Marcel Duchamp and His Women

My interest in Duchamp most likely stems from my long-ago romance with an artist (now deceased) who could plausibly claim to be one of Duchamp’s descendants. My ex had great ambitions for his art, which he mostly achieved, although he worried that his unattractive appearance would pose a serious obstacle to his career. He would complain that Duchamp and Picasso were spectators. What about him?

“Duchamp was a handsome Norman,” Peggy Guggenheim wrote in her memoir, Out of this century. “Every woman in Paris wanted to sleep with him.” Even though Guggenheim was obsessed with him, many did so anyway. (Instead, she benefited from his advice and connections from 1938, when she opened her first gallery in London, knowing little about modern art.)

Mysterious, elegant, courteous, creatively open but emotionally reserved, as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa (a postcard he transformed into another infamous readymade), Duchamp was the kind of man who inspired mad, often unrequited love. “Marcel, Marcel, I love you so much,” the German-born, Greenwich Village-based artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhofen would recite at Dada soirees…and she probably meant it literally. (The MoMA exhibition includes a 1920 photograph of her portrait of Duchamp, which includes feathers, springs and fish bait, all balancing precariously in a wine glass.)

Of course, he must have had some affection for his great patron and supporter, Katherine Dreier. Catherine Durrell co-founded the Anonymous Society with Duchamp and Man Ray in the 1920s to promote modern art, but he carefully maintained the friendship over three decades.

However, Duchamp was not immune to the influence of love. Since art historians often view stylistic shifts in Picasso’s work as developing in tandem with his important romantic encounters – see Sue Roy’s recent group biography, hidden portrait: Six women who shaped Picasso’s life—I wonder whether a consideration of the women who, for a while at least, were among this most elusive of modernists would have produced similar results. After all, Rrose Selavy’s name is a pun in French: Éros, this is life. (“Eros is life.”) What impact did Eros have on Duchamp’s creation?

At the Museum of Modern Art, as I listened to the experimental music composed by Duchamp, I was reminded of Gabrielle Buffett-Picabia, an accomplished musician who gave up her promising composition career after marrying the painter Frances Picabia. The couple’s passionate love triangle with Duchamp (described in the novel by sisters Anne and Claire Berest, Gabriel) ignited a strong creative passion in Duchamp and Picabia for many years; all three subsequently established a lifelong friendship.