Duchamp in Context [Hardcover]

Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691055513 | ISBN-13: 978-0691055510 | Publication Date: July 20, 1998

Between 1915 and 1923, Marcel Duchamp created one of the most mystifying art works of the early twentieth century: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass). The work is over nine feet tall, and on its glass surface Duchamp used such unorthodox materials as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, and dust, in addition to more conventional oil paint and varnish. Duchamp's declared subject is the relation between the sexes, but his protagonists are biomechanical creatures: a "Bride" in the upper panel hovers over a "Bachelor Apparatus" in the panel below, stimulating the "Bachelors" with "love gasoline" for an "electrical stripping."

In preparation for the Large Glass, Duchamp wrote hundreds of notes, which he considered just as important as the work itself. He published 178 during his lifetime, but over 100 more notes relating to the Glass were discovered and published following his death. In this landmark book, Linda Henderson provides the first systematic study of the Large Glass in relation to the entire corpus of Duchamp's notes for the project. Since Duchamp declared his interest in creating a "Playful Physics," she focuses on the scientific and technological themes that pervade the notes and the imagery of the Large Glass. In doing so, Henderson provides an unprecedented history of science as popularly known at the turn of the century, centered on late Victorian physics. In addition to electromagnetic waves, including X-rays and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy, the areas of science to which Duchamp responded so creatively ranged from chemistry and classical mechanics to thermodynamics, Brownian movement, radioactivity, and atomic theory. Restored to its context and amplified by the information in the posthumously published notes, the Large Glass appears far richer and more multifaceted and witty than had ever been suspected.

Henderson also includes a close examination of Duchamp's literary and artistic models for creative invention based on science, including Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Frantisek Kupka, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The book will not only redefine scholarship on Duchamp and the Large Glass, but will be a crucial resource for historians of literature, science, and modernism.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Two art historians contribute these most recent additions to the greatly expanding library of Duchamp literature. The more far-reaching of the two is Joselit (Univ. of California, Irvine), who ambitiously attempts to find a "center" for Duchamp's multifarious oeuvre. No other artist of such great influence and importance produced a body of work that is so complex (so constantly turning in on itself), and Joselit feels scholars have too often focused only on one theme, period, or medium. Simply put, Joselit argues that Duchamp's transformations are that center and are "organized around a consistent dynamic or interplay between materiality and its measure or the body and its (self) identification." Along the way he does touch on virtually all periods; his analysis of Duchamp's often neglected linguistic readymades is especially fresh and elucidating. Joselit makes good use of a good deal of recent scholarship, but most of all his achievement is tying a string around Duchamp's plurality. By contrast, Henderson (Univ. of Texas at Austin) focuses on a specific theme, albeit one that Duchamp himself found endlessly fascinating. The author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1975), she seems particularly well qualified to examine how the discussions and discoveries of the early 20th centuryAfrom X-rays, wave theory, and optics to notions of the fourth dimensionAaffected Duchamp's art. While not the first to touch on these matters, Henderson rightly argues that too many previous scholars have ignored the humor in the artist's relation to "playful physics." She also makes use of all the notes on the large glass (including those posthumously published) and brings a broad understanding of turn-of-the-century science to the work. Joselit's work belongs in all art and academic libraries; Henderson deserves a place in larger academic art or history of science collections.ADouglas McClemont, New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

A remarkable new study . . . . I greatly recommend Henderson's book as an exciting exploration of the borders between art and science, as they were traced at the dawn of Moderism by an elliptical genius.
(Arthur C. Danto The Nation )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 520 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (July 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691055513
• ISBN-13: 978-0691055510
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,477,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seeing Through the 'Large Glass', May 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Duchamp in Context (Hardcover)

Marcel Duchamp, the Puck of modern art, left copious notes on the 'Large Glass', which he left 'definively unfinished' in 1923 after seven years' work. The complexity and mischief in this piece, and in Duchamp's wider approach to art, has traditionally been subjected to analysis that places teleological art history ahead of the confusion of cultural history. Linda Henderson's approach places Duchamp in the context of the scientific understanding of the time, and her comprehensive research has cut through to the core questions with which Duchamp engaged.

Looking at the 1920s from our time, we are afflicted by a cultural blindness to ideas that have fallen from favour. Henderson looks beyond the prejudices of orthodoxy, and considers Duchamp's own writings and the popular understanding of science and technology that held sway eighty years ago. This clarifies aspects of the 'Large Glass' on which other writers have been silent; the significance of early wireless technology, the lingering concept of the 'ether', and early cathode-tube researches.

Despite the density and unfamiliarity of the ideas presented, and the inherent difficulty of explaining Duchamp's conceptual barrage, Henderson lively and clear approach is an exemplary and honest engagement with the conditions of art production. In no sense does she engineer the evidence so that a streamlined art-historical position can purr smoothly; she presents the material that informed Duchamp's ideas, shows how he processed this material, and argues persuasively for a Duchamp who responded to his setting rather than a deified modernist who worked in the vacuum of his own genius. Good art history enhances our understanding of art, history, and society. Henderson's honesty, and her sense of scholarly security, make for an invaluable contribution to the literature on a crucial and cunning giant of modern art.