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.