1. All biographical résumés register this significant event. For a specific example, see Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 116. All further references to this work are abbreviated as DMD , page number.

2. Thomas B. Hess in a set of point/counterpoint arguments suggests that Duchamp was a "second-rate painter," only to counter this claim with the equally exalted proposition that he did create "two or three masterpieces of

modern art"; see Thomas Hess, "J'Accuse Marcel Duchamp," in Masheck, Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, 116-17.

3. Commenting on this offer, Duchamp explains to Cabanne: "I said no, and I wasn't rich, either. I could have very well accepted ten thousand dollars, but no, I sensed the danger right away. I had been able to avoid it until then. In 1915-16, I was twenty-nine, so I was old enough to protect myself. I'm telling you this simply to explain my attitude. It would be the same today, if I were offered a hundred thousand dollars to do something" ( DMD , 106).

4. Duchamp's interest in chance was mediated through his contacts with Picabia in 1913. While Duchamp shares with the Dada movement an interpretation of chance as a "new stimulus to artistic creation," and as a "mental phenomenon," he does not pursue its psychological elaboration, as evidenced by the Surrealist appropriation of the term. Hans Richter observes that Duchamp's formulation and employment of chance in the case of the ready-mades is Cartesian; see Hans Richter, Dada Art and Anti-Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). For Richter's discussion of Dada, chance, and Duchamp, see esp. 50-64, 88.

5. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 19.

6. Thierry de Duve, for instance, argues that it is during Duchamp's visit to Munich that he attempts to work out his "passage" through and secession from Cubism, which later leads to his abandonment of painting as a métier; see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 96-118.

7. This interest in art is evident throughout the entire family. Duchamp's maternal grandfather was a painter and engraver, and he suggests that his mother was an artist as well, who did "Strasbourgs on paper" ( DMD , 20). Among his siblings, Jacques Villon became a painter and engraver, Duchamp-Villon a sculptor, and his sister, Suzanne Duchamp, a painter.

8. For an analysis of François Villon's poetry and its impact on Duchamp, see Jean Clair, "Villon: Mariage, hasard et pendaison," in Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire: Approches critiques, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, 1977), 201-2.

9. By the time Duchamp expressed an interest in art, following in his brothers' footsteps, his father even agreed to help him financially ( DMD , 20). As a

notary he devised a system by which current expenditures were to be deducted from the future inheritance, so as to assure equitable division among all his children.

10. Marcel Duchamp, "A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel Duchamp, Iconoclast," Arts and Decoration 5, no. 2 (September 1915): 428; reprinted in Studio International 189 (January-February 1975): 29.

11. Robert Lebel observes that Duchamp's reluctance to engage with Cubism as a school is shared by his reluctance to affiliate himself with the futurists, despite his interest in kinetics and the machine; see his Marcel Duchamp, trans. George H. Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 7-9.

12. See Duchamp's comments in his interview with James Johnson Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans in America," The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 13, nos. 4-5 (1946): 20.

13. Arturo Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," in Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975), v-vi.

14. Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," ii.

15. See Willis Domingo's discussion of Duchamp's Symbolist phase in "Meaning in the Art of Duchamp," Artforum (De cember 1971): 74.

16. Lawrence Steefel, Jr., "The Position of La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (19 15-1923) in the Stylistic and Iconographic Development of the Art of Marcel Duchamp" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1960), 85.

17. Letter of 28 January 1951 in the Archives of the Francis Bacon Foundation, Claremont, California, quoted in Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, iii.

18. For an analysis of Duchamp's interest in electricity, particularly as it relates to The Large Glass, see Robert Lebel, "Marcel Duchamp and Electricity at Large: The Dadaist Version of Electricity," in Electra: L'Electricité et l'électronique dans l'art au XXe siècle (Paris: Les Amis du Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1983), 164—73.

19. The Winston Dictionary (Philadelphia and New York: The John C. Winston Co., 1957), 65.

20. For an analysis of the erosion of "aura" in the modern period, see Walter Benjamin's seminal essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 220-25.

21. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 27.

22. For a history of the female nude as object of male spectatorship and desire, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 45-64. See also Laura Mulvey's seminal analysis of spectatorship and gender in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6-18. For the nude as an erotic genre in Manet, see T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York; Knopf, 1985), 119-31.

23. Quoted in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 256.

24. For Duchamp's discussion of the influence of Marey's chronophotography on the Nude, see DMD, 34-35.

25. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. R. Phillips and D. Gardner (New York: Seaver Books/The Viking Press, 1978), 2.

26. See Duchamp's qualification of abstraction in the Nude as more Cubist than Futurist ( DMD, 28-29).

27. Jules Laforgue's poem reads: "Pock-marked sun, bright yellow skimmer,/The laughing stock of the heartless stars!"; quoted in Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., "Marcel Duchamp's 'Encore à cet astre': A New Look," Art Journal 36, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 29, n.9.

28. I am referring here to the legal definition of "descent."

29. Masheck, "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 7.

30. Mario Perniola, "Between Clothing and Nudity," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989), vol. 2, 237.

31. Prints are the first multiples in the history of art, works that are serial in nature and whose value, like photographs, is based on the number of printings.

32. Paz, Appearance, 7-8.

33. Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans," 20.

34. Katherine Kuh, "Marcel Duchamp," In The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 81.

35. Kuh, "Duchamp," 92.

36. The serial nature of these works, involving both paintings and sketches, resembles the serial nature of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.

37. Duchamp's devotion to chess resulted in his publication of a book on pawn and king endings, written with the German chess master Vital Halberstadt and entitled Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled (Paris: L'Echiquier,

1932). See Francis M. Naumann's discussion in "Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites," Dada/Surrealism 16 (1987): 32-37; reprinted in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. R. Kuenzli and F. M. Naumann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 32-37. For the most comprehensive study in the area of art and chess, see Hubert Damisch, "The Duchamp Defense," trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, no. 10 (Fall 1979): 5-28.

38. In the right-hand corner of the image, the grid of a fence can be seen through the bushes, thereby reinforcing the sense of a measuring device.

39. For an analysis of the chessboard and Renaissance perspective, see Jean Clair, "L'échiquier, les modernes et la quatrième dimension," Revue de l'art, no. 3 (1978): 59-6l.

40. Francis Roberts, "I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics," Art News 67, no. 8 (December 1968): 63.

41. Quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970), 68.

42. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63.

43. I am referring here to Harold Bloom's formulation of the anxiety or burden of tradition on creative artists: see his The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). My strategic reading relies on a materialist understanding of the field of artistic production in line with Pierre Bourdieu's elaboration in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and with an introduction by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 55-61, 106-11.

44. Quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 260.

45. Kuh, "Duchamp," 88. John Golding attributes the originality of this work to his new intellectual and personal encounters, specifically Duchamp's meeting with Francis Picabia at the Salon d'Automne (1911) and later, Apollinaire; see John Golding, Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (London: Penguin Press, 1973), 45-47.

46. As Duchamp explains: "The word 'swift' ( vite ) had been used in sports; if a man ran 'swift,' he ran well. This amused me. 'Swift' is less involved with literature than 'at high speed'" ( DMD, 35-36).

47. Paz, Appearance, 9.

48. De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism, 44.

49. From the Museum of Modern Art questionnaire about the Three Standard Stoppages, Artist's Files, undated but according to Naumann, written shortly

after the acquisition of this work by the museum; see Francis M. Naumann, "Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, nn. 16, 17.

50. The meter, as a unit of length, is approximately the tenth-millionth part of a quadrant of a terrestrial meridian. The International Standard meter is defined as the precise distance between two indentations on a platinum-iridium bar, which is kept under temperature control (at 0°C.). The International Prototype Meter Bar at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, France, is a device that resembles Duchamp's work in several significant ways: 1) it is defined as a system of recorded impressions, 2) it is constituted as a series of three tubular templates, and 3) these tubes are molded upon each other so as to be boxed together in a tube.

51. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62.

52. Naumann, "Reconciliation," 30.

53. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 62-63.

54. Ibid., 63.

55. Mary Ann Caws suggests that Duchamp's gesture may be indebted to Mallarmé's throw of dice; see Caws's "Mallarmé and Duchamp: Mirror, Stair, and Gaming Table," L'Esprit créateur 20, no. 2. (Summer 1980): 53; reprinted in The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

56. Carol P. James, "Duchamp's Silent Noise/ Music for the Deaf," Dada and Surrealism 16 (1987); reprinted in Artist of the Century, ed. R. Kuenzli and F. Naumann, 110.

57. Michel Sanouillet, Duchamp du signe: Ecrits (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 52-53.

58. James, "Silent Noise," 111.

59. The first public exhibition of this work was at the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926.

60. Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 28.

61. The critical approaches to The Large Glass range from André Breton's inaugural reading of the work as a mechanist and unsentimental speculation on eroticism (1928; rpt. 1959); a symptomatic myth of modernity (Carrouges, 1954); a representation of barren love (Lebel, 1959); a linguistic and interpretative puzzle (Paz, 1973); as well as alchemical and esoteric interpretations

(Schwarz, 1970; Burnham, 1974; Calvesi, 1975); psychoanalytic interpretations (Held, 1973); N-dimensional geometry (Adcock, 1983); and perspective/optics (Clair, 1975).

62. For Duchamp's interest in popular culture, and specifically in catalogs and almanacs, see Michel Sanouillet, "Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition," in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, 53-54.

63. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 67.

64. The Box of 1914 is a commercial Kodak container for photographs, which holds the photograph of one drawing and sixteen manuscript notes. For an analysis of Duchamp's boxes, see Dawn Ades, "Marcel Duchamp's Portable Museum," in Marcel Duchamp's Travelling Box (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1982), 5.

65. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63.

66. The Green Box (1934) contains 94 photos, facsimile notes, diagrams, and calculations which are related to the planning and execution of the Glass. It was followed by a third collection of notes, À l'Infinitif (1966), also known as the White Box because of the color of its cover, which contains additional notes on the fourth dimension and non-Euclidian geometry.

67. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 63.

68. Richard Hamilton, "The Large Glass," 60.

69. Quoted by Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 12.

70. Quoted by Calvin Tomkins, Bride and Bachelors, 24.

71. Roberts, "Laws of Physics," 46.

72. When the Glass cracked while in transit, these glass strips described as the "Bride's garment," "Gilled cooler," or simply, "Horizon,'' were replaced by a thin strip of glass held between two aluminum bars, to provide additional support.

73. The string lines on the chocolate drums allude to the second version of the work, The Chocolate Grinder, No. 2 (1914, oil and thread on canvas).

74. Marcel Duchamp, letter of 21 May 1915; reprinted in Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy, 1887-1968, ed. and with an introduction by Pontus Hulten, texts by Jenifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

75. See Paul Matisse's observation regarding Duchamp's manipulation of the meaning of conventional words through illogical modifiers in "Some More

Nonsense about Duchamp," Art in America 68, no. 4 (April 1980): 81.

76. Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans," 21.

77. "Marcel Duchamp Speaks," an interview by George H. Hamilton and Richard Hamilton with comments by Charles Mitchell, broadcast by the Third Programme of the BBC, in the series Art, Anti-Art (1959); quoted in Arturo Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," xv.

78. For the most significant and comprehensive study of Duchamp's interest in N-dimensional geometry, see Craig Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).

79. For a description of the two versions of the Chocolate Grinder (the first painted perspectively, the second painted with added thread sewn to the canvas), see Schwarz, "Eros c'est la vie," Marcel Duchamp, xxi, and Richard Hamilton's discussion of its transposition to the Glass, "Large Glass," 60-61.

80. For a comprehensive analysis of Duchamp's interest in perspective, see Jean Clair's remarkable study "Marcel Duchamp et la tradition des perspecteurs," Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire, 124-59.

81. Theodore Reff notes the resemblance of this work to Leonardo's experiments with dust as a miniature terrain in "Duchamp and Leonardo: L.H.O.O.Q.-Alikes," Art in America 1 (January-February 1977): 87.

82. Richard Hamilton suggests that the "breeding of colors" comes closest to his ideal of the Glass as a "greenhouse, in which transparent colors, as ephemeral as perfumes, will emerge, flourish, ripen, and decay like flowers and fruits"; see ''Large Glass," 66.

83. For an analysis of the Nine Malic Molds and dressmaking, see Olivier Micha, "Duchamp et la couture," in Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire, ed. Jean Clair, 33-34.

84. Olivier Micha also notes the sexual ambiguity implicit in the conception of the dressmaker's pattern as a mold, in "Duchamp et la couture," 33.

85. I am referring here to another meaning of livery, in English law, which signifies the ceremonial delivery of possession of real property made upon the property itself.

86. Hamilton, "Large Glass," 60.

87. See Camfield's account of Duchamp's exhibit and Walter Hopps's comments in William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain (Houston: The Menil Collection, Houston Fine Arts Press, 1989).