1. Duchamp sold more pictures than anyone except Odilon Redon, but one reason was that his work had price tags that were relatively low compared with earlier and better-known artists such as Van Gogh, whose canvases could demand prices in the thousands of dollars. See Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York, 1988).

2. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp , trans. Ron Padgett (London, 1979; New York, 1987), 45.

3. Cabanne, Dialogues , 45.

4. See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), 217, 222.

5. See Brown, Story of the Armory Show , 163ff.

6. Clement Greenberg, "Counter-Avant-garde" (originally published in 1971 in Art International ), in Duchamp in Perspective , ed. Joseph Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975), 123.

7. On this point see in particular Leo Steinberg, "Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public," in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York, 1972), 3-16.

8. In general, Milton Browns reading of the contemporary press fails to capture this state of mind, but see 180ff.

9. A point correctly emphasized by Dieter Daniels, Duchamp und die anderen (Cologne, 1992).

10. For a convenient guide to interpretations of Duchamp, applied to his various works, see Jean Clair, with the collaboration of Ulf Linde et al., Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire. Approches critiques (Paris, 1977), a volume published in connection with the 1977 retrospective at the Paris Musée National d'Art Moderne, and Clair's article, "La Fortune critique de Marcel Duchamp," Revue de l'Art 3 (1976): 92-100. More recently, a wide-ranging discussion of the way Duchamp has appeared in public and been interpreted has been provided by Daniels, Duchamp und die anderen , who also gives a comprehensive account of Duchamp's career together with a pointed and helpful discussion of some of the interpretive claims and quarrels. For Duchamp as the bearer of a modern "myth of criticism," see Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare , trans. Rachel Philips (New York, 1978); for a Lacanian and postmodernist view of Duchamp as both the artist of industrialism and witness to the end of painting, see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade (1984), trans. Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis and Oxford, 1991); for various views of Duchamp in the light of alchemy or hermetic symbolism see Maurizio Calvesi, Duchamp Invisibile: La Costruzione del Simbolo (Rome, 1975), Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt Works (New York, 1974), and Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York, 1969; a new, updated edition of this work is promised for 1995). There is a comprehensive and most helpful discussion of this whole current of criticism in Daniels, Duchamp und die anderen , 238ff. Recent perspectives can be found in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century , ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989), and The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp , ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1991). There is an extensive and useful bibliography in the volume edited by Kuenzli and Naumann, and another in Daniels.

11. See John Tancock, "The Influence of Marcel Duchamp," and the remarks of various artists and writers in "A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp," both in Marcel Duchamp , ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York and Philadelphia, 1975, 1989), 158-78 and 179-229. On Duchamp's recent influence more generally, see also the catalogue edited by Alfred M. Fischer and Dieter Daniels of the 1988 Cologne exhibition, Übrigens sterben immer die anderen: Marcel Duchamp und die Avantgarde seit 1950 . Another recent testimony to Duchamp's continuing influence can be found in the exhibition After Duchamp , held at the Gallery 1900-2000, Paris, in the spring of 1991 and partially repeated in 1994; see the catalogue, edited by Edouard Jaguer and Jean-Jacques Lebel (Paris, 1991).

12. For such an objection, certainly intended to encompass a reading of Duchamp's career like mine but directed at works with which in fact the present book has very little in common, see Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York, 1977; paper ed., 1981), 81. Krauss's claim that Duchamp's works themselves (she refers specifically to Fountain ) destroy any "narrative matrix" within which interpreters may seek to place them seems to me to accede to Duchamp's own strategies and stated intentions without ever considering the question of what lies behind them, or what we might learn by trying to answer it. I recognize of course that what to me appear to be important gains from discovering the coherence of Duchamp's career at a deeper level would seem to her, and to others who share her theoretical ground, to be a loss. I would add that despite my radical disagreement with Krauss's views about Duchamp, I often find her readings extremely interesting and stimulating, and it was hearing her speak about Duchamp many years ago that first piqued my interest in him.

For a more recent example of an attempt to present Duchamp in a way that mirrors his own professed love of incoherence, see Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life , ed. Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont (Milan and Cambridge, Mass., 1993), the catalogue published for the exhibition of Duchamp's work held at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 1993. There, in a section called Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy, 1887-1968 , Gough-Cooper and Caumont have presented the results of their painstaking and devoted research into the details of Duchamp's life, carried out over decades, by arranging it under the days of the year, listing everything we know about what Duchamp did on the 19th of May in every year of his life, followed successively by the 20th, and so on, until all the days come round. Although I admit that I find this putatively ''Duchampian" presentation of what is after all a considerable amount of serious work to be by turns sly, pretentious, and exasperating-a sign no doubt that the authors have succeeded in their purpose-I have made use of the information provided in this catalogue at various places below, citing it as Ephemerides , under the relevant day and year (since there are no page numbers).

1. See Pierre Cabanne, The Brothers Duchamp , trans. Helga Harrison and Dinah Harrison (New York and Boston, 1975), 10.

2. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp , with chapters by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and H.-P. Roché, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York, 1959), 2; originally published in French as Sur Marcel Duchamp (Paris, 1959).

3. Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont refer to Mme. Duchamp's increasing deafness during the years 1908-9 in their Plan pour écrire une vie de Marcel Duchamp (Paris, 1977), 10; and Alice Goldfarb Marquis found confirmation in an interview with a family friend. See her book (on which I have also relied for other details) Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie. A Biography (Troy, N.Y., 1981), 70.

4. For the slang connotation of "manches," see Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 59-60.

5. Cabanne, Dialogues , 19.

6. See, for instance, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "X-Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp and the Cubists," Art Journal 47 (1988): 323-40; and Jean Clair, Duchamp et la photographie (Paris, 1977), 19-25.

7. The only other personal reference I have found is very brief, saying simply "Given that ...; if I suppose that I am suffering a lot" ("Étant donné que ...; si je suppose que je sols souffrant beaucoup"), Duchamp du signe , ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Paris, 1975, 1994), 36. Duchamp du signe is the expanded version of the original collection, Marchand du sel (Paris, 1958), which was published in English first as Salt Seller (New York, 1973) and later reprinted as The Writings of Marcel Duchamp , ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, trans. Elmer Peterson (New York, 1989).

8. This note was not published in the Green Box of 1934, but later on in the White Box ( À l'infinitif ) of 1966; Writings , 74. I have altered the translation found there, using the original in Duchamp du signe , 105-6. "Interrogatoire" is not just an examination, but a judicial interrogation, and it is not enough to translate "se conclut l'arrêt du choix" as "my choice is determined." On advertising, fantasy, and the world of commerce and consumption in fin-desiècle France, see Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982).

9. Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 71-72.

10. See the quote in the catalogue of Duchamp's work in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 251

11. Besides The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp , Schwarz's writings include The Large Glass and Related Works (Milan, 1967), and "The Alchemist Stripped Bare in the Bachelor, Even," in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 81-88. Schwarz, however, was not the first to suggest alchemical significance for this picture and for Duchamp's career more generally; on this whole subject see Daniels, Duchamp und die anderen , 238ff.

12. See Francis M. Naumann, "Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites," in Kuenzli and Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century , 24-25.

13. This quality of Duchamp's composition-as well as his theme-may recall the similar mix of foreground and background figures in Matisse's canvas of 1905-6 called Joy of Life ( Bonheur de vivre ), now in the Barnes Foundation.

14. Below, in chap. 7, in connection with the puzzle of Duchamp's mature sexuality, I discuss the possibility that the twinlike situation in which Duchamp and his sister lived as young children may have left him with a confusion of sexual identity, an outcome suggested by a number of psychodynamic studies. Some of his best-known works and gestures-the Mona Lisa readymade, his invention of a second identity as Rrose Sélavy, in a way even the Large Glass itself-are based on combinations of male and female elements.

15. For the last quote, Gianfranco Baruchello and Henry Martin, Why Duchamp? An Essay on Aesthetic Impact (Kingston, N.Y., 1985), 14.

16. See the letter quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 249.

17. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, "Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp," written 1949, and published in The Dada Painters and Poets , ed. Robert Motherwell (New York, 1951, 1967), 256.

18. Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven and London, 1988).

19. Ibid., 28.

20. Ibid., 19-20, quoting Victor Fournel, Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris, 1858).

21. Charles Baudelaire, "Windows," in Paris Spleen , trans. Louise Varèse (New York, 1947), 77.

22. I have discussed Zola's changing attitudes toward the impressionists in Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1850-1930 (New York, 1986), 299-306.

23. Quoted by Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York, 1977), 82, 85.

24. Mallarmé to Cazalis, May 14, 1867; cited in Guy Michaud, Le Message poétique du symbolisme (Paris, 1947), 168.

25. See especially "Crise de vers," in Divagations (Paris, 1943), 252: "L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poèe, qui cède l'initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés; ils s'allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelie traînée de feux sur des pierreries, remplaçant la respiration perceptible en l'ancien souffle lyrique ou la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase."

26. Balakian, Symbolist Movement , 84.

27. Rémy de Gourmont, "Le Symbolisme," La Revue blanche , 1892, p. 323.

28. Emile Hennequin, quoted in Dario Gamboni, La Plume et lepinceau: Odilon Redon et la littérature (Paris, 1989), 64-65. I owe much of what is said here about Redon to Gamboni's excellent book. See also Sven Sandström, Le Monde imaginaire d'Odilon Redon: Étude iconologique (Lund, 1955).

29. There is a clear and convenient English translation of this pamphlet in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays , ed. Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964), 2-18.

30. Cited from ibid., 13, 6, 8.

31. Ibid., 5, 14.

32. Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations , trans. Lionel Abel (New York, 1949), 47-48.

1. On these matters see the informed and perceptive discussions in Virginia Spate, Orhism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910-14 (Oxford, 1979). And for a sophisticated dissection of the various cultural and political possibilities inherent within Bergsonianism and realized in cultural movements, see Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, 1993). Antliff makes clear the connections between the cubists around Gleizes and Metzinger and the cultural world of symbolism, adding an important dimension to the discussion of On Cubism given above. See also Fanette Roche-Pézard, L'Aventure futuriste, 1909-16 (Rome, 1983). On Apollinaire's relationship to the various currents in symbolism see Michel Déaudin, La Crise des valeurs symbolistes: Vingt ans de poésie française, 1885-1914 (Paris, 1960).

2. Spate, Orphism , 22. Picabia, who was close to Duchamp in these years, also spoke of having his work express "states of soul"; ibid., 331-32.

3. Duchamp, "Apropos of Myself," talk delivered at the St. Louis City Art Museum, November 24, 1964; cited in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 256.

4. On Marey, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (New York, 1990; paper ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), 105, 107; on Raymond's teacher, Albert Londe, see Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 30.

5. Duchamp, "The Great Trouble with Art in This Century," an interview with James Johnson Sweeney, originally published in The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 13 (1946), and reprinted in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp , 124.

6. See Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 73, who cites Robert Coates for this suggestion.

7. Marquis suggests that Sad Young Man on a Train may be "his troubled reaction to a fantasy about his little sister, Suzanne"; ibid., 73.

8. See John Golding, Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (London and New York, 1972), 61. Most writers about Duchamp insist on seeing in this drawing the first intimation of Duchamp's later interest in machines; this seems to me at best doubtful, since his other work at this time was still involved with the themes of linear motion and formal dissolution; only later would machines enter into his artistic work, and for reasons that I will try to show were much more personal than most commentators are willing m recognize. Molly Nesbit points out, however, that the coffee mill echoes exercises in mechanical drawing that were taught in early twentieth-century French schools, a comparison that seems enlightening even though (for reasons that will appear clearly enough below) I cannot share her view that this connection means Duchamp was trying to assimilate art to the condition of industrial objects. See Molly Nesbit, "Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model," October 37 (1986): 53-64.

9. For most of this information, see Ephemerides , June 6, 1968, June 21, 1912, and August 7, 1912.

10. Sweeney interview, Writings , 124.

11. Spate, Orphism , 32.

12. Ibid., 36.

13. See Golding, Marcel Duchamp , 41.

14. Lebel, Marcel Duchamp , 73n.

15. It should be remembered, however, that Gleizes and Metzinger, in On Cubism , had also declared a departure from the retina; in addition, the theme of the "passage," which would soon surface in Duchamp's work, was also one they had developed.

16. Sweeney interview, Writings , 124.

17. Virginia Spate writes: "What appears as a ground plane can also be read as a plane in the process of becoming concave or as the convex interior of a sectional form"; Orphism , 317.

18. The suggestion of Lawrence D. Steefel Jr., "Marcel Duchamp and the Machine," in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 73.

19. Quoted by John Tancock in "The Influence of Marcel Duchamp," in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 164.

20. Lebel, Marcel Duchamp , 14; William Rubin, "Reflexions on Marcel Duchamp," originally in Art International 4, no. 9 (December 1968), reprinted in Masheck, ed., Duchamp in Perspective , 41-52.

21. This paragraph owes much to the analysis provided by Lawrence D. Steefel Jr., "Dimensions and Development in The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride ," in Masheck, ed., Duchamp in Perspective , esp. 91-95. I find it impossible to see certain things in the picture that Steefel finds there, however, and the argument about Duchamp's development made here does not go in quite the same direction as his.

22. See Sweeney interview, Writings , 126; Cabanne, Dialogues , 33-34 and 40-41.

23. See Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres (Paris, 1935; facsimile ed., Paris, 1963, 1985), 15.

24. Readers who want to know what series of puns and verbal games lay behind these things can find them explained in Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres .

25. Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel (Paris, 1963), published in English as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel , trans. Charles Ruas (New York, 1986); there are some speculations on Foucault and Roussel in my article "Avoiding the Subject: A Foucaultian Itinerary," Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 273-99. For Roussel, Duchamp, and antihumanism, see the discussion already referred to in Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture .

26. The best general source for Roussel's life is François Caradec, Vie de Raymond Roussel (Paris, 1972); there is much insightful commentary also in Raynet Heppenstall, Raymond Roussel: A Critical Guide (London, 1966). Much of interest, although often speculative, can be found in Philippe G. Kerbellec, Comment lire Raymond Roussel: Cryptanalyse (Paris, 1988), and (equally learned and enlightening, but less speculative) in Gian Carlo Roscioni, L'Arbitrio Letterario: Uno Studio su Raymond Roussel (Turin, 1985). Michel Leiris's various and enlightening pieces on Roussel are collected in Roussel l'ingénu (Paris, 1987).

27. Much of this information comes from the one vanguard figure to whom Roussel was personally close, Michel Leiris, whom Roussel knew first as the son of Eugène Leiris, his family's financial agent and adviser. Most of the other information in these paragraphs comes from Caradec; the details about Roussel's clothes obsessions were furnished to Michel Leiris by Charlotte Du Frène. Most accounts of Roussel's life regard his death as a suicide, but I follow Caradec here too in concluding that death may not have been his intention.

28. Comment j'ai écrit , 127-32, reproducing Pierre Janet, De l'angoisse à l'extase (Paris, 1926), 1: 132-37. Roussel's own account of the same crisis appears earlier in Comment j'ai écrit , 28-30.

29. Impressions d'Afrique (Paris, 1910; reprint Paris, 1963), 158.

30. See Kerbellec, Comment lire Raymond Roussel

1. The notes have been published in several versions. I cite them here either from Duchamp du signe or from The Writings of Marcel Duchamp .

2. Breton's essay, "Phare de la ariée" ("Lighthouse of the Bride") was reprinted by Robert Lebel in Marcel Duchamp .

3. Writings , 45. The most obscure and difficult of the notes are those Duchamp did not publish himself, but that were published (and translated into English) after his death by Paul Matisse; see Marcel Duchamp, Notes , arr. and trans. Paul Matisse, with a preface by Anne d'Harnoncourt (Boston, 1983). I have been able to comment on only a few of these notes here.

4. Writings , 26-27. I owe the suggestion about enfant phare and en fanfare to Rose Vekony. There exists another version of the text (see Notes , ed. Paul Matisse, number 109) that speaks still more lyrically of the headlight as the "child god, rather like [ rappelant assez ] the primitives' Jesus." At one point in this note Duchamp said that this child-headlight-god would "have to be radiant with glory " (the phrase rayonner de gloire was circled in the manuscript), the very image of himself as creator that had occupied Roussel with such intensity in his youthful crisis. Since Duchamp in 1912 had no way to know about Roussel's use of this image, we have to regard its appearance as a coincidence, or perhaps as a spontaneous witness to the shared impulses and qualities that bound the two figures together. This text is also reproduced in the catalogue of the 1993 Venice exhibition, Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life , ed. Gough-Cooper and Caumont, 36.

5. Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont provide an illustration of the various machines as they were set up by the Rouen chocolate-maker; Plan pour écrire une vie de Marcel Duchamp , 77.

6. As pointed out by Michel Sanouillet, "Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition," in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 53; and by Adam Gopnik and Kirk Varnedoe in High and Low: Popular Culture in Modern Art (New York, 1990), 254-55. Duchamp, by the way, had done a series of drawings of male occupations in his early months in Paris, which may also be echoed in these costumes.

7. For more details, see for instance Jean Suquet, Le Grand Verre rêvé (Paris, 1991), or for English readers his article in de Duve, ed., The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp . One of the most careful and sensible readers of Duchamp's notes is Craig E. Adcock; see Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983); he also contributed to the Halifax conference cited immediately above.

8. "L'ironisme d'affirmation: difféences avec l'ironisme négateur dépendant du Rire seulement," Duchamp du signe , 46.

9. See Writings , 39, 42, 44.

10. Ibid., 42.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 43.

13. Ibid., 39, 43.

14. Ibid., 43. This note is also reproduced in Gough-Cooper and Caumont, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life , 37.

15. Interview with Michel Sanouillet, in Les Nouvelles Littéraires , December 16, 1954, 5.

16. I quote from Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal , trans. Richard Howard (Boston, 1982), 30-31. See the reading by Martin Turnell, Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry (New York, 1972), 112ff.

17. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), 170. For more on the romantic theme of unfulfilled desire, see Gerald N. Izenberg's discussion of Chateaubriand in Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood (Princeton, N.J., 1992).

18. Jules Laforgue, Mélanges posthumes (1903), quoted by Martin Turnell, Baudelaire , 36-37.

19. See Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass .

20. As a way of pointing to the limitations of conventional thinking, the idea of the fourth dimension had been employed earlier by Edwin A. Abbot in his book Flatland (1884). Here a sphere, seeking to make plane figures understand three-dimensional existence, receives the retort: How do you know there is no fourth dimension beyond the world you know? See the interesting discussion of this work, in connection with modern art as the reorientation of familiar models of experience, by Kirk Varnedoe in A Fine Disregard (New York, 1990), 250ff. It seems to me, however, that in Duchamp's case what Varnedoe describes as opening people's minds up to new possibilities has slipped over into the imagination of a world in which there are no limits to possibility. I would offer the dialectic between these two positions as a broader frame for the logic of modern cultural innovation, to which Varnedoe has contributed with great insight and imagination in his book.

21. Duchamp, Notes and Projects for the Large Glass , ed. Arturo Schwarz (New York, 1969), no. 15. This note, along with the whole topic of the "ultrathin," is discussed by Adcock, Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass , 79. I am not sure that the association of the ultrathin with the vanishing point is as crucial to Duchamp's project as is the use made of the purely two-dimensional picture plane.

22. Duchamp, Notes and Projects , 80.

23. Duchamp used this formula in speaking to George and Richard Hamilton; see Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp , 23.

24. Writings , 44, and 83-86.

25. Ibid., 86ff.

26. Ibid., 75.

27. Ibid., 90, 31.

28. Ibid., 50.

29. See Golding, Marcel Duchamp , 70, on this point.

30. Duchamp, Writings , 96-97.

31. Sweeney interview, Writings , 137.

32. Baruchello and Martin, Why Duchamp? 105ff.

33. These contrasts, along with others that will emerge in the course of discussion, seem to me to speak strongly against the interpretation recently suggested by Rosalind Krauss, which makes the bodily determination of perception and consciousness the central theme of Duchamp's work, an interpretation constructed by way of the assimilation of the Large Glass to Given , so that the former must accord with the spirit of the latter. See Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993), 95-147.

34. Both photographs were published in Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, Étant donnés: 1. La Chute d'eau 2. Le Gaz d'éclairage. Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp (Philadelphia, 1969, 1987), 59-60.

1. Greenberg, "Counter-Avant-Garde," in Masheck, ed., Duchamp in Perspective , 124, 128.

2. Cabanne, Dialogues , 48; Writings , 32.

3. Revue anarchiste , 1893.

4. See the interview reprinted in New York Dada , ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York, 1986), 134.

5. Writings , 5.

6. Cabanne, Dialogues , 48.

7. Quoted in Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass , 24.

8. Baruchello and Martin, Why Duchamp? 71. Groups or collections of Duchamp's puns were published several times during the 1920S and 1930s, first in the dada periodical 391 in July 1921; in André Breton's magazine Littéature in 1922; in Pierre Massot's The Wonderful Book: Reflections on Rrose Sélavy (Paris 1924); and by Duchamp himself in Rrose Sélavy, oculisme de précision, poils et coups de pied en tous genres (Paris, 1937).

9. For Duchamp's account, see Cabanne, Dialogues, 47. Pharmacie may also have been partly inspired by some lines in Jules Laforgue's Autres complaintes , which read: "Et le pharmacien sur le blême trottoir, / Fait s'épandre les lacs des bocaux verts ou rouges / Phares lointains de ceux qui s'en iront ce soir." ("And the pharmacist spreads the lakes of his green or red globes on the pale sidewalk, distant lights for those who depart tonight.") I take the suggestion from Ephemerides , April 4, 1916.

10. The "roue/sel" pun is also suggested in Ephemerides , June 4, 1964. Duchamp's general fascination for circular motion at this time seems evident in the comment Fernand Léger remembered him making to Constantin Brancusi during a visit to an aviation show in Paris during October, 1912; standing before an airplane propellor Duchamp exclaimed: "Painting's washed up. Who'll do anything better than that propellor? Tell me, can you do that?" See Dora Vallier, "La Vie dans l'oeuvre de Fernand Léger," Cahiers d'Art 29 (1954): 140; cited by William A. Camfield, ''Marcel Duchamp's Fountain : Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917," in Kuenzli and Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century , 81. There is some question whether Duchamp actually said this: Léger reported the incident only much later, Duchamp seems not to have remembered it, and some have doubted that it happened; see Jeffrey Steven Weiss, "The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp and Avant-Gardism" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1990, 363; and Schwarz, Complete Works , 595, for Duchamp's not remembering the incident. If he did say it, however, Duchamp was taking part in the contemporary enthusiasm for modern technology we have several times mentioned. In 1912 he did a drawing labeled "Airplane," in which an upwardsweeping line seems to suggest a takeoff, and another (discussed above in connection with the pictures of "swift nudes") of an automobile, placed upright between one male and one female figure. But Duchamp was never fully committed to a machine aesthetic; the mechanical objects in the lower part of the Large Glass are not machine-made, and the images in the upper part are not mechanical, while only a few of the readymades would be objects that proclaim a connection to machines or modern industry. If he responded enthusiastically to a propellor, the reasons probably had at least as much to do with its resemblance to the other wheel-like forms that fascinated him as with its mechanical modernity.

11. For Schwarz's reading see Complete Works , 449; he notices the absence of the bottles but can only see in it a reference to Duchamp's bachelorhood. The information that Duchamp accepted the reading was conveyed by Schwarz to William A. Camfield, who reports it in his article "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain ," 94 n. 60.

12. Buffet-Picabia, cited in Masheck, ed., Duchamp in Perspective , 48. Henri-Pierre Roché gives a similar account of a visit to Duchamp's studio in his novel about Duchamp, Victor ( Marcel Duchamp ), ed. Danielle Régnier-Bohler, with a preface and notes by Jean Clair (Paris, 1977).

13. Writings , 74.

14. As Pierre Cabanne recognized; see Dialogues , 45.

15. Alice Marquis shares this view, writing that, in addition to the members of the avant-garde themselves, there was in America a public for the assault on art, representative of "a uniquely American phenomenon: a sometimes articulate and often affluent mass who relished any assault on art as a high-falutin, pretentious cult. It was-and still is-a group whose no-nonsense approach to culture welcomed iconoclastic attacks on 'the precious and solemn and costly,' indeed the 'fragile aristocratic beauty' purveyed by American museums and critics"; Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 140.

16. "The Nude Descending a Staircase Man Surveys Us," interview with Duchamp in New York Tribune , September 12, 1915, sec. 4, p. 2. Since various accounts attest that Duchamp had very little English at this point, it seems likely that the interview was conducted in French, or that some bilingual person served as interpreter.

17. "French Artists Spur on an American Art," anonymous article in New York Tribune , Sunday, October 24, 1915, reprinted in Kuenzli, ed., New York Dada : Crotti quoted 132, Duchamp 134.

18. Ibid., 133.

19. See the letter in " Affectueusement, Marcel : Ten Letters from Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti," ed. Francis M. Naumann, Archives of American Art Journal 22, no. 4 (1982): 5. Duchamp's later claim that he had inscribed the rack when he bought it (Cabanne, Dialogues , 47), still often repeated, is shown to be false by this letter; whether in retrospect he genuinely thought he had made such an inscription or was only trying to give unity to the category a posteriori , it is not possible to say. We do not know what the inscription was to be, since he sent it in a later letter, which seems to have been lost.

20. For the story of the shovel, told by Juliet Roché, see Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York, 1991), 267. I think, however, that Watson too quickly assimilates the Duchamp-Arensberg circle to the later spirit of dada.

21. For an account of the exhibition, see ibid., 312ff.

22. See the letter in " Affectueusement, Marcel ," 8, but Naumann incorrectly translates potin as gossip. The original letters can be read in the Crotti papers in the microfilm collection of the Archives of America Art, New York.

23. For this general point, I recommend the account in Watson, Strange Bed-fellows .

24. Quoted by Camfield, "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain ," 75.

25. Writings , 23.

26. Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself (Ojai, Calif., 1985; reprint San Francisco, 1988), 229-30; quoted by Camfield, "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain ," 70.

27. Louise Norton, "Buddha of the Bathroom," The Blind Man ² , no. 2 (May 1917): 5-6. Given Norton's insistence on the ambiguity of the gesture and the connection to blague she and others suggested at the time, I cannot agree with William Camfield's attempt to take the aesthetic claims made for Fountain with complete seriousness. See Camfield, "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain ," 64-94.

28. Cabanne, Dialogues , 62-63.

29. For that reason, some critics interpret Duchamp's readymades as a revival of a formalist aesthetic; see Steven Goldsmith, "The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp: The Ambiguities of an Aesthetic Revolution," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 197-208, for an intelligent discussion of views put forward by Arthur Danto and George Dickie. That the objects can be used as examples in such debates is reasonable and appropriate enough, but the whole question seems to me to need reconsideration once the readymades are understood in light of the historical account given here.

1. This account is based largely on Elisabeth A. Howe, Stages of Self: The Dramatic Monologues of Laforgue, Valéry and Mallarmé (Athens, Ohio, 1990).

2. For an interesting and persuasive affirmation of this point-from someone who was at times identified with a different position-see Claude Lévi-Strauss, "A Belated Word about the Creative Child," in The View from Afar , trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York, 1985), 268-88. I discuss this essay and its place in Lévi-Strauss's views about individuality in "The Subjectivity of Structure: Individuality and Its Contradictions in Lévi-Strauss," in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche , ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford, 1994).

3. William Seitz, "What's Happened to Art: An Interview with Marcel Duchamp," Vogue , February 15, 1963.

4. Duchamp made the remark to Lawrence Steefel; it has, of course, been repeatedly cited, for instance by Alice Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 311.

5. Writings , 31-32.

6. Ibid., 77.

7. Ibid., 78. This may be an appropriate place to note that it was in relationship to this script that Duchamp employed the phrase "pictorial Nominalism," meaning by it that pictures would replace words, perhaps with the implication that these signs, unlike verbal ones, would not encourage people to believe in the real existence of abstract relations. Thierry de Duve has taken this phrase as the title of a book about Duchamp and erected it into a theory of avantgarde art based on the Lacanian notion that symbols cannot mediate our relationship to reality (that is, to the deep reality of the ça where we are inevitably divided from ourselves). Thus, Duchamp is supposed to have discovered that painting is impossible because it can create no generally meaningful relationship between the world and the human subject; in this situation every form of painting becomes simply an arbitrary claim to the name of painting, which it contests against every other one. This is not the place for a sustained critique of Duve's book, but among its problematic features are its positing of a wholly invented Oedipal relationship between Duchamp and Cézanne and its reading of the bride images as nonvirgins, in order to make them represent the canvas painted in opposition to the virginity of a blank canvas. See Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism .

8. See the letter quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 278-79.

9. See Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982); also Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978).

10. David Lodge, Small World: An Academic Romance (New York, 1984, 1991), 31.

11. Barbara Johnson, "Introduction," in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981), xvi.

12. See for instance George H. Bauer, "Duchamp's Ubiquitous Puns," and Dalia Judovitz, "Rendezvous with Marcel Duchamp: Given ," both in Kuenzli and Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century ; and davidantin, "Duchamp and Language" and ''The Romantic Adventures of an Adversative Rotarian or Alreadymadesomuchoff," collated by Lucy R. Lippard, both in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp .

13. Duchamp gave this account in, "Apropos of Myself," cited in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 273.

14. I discuss Jarry and his relationship to these currents in Bohemian Paris , 310ff., where the sources of these quotations are cited.

15. Cabanne, Dialogues , 48.

16. There is a photo of the bottom of the cage in Schwarz, Complete Works , 486.

17. Cabanne, Dialogues , 59.

18. From an unpublished interview with Harriet Janis, quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 295.

19. Cabanne, Dialogues , 16.

20. The text is reproduced in Ephemerides , May 13, 1960.

21. See especially the chapters on words and on advertising in Varnedoe and Gopnik, High and Low . I made a somewhat similar point in the conclusion to Bohemian Paris .

22. More will be said below about Duchamp's role in Arensberg's collection. For the catalogue of the Société Anonyme see the entries in Writings , 143-59. Alice Marquis points out that the three witnesses at his naturalization as a United States citizen in 1955 were directors of museums: Alfred Barr of MOMA, James Thrall Soby of the Yale Univeristy Art Gallery, and James Johnson Sweeney of the Guggenheim; Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 311.

23. Cabanne, Dialogues , 72.

24. Quoted in Katherine Kuh, The Artist's Voice (New York, 1962), 89.

25. Erich Heller, "The Artist's Journey into the Interior: A Hegelian Prophecy and Its Fulfillment," in The Artist's Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (New York, 1965); most of the passages quoted occur between pages 134 and 136.

26. The poem is "The Bad Glazier," in Paris Spleen .

27. Cited by Richard D. Sonn in Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lincoln, Nebr., 1989), 224. Readers familiar with debates about modernism will see that such a view goes directly against the attempt by Peter Bürger to portray the avant-garde as the contrary and enemy of symbolist interiority. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984).

1. The account is called simply "Marcel," and it appears in the volume of essays collected on the occasion of the centennial of Duchamp's birth: Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century , ed. Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (originally published as no. 16 of the journal Dadal/Surrealism [1987] ). Here Wood states that it was Duchamp who introduced her to Henri-Pierre Roché, whereas in her autobiography, I Shock Myself , she places her meeting with Roché earlier than her encounter with Duchamp. Roché also makes Duchamp the source of his meeting with Wood in his contribution to Lebel's Marcel Duchamp ; see pp. 79-80, as well as later in his novel Victor , on which see below. The general account given in "Marcel" is also confirmed in the interview Wood gave to Alice G. Marquis, also cited below. Wood spoke again about her ties to Duchamp on a videotaped interview, Special People: Beatrice Wood , written, directed, and produced by Joel Parks (Pro Video News Service, c. 1991), but here the details are minimal.

2. "Marcel," 12.

3. Ibid., 16.

4. Interview with Alice G. Marquis, recounted in Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 151.

5. On the Stettheimers, see Watson, Strange Bedfellows , and Linda Nochlin, "Florine Stettheimer, Rococo Subversive," chap. 5 of Women, Art, and Power (New York, 1988).

6. Henri Waste [Ettie Stettheimer], Love Days (New York, 1923), 116. For other references of interest, see 109 and 111.

7. Man Ray, Self Portrait , with an afterword by Juliet Man Ray, new ed. (New York, 1988), 72.

8. Cabanne, Dialogues , 76. In what way Picabia may have been behind the whole business remains obscure, but Gough-Cooper and Caumont imply at one point that Lydie's father wanted to marry her off because his wife made it a condition for giving him a divorce ( Ephemerides , June 7, 1927); perhaps, knowing this, Picabia proposed Duchamp as the groom. But here as elsewhere Gough-Cooper and Caumont give no source for their information, so there is no way to know how trustworthy it may be.

9. Ephemerides , May 25 and May 27, 1927.

10. Ibid., June 24, 1927.

11. Man Ray, Self Portrait , 189-90.

12. Cabanne, Dialogues , 33, 75; Man Ray, Self Portrait , 193.

13. See Ephemerides , July 31, 1924, for the night with the three young women, and for the daughter, the same under the dates June 23, 1966, April 16, 1910, and February 6, 1911. The Duchamps kept in touch with Yvonne and her husband afterward. See also the discussion in Francis M. Naumann, "The Bachelor's Quest," Art in America , September 1993, 81. I am grateful to Jack Flam for calling my attention to this review-article.

14. See the letters published by Francis M. Naumann in " Affectueusement, Marcel "; and those to the Arensbergs in Kuenzli and Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century , 203-27. Katherine Dreier spent several months in Buenos Aires at this time too, but nothing points to the possibility that she and Duchamp were ever lovers.

15. Although Caumont and Gough-Cooper do not speak about Roché's responsibility for the episode, their account (July 31, 1924) makes clear that he was behind it; Roché claims to have predicted correctly which of the three women Duchamp would turn to first, and he even knew that Duchamp's mistress Yvonne Fressingeas (whom Roché called Saintonge) was leaving Paris the next morning and went to look for her in the Gare d'Orléans.

16. H.-P. Roché, "Souvenirs of Marcel Duchamp," in Lebel, Marcel Duchamp , 79 and 86. The original publication was in the Nouvelle Revue Française , June 1953, 79-87.

17. For the interview, Ephemerides , June 19, 1924; for the novel, Roché, Victor (Marcel Duchamp) . For Roché's own sexual life, see his Carnets: Les Années Jules et Jim , with an avant-propos by François Truffaut (Marseilles, 1990). The original manuscripts of these notebooks are now at the Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, but I have not seen them. The suggestion sometimes made that features of Duchamp also appear in Roché's better-known work Jules et Jim seems to me mistaken.

18. Ephemerides , June 19, July 3, July 23, and August 15, 1924. Man Ray's comment is in the same passage from his autobiography cited in n.11.

19. For Duchamp's later comment, see Cabanne, Dialogues , 68. For the mingled books, see Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 241-44; with her typical good sense Marquis concludes that the relationship remained "characteristically ambiguous."

20. See Matisse's affectionate portrayal, "Some More Nonsense about Duchamp," Art in America 68 (April 1980): 76-83. His comments on Duchamp's language in his edition of Duchamp, Notes , are also very helpful.

21. Cabanne, Dialogues , 88. It should be noted that Duchamp underwent an operation for an enlarged prostate in April of 1954. It seems to have gone very well, but in some cases such operations can affect sexual potency.

22. For information on Duchamp and Maria Martins, and on Paysage fautif , see Naumann, "The Bachelor's Quest," 77ff. The picture was included in the Boîte en valise Duchamp made for her; these suitcase-collections of his work will be discussed below.

23. See the letter in Naumann, " Affectueusement, Marcel ," 15.

24. Sigmund Freud, "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," trans. Joan Riviere, in Freud's Collected Papers (New York and London, 1959), 4: 203-16. In this essay, first published in 1912, Freud attributed impotence, especially in "men of a strongly libidinous nature" (some of whom were able to have erections both before and after the failed attempt to carry out the sexual act), to a failure to unite ''tender and affectionate" feelings with sexual ones. This failure arose in people who, Freud claimed, retained strong incestuous fantasies from childhood, to which their sexual feelings became attached in puberty, thus associating all sexual activity on the unconscious level with incest. I am grateful to Stephen Kern for reminding me about this paper, whose existence I had forgotten.

25. Buffet-Picabia's reminiscences in Motherwell, ed., The Dada Poets and Painters , 260.

26. Ephemerides , June 24 and 27, 1927.

27. Although I do not want to burden any of them with responsibility for what I have written here, I wish to thank the members of the New York University Humanities Council Seminar in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities, who were kind enough to discuss some features of my work on Duchamp at a meeting in April 1993. I am particularly grateful to Leonard Barkin for organizing the session and to Jules Glenn for his suggestions and for the references cited in the next note.

28. See Mary Shopper, "Twinning Reaction in Nontwin Siblings," Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 13, no. 2 (1974): 300-318; Jules Glenn, "Opposite-Sex Twins," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 14, no. 4 (1966): 736-59; Jules Glenn and Sylvia Glenn, "The Psychology of Twins," in Supplement of "Dynamics in Psychiatry": Papers Compiled in Honor of D.-T. Kouretas (Basel and New York, 1968). For the example of Roussel, who was raised with his sister Germaine in circumstances that recall Duchamp's closeness to Suzanne, see Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres , 27-28, where Roussel notes that their older brother Georges was practically grown up during the time he and Germaine were children.

29. Interview with Katherine Kuh in The Artist's Voice , 83.

30. Cabanne, Dialogues , 67; Seitz interview, 113.

31. From an interview in The New Yorker , April 6, 1957, 26.

32. A remark reported by Walter Pach in Queer Thing, Painting (New York, 1938), 155; also cited by Anne d'Harnoncourt in her introduction to d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 39. Duchamp said a rather similar thing in a 1968 interview: "Sometimes in the unfinished thing there is more warmth that you don't change or make any more perfect in the finished product"; Francis Roberts, "I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics Just a Little," interview with Duchamp in Art News 67, no. 8, (December 1968): 46.

33. Cabanne, Dialogues , 25.

34. "Grandeur des poètes de saisir fortement avec leurs mots, ce qu'ils n'ont fait qu'entrevoir faiblement dans leur esprit." Paul Valéry, Tel Quel , in Oeuvres (Paris, 1957), 483.

35. On Valéry and his crisis see Suzanne Nash, Paul Valéry's "Album de vers anciens": A Past Transfigured (Princeton, 1983), and Christine M. Crow, Paul Valéry: Consciousness and Nature (Cambridge, Eng., 1972).

36. Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, and Antonio Recalcati, "Vivre et laisser mourir, ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp," Statement for their joint exhibition at the Galerie Creuze, Paris, September 1965. Clipping in Crotti Papers, Archives of American Art, New York. For Duchamp's reaction, see Cabanne, Dialogues , 102. Werner Hofmann argues just the opposite, that Duchamp's readymades allowed objects to have their own forms, since the artist no longer sought to impose formal unity on the world through composition; see "Duchamp and Emblematic Realism," in Masheck, ed., Duchamp in Perspective , 63. This is true in a way, but if I am right about the readymades, then such a view misses what is essential in Duchamp's relations to them.

37. The letter is printed and translated, together with Duchamp's other letters to the Arensbergs from this period, in Kuenzli and Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century , 218-19. I have, however, altered the translation, since tout cannot refer to "everybody." Cabanne, Dialogues , 19.

38. In fact, the photographer, Julian Wasser, took an extended series of photos of the game, but the one reproduced here-as it has been elsewhere-was Duchamp's own favorite. See Dickran Tashjian, "Nothing Left to Chance: Duchamp's First Retrospective," in West Coast Duchamp , ed. Bonnie Clearwater (Miami Beach, 1991), 71-76. The notion repeated in this article, however, that the Large Glass was a site of "sexual frustration" and unsuccessful love, misses the point.

39. Marcel Duchamp and Vitaly Halberstadt, L'Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont reconciliées (Paris, 1932); for Duchamp's comments on the book, see Cabanne, Dialogues , 77-78; for the "telepathic" communication between the squares, see the interview of François Le Lionnais by Ralph Rumney in Studio International , January-February 1975, 23-24.

40. The text of Duchamp's speech, given August 20, 1952, can be found in a typescript in the Crotti Papers in the microfilm collection of the Archives of American Art.

41. I am aware, of course, that ideas about strategy change, and with them even what the expertise of a given time regards as allowable or not. Such ideas were changing in the period after World War I (see Schwarz, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp , 58-59), but Duchamp's fascination with chess developed before these novelties had a chance to affect him. According to François Le Lionnais, who played a number of times with Duchamp, the latter's game was highly conventional, even conformist in its adherence to rules; there was nothing rebellious or anarchistic about it. See his comments in the interview cited in n. 39 above.

1. draw here on my own earlier work, Bohemian Paris .

2. Cabanne, Dialogues , 25, 58, 15, 41, 72.

3. For Roché, see Lebel, Marcel Duchamp , 87; for Barbey, Bohemian Paris , 113.

4. Bohemian Paris , chap. 4; for these quotes, 118-19.

5. The letters are conveniently available in Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters , trans, and ed. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago and London, 1966), 302.-10.

6. Yves Bonnefoy, Rimbaud , trans. Paul Schmidt (New York, 1973), 43, 127.

7. Seitz interview, 113.

8. Duchamp gave the talk, in English, at a meeting in Houston in April 1957. It was published in Art News 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957) and is reprinted in Writings , 138-40. For similar ideas see the comments reported by Calvin Tomkins in The Bride and the Bachelors (New York, 1965), 17-19.

9. Sweeney interview, Writings , 137.

10. The letter, dated August 17, 1952, was published (and translated) by Francis M. Naumann in "Affectueusement, Marcel ," 16-17. That it had quite an effect on the recipients is suggested by a later letter of Duchamp to his sister, responding to her request for a comment she could use in a catalogue entry with the suggestion that he would revise a bit "the famous letter I sent to Jean." The later letter, dated October 12, 1959, is in the Crotti Papers, Archives of American Art.

11. See the interviews in the New York Tribune , October 24, 1915 (reprinted in Kuenzli, ed., New York Dada ; see 134 for the quote), and September 12, 1915.

12. Seitz interview, 113, 129-31; Cabanne, Dialogues , 98. Duchamp even took the same view about interpretations of his work, saying that they were "only interesting when you consider the man who wrote the interpretation, as always." Dialogues , 42. The idea that "most artists only repeat themselves" was of course a self-description.

13. Translation modified from Rimbaud, Illuminations and Other Prose Poems , trans. Louise Varèse (New York, 1946, 1957), xxvii.

14. For the most sophisticated attempt to take Rimbaud's social radicalism seriously as a central element in his writing, see Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis, 1988). I think, however, that more skeptical views about Rimbaud's politics capture the nature of his consciousness better. See Paul Gascar, Rimbaud et la Commune (Paris, 1971), and Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (New York and Oxford, 1985).

15. Bonnefoy, Rimbaud , 136.

16. I have discussed these issues in several articles, viz.: "La Mort du sujet, origines d'un thème," Le Débat 58 (January-February 1990): 160-69; "The Human Subject as a Language-Effect," History of European Ideas 18, no. 4 (1994): 481-95; and ''The Subjectivity of Structure."

17. Seitz interview, 130. For Duchamp's general views about the changes in the conditions of artistic production, see, in addition to this interview, Cabanne, Dialogues , 93ff, and the Sweeney interview, Writings , 123ff.

18. Interview with Dore Ashton, cited by Adock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass , 19. There are similar ideas in the talk he gave at Hofstra College in May of 1960; see Ephemerides , May 13, 1960.

19. There is an exhaustive monograph on the boxes by Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise , trans. David Britt (New York, 1989).

20. I take most of this information about Duchamp's commercial dealings from Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 244-57 and 259; for the Buenos Aires plans see the letters in Naumann, " Affectueusement, Marcel ." The correspondence between Duchamp and Arensberg where these transactions are discussed is in the Francis Bacon Library, Claremont, California, and Duchamp's letters to Katherine Dreier are in the Beinecke Library, Yale. There is also some information on this aspect of Duchamp's life in the Roché Papers at the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center in the University of Texas, Austin. For an interesting general statement about the relationship of the avant-garde to galleries and the commercial art world, see Robert Jansen, "The Avant-Garde and the Trade in Art," Art Journal 47 (Winter 1988): 360-67. I have also discussed some general aspects of this question in Bohemian Paris .

21. Revue anarchiste , 1893.

22. I think Duchamp's project is easily distinguishable from the practice of earlier artists who provided images of their own work either as studio pictures or as backgrounds in other paintings; Courbet had nothing very similar in mind in his famous picture of his own studio. Since Duchamp, other artists have assembled collections of their work in what one critic calls "self-managed retrospectives"; see Lois E. Nesbitt, "(Self-) Representation (The Artist as Collector and Exhibitor of his own Works)," Arts Magazine 64 (Summer 1990): 61-67. Nesbitt places Duchamp at the beginning of this phenomenon, but I think she takes his opposition to museums too seriously; in any case such opposition was not a major impulse behind the Boîtes .

23. Cabanne, Dialogues , 64.

1. Baruchello and Martin, Why Duchamp? 84.

2. Breton's appreciation can conveniently be found in Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets , 209-11; there is an abridged version in Marcel Jean, ed., The Autobiography of Surrealism (New York, 1980), 84-86. In the original French the crab-apple tree is a "manchineel tree," but the point is the same.

3. Paul Eluard, À Pablo Picasso (Geneva and Paris, 1944), 31-33.

4. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London and New York, 1971).

5. New York Tribune , October 24, 1915; reprinted in Motherwell, ed., New York Dada , 134.

6. Seitz interview, 113.

7. Writings , 31.

8. For this reason, I cannot agree with those, like Molly Nesbit and Thierry de Duve, who find the chief significance of the readymades in their assimilation of art to the forms of modern industry. To make industrial capitalism into a Procrustean bed which all the phenomena of modern life must be stretched to fit is a bootless project, and it provides no purchase on most of the central features of Duchamp's-or any other innovative figure's-career. See Nesbit, "Ready-made Originals: The Duchamp Model," October 37 (1986): 53-64; and de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism , especially chap. 5.

9. John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn., 1967), 105-6. In the long quote, I have not preserved Cage's spacing, which divides the text into four columns across the page, but allows some words to straddle two columns.

10. Henri-Pierre Roché reports it as Beatrice Wood's reaction to considering the Large Glass and the other objects in Duchamp's studio in Victor . In an interesting series of reflections, Annette Michelson compares Duchamp's mental universe to that of an autistic child; see her article, "'Anemic Cinema': Reflections on an Enigmatic Work," Artforum , October, 1973, 64-69.

11. I refer, of course, to Histoire de la folie (Paris, 1961); published in English in an abridged version as Madness and Civilization , trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965).

12. For the interview, Kuenzli, ed., New York Dada , 134; for the proposal about bodily "deferment," Writings , 23.

13. See Cabanne, Dialogues , 80-82. For an interesting general account see Dawn Ades, "Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism," in the volume Duchamp (Barcelona, 1984), issued as the catalogue of the exhibition held in Barcelona in 1984.

14. Seitz interview, 113. There is a good bit of evidence in the entries in Ephemerides that Duchamp took a very negative view of the events of 1968 in Paris.

15. Jean-François Lyotard, Les Transformateurs Duchamp (Paris, 1977), 31. There is a much more outlandish invocation of Duchamp for similar purposes, based on Michel Carrouges's reading of the Large Glass, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix

16. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious , 142; Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism , 191.

17. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1983), 118-19.

18. See Rainer Rochlitz, Subversion et subvention: Art contemporain et argumentation esthétique (Paris, 1994). The last point owes much to Jürgen Habermas; see "Modernity vs. Postmodernity," New German Critique 22 (1981): 3-14.