The Brooklyn Rail

In 1964, four years before his death, Marcel Duchamp sat for a slide lecture called “Apropos of Myself” and walked an audience in Saint Louis through his career. The retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art begins where Duchamp himself opted to start his story. Not with his urinal, shattered glass, or his nudes, but with his Church at Blainville—an oil he painted in the summer of 1902, at the tender age of fifteen—depicting the fifteenth-century Saint-Michel in the Norman village where he was born. The painting is a tall, quiet canvas. The church sits back behind a tree that climbs the whole left edge, its leaves broken into the wet, bright lush greens of Impressionism. Sun warms the near gable to cream and pale ochre, the long roof falls away into a tender slate blue, and the two lancet windows of the transept dissolve into tonal shadow rather than resolving into anything as devout as tracery. At the peak, almost incidental against the flat sky, a small cross. A path enters at the lower right and goes somewhere or nowhere. It is an immutable Sunday, observed in the open air, signed in the corner by the man who would spend the next sixty years teaching the world that the eye was the enemy and that he had never much cared for paint.

That sentence is, more or less, the official story. And like most official stories about Duchamp, it is the work of a church erected in his name rather than historical reality. Around this artist a remarkable thing has happened: not one orthodoxy but several, overlapping, each canonizing a different article of faith, each requiring that some part of the actual work be kept out of view. There is the sect that venerates the readymade as the great unmasking of art-as-commodity, the urinal that shamed the marketplace. There is the sect for whom the abandonment of “retinal” painting in favor of “cerebral” art was an evolutionary ascent, mind shedding the dead weight of the hand. There is the sect that takes “the spectator makes the work” as a settled law of reception, a democratic gift. And there is the sect that crowns him the founding father of institutional critique, the installateur of the great leap from work to frame. The doctrines overlap and sometimes contradict, but they share a method: each one edits him dogmatically to make him fit into their orthodoxy.

MoMA’s retrospective—the first of its scale in North America in more than fifty years, organized by Ann Temkin, Michelle Kuo, and Matthew Affron—is an irreverent exhibition, which is harder than it sounds when the subject is a man whose admirers have spent decades polishing him into the messiah of art after modernism. The curators decline to genuflect, and they decline to debunk; they simply put the work in front of you and let it be stranger than its reputation. Armed with chronology as the organizing logic, strict and unforgiving, they allow us to watch the mind of the great mystic of demystification move in real time: changing gears, doubling back, worrying over the same few problems for sixty years, abandoning painting only to keep its questions alive by other means.

Take, for instance, the question of color, largely overlooked by many of his acolytes. It is worth dwelling on because color is where the gap between what Duchamp said and what Duchamp did opens widest. By 1910, the boy who painted a church in tender blue-grey is making the Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel in violent reds and acid greens, a halo of pure pigment swimming around the doctor’s hand; then he cycles through Paul Cezanne, then Paul Gauguin, as if to give each master three months in his restless and slightly Napoleonic quest to create a masterpiece. Here, the press has fallen into a trap of its own making, bickering over whether a boy of a little over twenty years of age was a “good” painter or a “bad” one, as though the early work were a skills exam he either passed or flunked. It is the wrong question. Instead, watch the color across the whole sequence unfold, watch when it goes underground only to get stranger. In Tu m' (1918), he paints a row of overlapping color samples, a hand-rendered paint chart, color rationalized into a measuring instrument. In the Rotary Glass Plates (1920) and Discs Bearing Spirals (1923), he engineers machines to study what color does to the eye in motion. In the Green Box (1934) notes he distinguishes “apparent” colors from “native” ones, theorizes pigments whose hue inheres in the molecule rather than the light. And the 324 Boîtes-en-valise, issued in several series between 1941 and 1971, supposedly the driest archival gesture of all, turn out to have been hand-tinted through as many as thirty zinc stencils apiece, the artist crossing a continent to take color notes from his own canvases in the Arensbergs’s house rather than trust his memory, signing the results “Marcel Coloravit”—Marcel colored this. This is not a man who left the retina behind in 1912. This is a man who spent sixty years obsessed with how color is made, faked, measured, preserved, and perceived. The eye, in other words, never yielded to the mind; the two were yoked together by the insistence on manual labor. The myth of his ascent from eye to mind has exactly one author, and it is Duchamp—whose enigmatic pronouncements have been received as doctrine, ever since, and set above the evidence of his own relentless hands.

If the color tells you the eye never closed, the next rooms tell you something the disciples like even less: that the great demystifier was trafficking, from the start, in sacred materials. Signs abound once you stop closing your eyes. Paradise (1910–11) is Adam and Eve. Baptism (1911) is a sacrament. A boy raised in the last French generation drilled in Catholic belief in a state schoolroom carried his catechism into the avant-garde and never put it down. The point is not to claim him as an avowed Christian but to understand that the work kept the sacramental form long after faith might have receded, the way a language survives the empire that spread it. The place to watch him indulge is the triptych at the heart of these galleries—the “Virgin” drawings, The Passage from Virgin to Bride, and Bride, made in Munich in the summer of 1912. Duchamp spent that summer going almost daily to the Gothic nudes of Lucas Cranach the Elder—the prodigious painter of the Reformation, the man who went on making images of the sacred body in the very moment Protestant iconoclasm was smashing them, who found a way for the image to survive its own stripping.

Like Cranach, the initial stripping in Duchamp is frankly carnal: The Passage is a kind of ritual vivisection, dissected flaps and tubes and filaments worked under a velvety, hand-kneaded skin, a robotic voyeur peering into the viscera; Bride is a mechanized flayed body in pink mucus tones, a glimpse straight into the mechanism of sex. What the works stage is not a debunking but a transfiguration—the Annunciation’s passage from Virgin to bride rendered as the problem Roberto Matta said Duchamp had solved: how to paint not a thing, but the “moment of change, change itself.” The Cubist question of how a body occupies space and the Futurist question of how it moves through time are folded, in these canvases, into the oldest Christian question there is: how flesh becomes spirit.

There is an easy rebuke in the Duchampian catechism: he was just joking. The crosses and brides and assumptions are parody, the sacred dragged in only to be mocked. Duchamp was certainly a relentless ironist, who called the Large Glass an “agricultural machine,” a “delay in glass”—anything to keep you from saying the word “painting.” But watch what the irony is asked to cover. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), the work the Munich triptych was climbing toward, built over nine years on two panes of glass nine feet tall, is where his question of transfiguration found its architecture: lead wire, dust, and oil suspended in glass—a vitrail, his “definitely unfinished” cathedral. The Bride floats above as an “apotheosis of virginity,” a “four-dimensional” being, as he put it, that the bachelors below can never reach; the lower panel is the secular, measurable world grinding at its thwarted desire. Lower world, upper spirit, the body translated across a threshold it cannot cross by its own power—the “Assumption of the Virgin,” which is what Sidney Janis, looking without the need to laugh, called it in 1945. Crucially, the Glass comes with a key. Duchamp supplied a diagram through his etchings, reprinted as illustration in the exhibition, naming and locating every element. This is not a work liberating the spectator but an instruction to do what a worshipper does to a church window, an iconography of symbols decoded panel by panel to stage the enigmatic. Duchamp’s irony was never the opposite of seriousness; it was the alibi that let him be serious about the one thing he admitted was serious—“eroticism,” he said, “because that is serious”—without kneeling in any church but his own.

This is a tremendous exhibition, and the reason is everything I have not had room to say: there is the great demystifier of the commodity franchising himself, editioning his catalogue into a salable object decades before any museum got around to do a retrospective. There is the artisan who designated a snow shovel to be art but then spent almost a decade tinting miniature replicas of those very readymades, painstakingly reproducing each crack of the Large Glass by hand. Not to mention Denise Brown Hare’s documentation of Étant donnés (1946–66) and its accompanying manual, the diorama he allegedly worked on for twenty years in secret, a Paradise frozen at the instant of the Fall. The irreverence of the exhibition is that it declines to hand us Duchamp the messiah—the figure who arrives to enlighten us about the market, or to redeem painting into pure thought, or to free the spectator, or to father the critique of the museum. Instead, it lets the colorist and the iconoclast, the franchiser and the ascetic, the joker and the perfectionist all stand in the same rooms, unreconciled, and trusting that you will keep looking.

Duchamp once said that with The Bush (1910) he had begun treating the title of a painting as an “invisible color,” a pigment added to the canvas that no eye could find. His words were never a verdict standing above the work but one material among others to be met the way the whole of his art asks to be met: believed and disbelieved all at once. This is the old Baroque trick, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble made breath—seeing is believing, just don’t trust your eyes.