of 1912 because it displeased the authors of On Cubism , who were the show's organizers, and the picture attracted little notice when it was shown in Barcelona a few months afterward or, finally, in Paris in October.

Which of Duchamp's later activities he would have carried out in the same way without his trip to America it is not possible to say. But it was in New York that he would labor over-and never complete-the other work whose title, along with the Nude , has passed into the general lexicon of modern culture, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même )-also known as the Large Glass, from the material on which it was painted and from its size, over nine feet tall and almost six feet wide. There too he would coin the term "readymade" to describe the ordinary, often machinemade objects he began to offer as his work, taking over the word-always in English-from the American clothing industry, and sending the most notorious of them, an ordinary porcelain urinal, mounted on its side and dubbed Fountain , to an art exhibit in 1917. It was following his early stays in New York as well that Duchamp's persona took on the

feature which many of his admirers found the most mysterious and alluring of all, that of the artist who had the courage and originality to abandon art making for what seemed a life of calm indifference enlivened by one great passion only—chess.

The fame that struck Duchamp in 1913 would have much to do with this remarkable career. Already it was fame of a peculiar—and a peculiarly revealing—kind. In his early days in America he sometimes thought that only his picture was famous, whereas he as a person had disappeared behind it, "obscured ... squashed by the Nude ."^[3] And yet people were aware that the painting had a maker, and that Duchamp was he. What he meant was that those who knew him as the painter of Nude Descending a Staircase often knew nothing else about him, nothing of his origins or his personal history, his aims as an artist, or his plans for the future. He was not so much hidden by his work as depersonalized by it, suffused in a glow that was an aura of incomprehension. To put it another way, what made Duchamp feel that anonymity was the paradoxical price of the fame bestowed on him in 1913 was not exactly that he had been obscured by his picture, but that artist and picture together had been taken up into the public's collective representation of "modern art."

What did modern art mean to those for whom a disembodied "Duchamp" was its symbol? We already know one answer, the vague sexual suggestiveness conveyed by his title. For centuries, Western painting had given special attention to the nude—most often female—body, raising nudity out of the sphere of sensuality and into that of the ideal through the body's power to stand for formal perfection. But the erotic component had sometimes peeked out through the veil of highmindedness, as we can see in a picture like Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus , shown in 1863, the same year as a more famous nude, Edouard Manet's Olympia (Figs. 1, 2). Manet, a master of irony, exploited the ambiguity between the exalted nude and the more questionable naked female to dramatize the widening gap between the traditional forms of painting and the conditions of modern life. By the 1890s modernists like the Viennese Gustav Klimt were playing games with the old iconography that made nudity a generalized figure of unadorned truth, Nuda veritas ; by emphasizing previously tabu bodily features such as

Figure 1.
Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus (1863)

Figure 2.
Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863)

pubic hair, Klimt called attention to the explicitly sexual truths previously hidden by the adornments of artistic tradition, causing a recent historian to dub one of his images Vera nuditas .^[4] Duchamp's Nude was bound to evoke ambiguities of this sort for those who came to peer at it, whether or not they knew any specifics of modern art's transactions with nudity, for the public looked upon artists' special access to nude bodies with a complex of jealousy and suspicion, locating it in a field of equivocation. To critics of the Armory Show, even techniques that dematerialized the body so that it seemed to have little to do with sexuality showed that modern artists were bearers of immorality and decadence.^[5]

This play between sublimation and erotic liberation bordered on a second feature of what Duchamp and his picture symbolized in 1913: modern art's aggressive rejection of traditional aesthetic goals and expectations. To introduce the art that had declared its independence from tradition was what the Armory Show was all about. The American public felt the impact of aesthetic revolution with a vengeance, because the exhibition confronted it at a single blow with the series of movements and styles that had appeared one by one in Europe over the past half-century: impressionism, postimpressionism, symbolism, fauvism, cubism. (No genuinely futurist work was shown, although the term was often applied in the press, perhaps because some early publicity had mentioned the movement; dada and surrealism were still to come.) Duchamp's canvas, showing the influence of both cubism and futurism (but in a peculiar and personal way), was not as distant from the realistic representation that popular taste looked for as some other entries in the show, but the very uncertainty about whether it was meant to depict something identifiable or not called up the opposition between representation and its abandonment that had been developing little by little since the time of the impressionists and that continued to create some tense relations between artists and the public in the years before World War I. According to Clement Greenberg, what made the Nude scandalous was that, more than other entries, it "gave people enough clues to permit them to watch themselves being startled by the 'new.'"^[6] It was this tension that the public moved in to identify and relieve by proposing new titles for the picture. Several of these, notably

the popular "an explosion in a shingle factory," managed to convey both the sense of disruption, even violence, that the new aesthetic bore, and the links modern art was trying to establish with ordinary objects of everyday life and use. Duchamp would soon deepen and exploit these quotidian connections through his "readymades."

The association the public made between the picture and an explosion or (as another proposed title had it) an earthquake suggests something else about the modernism for which Duchamp stood: it seemed to be possessed of a free-floating contestatory energy whose precise targets and objectives were hard to pin down. Many members of the public associated the new art with political radicalism, anarchist and revolutionary, decrying it as an attack on the morality and stability of established social life. Others, however, were more troubled by the possibility that they were being made the butt of some elaborate practical joke, a fear that helped to inspire the substitute titles as a way of talking back. The latter of these reactions may have been especially free in the United States, where tradition had less power than in Europe to protect high culture from the skepticism of practical people, but in fact satire and laughter had been a mutual response of European artists and the public to each other for over half a century. Faced with the aggressive realism of Courbet in the 1850s and the bold experiments of the impressionists in the next decades, French newspaper cartoonists had responded to what seemed the self-importance and pretension of the new painting with irreverent pastiches (of Manet, for instance: see Fig. 3). Artists for their part had long enjoyed playing jokes on unsuspecting bourgeois, developing an elaborate practice of pretense and foolery summed up in the French term blague . Already in the 1860s the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, novelists and critics, had claimed to see in blague the spirit of those modern artists whose work was partly inspired by a taste for novelty and a disdain for respectable people. The image of Duchamp the practical joker and clown is one he would later cultivate with gusto himself, and it has appealed to many of his admirers, for whom his greatest achievement was to recast the figure of the artist as above all a subverter of the old pieties of art.

But in 1913 the fear that Duchamp was merely practicing blague was mixed with the different worry that he possessed some genuine entry

Figure 3.
"Cham," La Naissance du petit ébéniste (1865)

into a world beyond the ordinary, an access denied to nonartists. The coexistence of these two attitudes in many members of the public, despite the tension between them, has been a main—even a defining—feature of modern art. Its roots may go very deep, all the way back to primitive associations between image making and magic, but in its modern form the mixture of suspicion and reverence directed toward artists began to arise with the romantic replacement of tradition by the power of individual genius. Once art came to be identified with overturning shared and inherited expectations (as was often the case already in romanticism), then the gap of mutual incomprehension between the worlds of art makers and their audience could not help but widen, and within this gap the task of drawing the boundaries between genuine discovery and mere pretense can never be easy. The dilemma was deepened during the nineteenth century, as one movement after another was first greeted with rejection by a public formed on expectations rooted in earlier works and styles, then accepted as a new incarnation of the spirit of aesthetic innovation.^[7] In Duchamp's public of 1913, only a few people can be clearly identified as believing that his work possessed some new and as yet not generally understandable aesthetic

power—namely, those who bought the pictures. But between them and the opposite group who refused to take the new art seriously there was a large middle ground, and it was precisely there that the two attitudes of hostile suspicion and anxious respect flowed in and out of each other. Both are evident, as we shall see, in the questions posed to Duchamp at the time by newspaper interviewers.^[8]

Duchamp's fame, then, was a compound of these elements: the ambiguous relationship between art, sex, and morality; the modernist rejection of tradition; the perception that modern art was the bearer of an undefined but radical energy, as able to issue in joking as in some serious challenge; and the sense that nonetheless art promised access to a world of heightened perception or deeper understanding. Each of these features had some sort of relationship to his picture, but what allowed Nude Descending a Staircase to fuse them into a symbolic representation of modern art was its quasi-opacity, the sense it gave off of being about something that could never be wholly perceived. Here arose the aura of incomprehension that spread itself around the picture and its maker, helping to turn Duchamp into the abstraction of himself that made him feel he had somehow disappeared behind his work.

This sense that the picture's meaning hovered just out of reach of ordinary people allowed its maker to represent those things about modern art that were least concrete, most difficult to seize upon, hardest to define, and for those reasons possessed of a kind of uncontainable power. His relationship to his audience was not determined by the particular content of his work, nor by his abilities as a draftsman or colorist, nor by his exemplification of some particular style. His persona dwelt within the realm Max Weber defined as the charismatic, where authority relies neither on tradition nor on any quality that can be confined inside clear rational boundaries, but operates by virtue of a mysterious ability to infuse the colorless everyday world with energies from unexplored regions of social life or from the depths of the self.

Fame invested Duchamp with a power on which he would draw deftly and effectively in the years that followed. His ability to make the most of what had happened in 1913 was a sign that the consecration the American public bestowed on him had been no mistake: his status as an exemplar of what was most arresting and challenging in mod-

ernism would expand and deepen in the years that followed. And yet the reasons why Duchamp was such an appropriate symbol for the avant-garde contain an important paradox: what qualified him for the role was precisely his distance from those he was taken to represent. Modernism was a movement, or at least a complex of related movements, and much of the character of impressionism, symbolism, fauvism, cubism, and surrealism derived from the willingness of those who participated in them to be part of a group, to work within a sphere in which individual artistic identities developed through interaction with some common set of ideas and practices.

To Duchamp, such close cooperation was as alien as living on the moon. He had tried it with the group around Gleizes and Metzinger off and on between 1910 and 1912, but the attempt collapsed when those same friends let it be known that they did not want Nude Descending a Staircase in their exhibition, because it did not fit their program. He responded by drawing away into a largely solitary life, and by coincidence the Armory Show took place just at the moment when he was beginning work on the Large Glass, the project that marked his departure from traditional painting. As he pursued his new path, the features of his personality that had always marked him as a loner and an outsider, detached above all from those who seemed closest to him, would become more prominent. Nothing testifies to this evolution better than the life he would make for himself during the long periods he spent in America, comfortable in a situation that cut him off from his European roots in a way that would have been unimaginable for a Picasso, a Kandinsky, or a Breton.

Perhaps the fact that the Armory Show brought together works from so many different modernist schools encouraged its audience to focus on a figure who represented none of them very well. For whatever reason, the Americans who lifted Duchamp out of obscurity had chosen a person who—as his subsequent career would demonstrate—cared more about his personal independence than he did about art itself. Beneath the succession of avant-garde movements there had always lurked an impulse of radical individualism, and no one represented it better than Marcel Duchamp; what more appropriate quality for a Yankee audience to seize on? Of all vanguard figures, only Duchamp pro-

duced as a major work a picture—The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even —whose meanings were so private and yet so intricately developed that it required an elaborate set of notes to give others any entry into its enclosed world. Who but Duchamp could dramatize his separation from others by representing himself at a dada exhibition by empty spaces on the walls? As he later agreed, he was in some way predestined for America: there his growing distance from the ordinary ways of being an artist found a counterpart in the tension the general public felt between itself and many elements of traditional culture; there even his incomprehensibility represented an individualism, and a distance from the inherited modes of artistic practice, that audiences could associate with their own proudest values. For decades Duchamp would remain far better known in America than in Europe.^[9] Yet the meaning of his career cannot be separated from its European roots: living simultaneously in two worlds helped him to set free what we may call the spirit of the avant-garde as such, unleashed from the specific aesthetic programs advanced by separate movements like cubism, futurism, or surrealism, and turning the power of imagination against the very boundaries of life itself.

The aura of fame that Duchamp enjoys nowadays is brighter and more intense than the succès de scandale of the Armory Show, fed by the whole unprecedented course of his career and by the inspiration that many radical art movements since the 1960s have found in it. He has become a kind of mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell and retell for the sake of its exemplary lessons. The readymades stand as a challenge to the long-cherished assumptions that art is a special kind of activity, properly set apart from the rest of life, and that artworks are expressions of individual vision or feeling. The later gesture of seeming to abandon making or exhibiting any kind of objects appears at once to exalt the freedom of the artist to follow imagination wherever it leads and to question the very right or need for art to survive at all. Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about art's nature and meaning, questions whose range and depth he expanded by mixing his challenges to visual conventions with experiments in remaking language, and with arguments that the audience,

not the artist, determines the meaning and value of art objects. There may not be many people today who prefer his work to that of, say, Picasso or Matisse—nor should there be—but no vanguard figure invites us to confront basic questions about the meaning of modern culture more insistently than he.

For these reasons, there is much at stake in how we understand Duchamp's life and work. He has been offered as a witness to the condition of art under developed capitalism, claimed as a representative of alchemical spiritualism, cited as a revelation of the deep void of meaninglessness from which culture seeks vainly to shield us, derided as an empty pretender, or savored as a wily, wise, and up-to-date court fool.^[10] Many accounts of his career agree in presenting it as the distillation of a bigger story, one whose moral is not just the end of traditional painting, but the end of art as we have known it in the West, and especially the end of the artist as a being who filters experience through a temperament especially able to add a new vision to our stock of ways to experience and make sense out of the world. Duchamp is said not only to have undermined the goal of seeking meaning through artistic activity, but also to have dissolved his own subjectivity as an artist, subverting the coherence of his personality by floating through life freely and without direction, taking each moment as it came and bobbing along on a sea of accident and chance. This image of him was cherished by later figures such as John Cage, who sought new ways to remove self-expression from artistic practice, and it helped inspire the various "anti-art" movements that have flourished since the 1960s.^[11]

Despite the credit often given to this picture of Duchamp as an exemplary man without qualities, and the reassurance it has provided for many who declare themselves his heirs, I think it hides more than it reveals, about both the person and the work. In opposition to it, the pages that follow aim first of all to show that his career forms a coherent whole: his mature work consists of objects and gestures behind whose appearance of random disconnectedness there stand a small number of identifiable and interrelated ideas and impulses, linked to a set of personal themes that persisted throughout his life. Far from being the product of a dissolved subjectivity, the objects and activities that defined Duchamp as a person and as an artist—including the readymades

and his "abandonment" of art—fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, combining to reproduce the pattern of his own peculiar and eccentric, but intriguing and quintessentially modern relationship to the world.

If this be so, then what should we make of Duchamp's many apparent assertions to the contrary, his rejection of consistency, taste, and habit, his celebration of personal instability? Those claims are pieces of the puzzle too, whose place in it can be clarified by locating Duchamp within a particular current of modern culture—powerfully present in the avant-garde, but also operative outside it—where the apparent abandonment of personal, subjective coherence serves to give the self greater purity and a more exalted claim to independence. The point is not so paradoxical as it may seem. By seeking to substitute fluidity for fixity, chance and accident for taste and habit, Duchamp was aiming, like some of his modernist forebears and companions, to dissolve one particular kind of personal identity, the kind most ordinary people seek when they—we—take as starting points the socially and culturally given elements of collective life that every individual finds at her or his entry into the world. Such identities may be more or less original or meaningful or satisfying, but people attain them by reworking and synthesizing the materials—opinions, beliefs, activities, practices—that society and culture provide. The task is not easy because such social and cultural materials are heterogeneous and often contradictory—increasingly so as cultures grow more differentiated and complex-and they impose limits on what any person can become. To renounce personal identity as a project is to cast off the burden of reconciling contradictions that membership in complex cultures imposes on individuals, opening the way to a lighter, more elemental kind of selfhood, freed of the particular opinions and practices of a given culture, and able—at least in imagination—to transcend the limits that any and every culture imposes on its members.

Many vanguard claims to dissolve or dismantle individual subjectivity thus turn out to be directed not against personal identity and coherence, but against the form of subjectivity that accepts limits shared with others as the conditions of self-formation; in its place they project the image of a different kind of self or subject, free of common limitations and cleansed of all the internalized residues that social and

cultural experience deposit within ordinary persons. In the name of dissolving the self—often the "bourgeois" self—they actually seek to live outside of culture. Because this form of selfhood has been aspired to with some frequency in modernist—and "postmodernist"—projects, Duchamp offers a vantage point from which to understand currents and impulses whose importance extends well beyond his career. Hoping to deepen that understanding, we give attention below to some figures who belong to this broader context and who reveal its main features, among them Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry. We also look more closely at the more obscure and eccentric figure of Raymond Roussel, whom Duchamp hailed as a predecessor, and who also exercised great fascination on the surrealists. The themes that linked Duchamp to all these people are the terms "desire, liberation, and the self" set out in the subtitle: the deeper meanings of Duchamp's career must be sought in searching out, behind the claims he made for the dissolution of selfhood, just what kind of personal existence he aspired to, and what place it occupies in the history of modern culture.

What has been said so far already tells that the picture of Duchamp given below will be one that tries to order his life around a core of psychological coherence, but readers will find an account that is only mildly and partially psychobiographical. One reason is that the evidence available about both his childhood and his behavior as an adult imposes fairly strict limits on how far such a view can be worked out. Another is the need, already mentioned, to grasp his career in relation to historical currents and conditions that reached far beyond him. The themes in his work that reflected patterns in his life had powerful resonance outside because they echoed motifs and concerns already present in earlier modernist movements and in the historical experience out of which they arose; and at a critical moment—his passage to America—Duchamp's self-understanding and the meaning he attributed to his own activities were radically altered by the new situation, and the new audience, he found there. His own later declarations about the power of the public to determine the value, and perhaps even the meaning, of artworks faithfully mirrored that experience.

It may be objected that such an approach is not "Duchampian" in

that it attributes to him just the sort of social rootedness and personal coherence from which he claimed to have set himself free.^[12] Perhaps, but he sometimes acknowledged the shakiness of those claims, and the account of him offered here will prove to be just as true to his overall sense of himself—more true, I hope to show—as are the opposite views put forward by most of his followers and interpreters. Moreover, we need such a view of Duchamp especially now, when many of the claims made by avant-garde figures about themselves ring ever more hollow; increasingly we understand that the avant-garde belongs to our culture, the culture of modernity, and never more wholly and loyally than in its claims to be in revolt against it, to be its destroyer and grave digger, for modern Western culture is the first to be nurtured and thrive on opposition and negation. (This does not mean that it will necessarily survive such attacks forever.)

If we are to grasp the relationship between modern life and the culture it has spawned, we need to view figures like Duchamp in ways that reveal how actions and practices that appeared destructive, even revolutionary, in their first light actually drew on and preserved the basic elements out of which modernity was—and is—constructed; we need to understand the avant-garde's rootedness in the culture it challenged without being either taken in or put off by its exalted and sometimes truculent advertisements for itself. This is what I hope the more humanistic and in some ways more old-fashioned approach to Duchamp offered here may help to provide.

Readers should perhaps be warned at this point that the author of the book they have in hand is not trained in art history. I think my perspective as a student of modern culture more generally is appropriate to a figure whose relationship to painting was usually distant and ambiguous, who insisted on his closeness to literature and philosophy, and whose importance lies in the larger questions he was able to put in play by not doing what his identity as an artist led people to expect. All the same, I have not held back from trying to make sense of the pictures.