"A duplicate or a mechanical
repetition has the same value as the original."
Marcel Duchamp
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Marcel Duchamp and the Lure of the Copy
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents - Marcel Duchamp and the Lure of the Copy, - until March 18 - curated by Paul B. Franklin, a Paris-based art historian and an internationally acclaimed expert on the life and work of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). This is the very first exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection devoted exclusively to Duchamp, among the most influential and innovative artists of the twentieth century and a longtime friend and adviser to the American patron Peggy Guggenheim.
Marcel Duchamp - de ou par - Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy
Boite-en-valise - Box in a Valise - 1935-41
Photograph courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Peggy Guggenheim Collection - Venice - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation - New York
Peggy Guggenheim Collection - Venice - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation - New York
The show features some sixty artworks dating from 1911 to 1968. These include iconic objects from the permanent collection of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, such as Nude (Sketch), Sad Young Man in a Train (1911) and the Box in a Valise (1935–41), as well as from other Italian and American institutions. The exhibition also presents several lesser-known artworks in private hands, including the artist’s estate. Furthermore, fully half of the pieces on display come from the distinguished Venetian collection of the late Attilio Codognato, who first took an interest in Duchamp’s work in the early 1970s.
Marcel Duchamp - Dedication to Peggy Guggenheim
in her copy of the from or by
Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy - Box in a valise - 1935-41
cat.6 - deluxe edition - no. i?XX - January 1941
“I needed much help and advice, which I got from an old friend, Marcel Duchamp . . . I don’t know what I would have done without him . . . I have to thank him for my introduction to the modern art world.”
Peggy Guggenheim
Confessions of an Art Addict - 1960
Peggy Guggenheim met Marcel Duchamp in Paris around 1923. Beginning in the fall of 1937, the artist was one of her most trusted mentors and advisors, as she set out to launch the art gallery Guggenheim Jeune, which opened in London on January 24, 1938, and soon after to build her own collection of modern art. In her memoirs - Confessions of an Art Addict - 1960 - Guggenheim recalled: “I needed much help and advice, which I got from an old friend, Marcel Duchamp . . . I don’t know what I would have done without him . . . I have to thank him for my introduction to the modern art world.” Guggenheim was also one of Duchamp’s early patrons, acquiring the first copy of the deluxe edition of Box in a Valise in 1941 - above.
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp - A Propos de jeune soeur
Apropos of Little Sister - front and back - October 1911
Duchamp, despite having executed some of the most recognizable canvases of the twentieth century, such as Le Roi et la reine entourés de nus vites - The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes - 1912 - above - abandoned easel painting in 1918 at the age of thirty-one. For the next fifty years, he engaged in multiple creative acts, virtually none of which was considered high art at the time. In addition to those endeavors, he repeatedly reproduced his own work in different media and on various scales. These meticulously executed copies enabled him to disseminate his otherwise modest output without generating anything indisputably new. As a result, he also deftly circumvented the voracious art market.
Marcel Duhamp - Le roi et la reine entoure de nus vites
The King and Queen Sourrounded by Swift Nudes - May 1912
La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires meme
The Bride Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
Green Box - commonly known - 1934
Man Ray - born Emmanuel Radnitzky - Marcel Duchamp in his studio holding
Glissiere contentant un moulin a eau - en metaux voisons
Glicer Containing a Water Mill - in Neighboring Metals 1913-1915 - December 1923
Marcel Duchamp
Cover design for Transition: a Quarterly Review - no. 26 - Winter 1937 Periodical
Peigne - Comb - 1964 replica of 1916 original
On a cotton dish towel screen-printed with a kitschy reproduction of the Mona Lisa, Duchamp, added a mustache and a goatee. In the lower right half, he collaged a miniature paper painter's palette and brush, on which he inscribed l'envers de la pienture, the wrong side of the painting. When furthermore turned over the cotton towel - a surrogate canvas - viewed on the wrong side - the Mona Lisa would appear backwards or a' l'envers. These two Mona Lisa, one besmirched by Duchamp and the other the wrong way around - both signify - l'envers de la pienture - because neither is a faithful copy of the original.
Marcel Duchamp - L'envers de la pienture - ca. 1955
screen-printed dish towel with ink and paper additions
Trap - replica of lost 1917 original - 1964
Paul B. Franklin
curator
Marcel Duchamp - Variations on Optical Disks - 1938
Marcel Duchamp Couverture-Cigarettes
Front and back cover design for the deluxe edition of
La Septieme face du de: poemes-decoupages - printed May 25 - 1936
“As for distinguishing the real from the fake,
the imitation from the copy,
those are totally idiotic technical questions.”
Marcel Duchamp
1967
In reproducing his work in different media, on various scales, and in limited editions, Duchamp illustrated that certain duplicates and the originals from which they were replicated offered comparable forms of aesthetic pleasure. In so doing, Duchamp also redefined what constitutes a work of art and, by extension, the identity of the artist. Throughout his oeuvre, he continually called into question the traditional hierarchy between original and copy. For Duchamp, the ideas embodied in a work of art were of equal significance as the physical object itself. The importance that he accorded to aesthetic concepts inspired him to reproduce his own work repeatedly and with meticulous exactitude, beginning with the - Boîte de 1914 - Box of 1914 - 1913–14/15 - a series of photographic facsimiles of handwritten notes, and continuing into the 1960s, with replicas of his historic readymades.
Marcel Duchamp - de ou par - Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy
Boite-en-valise - Box in a Valise -
conceived - 1935-41 - series F - assembled 1966
Marcel Duchamp and the Lure of the Copy offers a rare opportunity to examine a significant selection of the artist’s works in relation to one another, an exercise, as Duchamp frequently argued, essential to comprehending his aesthetic project. In so doing, not only can one discern the intricate visual, thematic, and conceptual connections that unify them as an oeuvre, but also one can grasp the extent to which these whimsical, often-hybrid “items” troubled and sometimes totally escaped standard artistic classifications in use at the time of their conception.
Marcel Duchamp - Apolinere Enameled
printer's proof - replica of 1916-17 original - 1965
Paul B. Franklin and Karole Vail