Derrière le miroir: Sur 4 murs (Numéros 107-108-109, 1958)

Expand

IIIFView PDF

Derrière le miroir: Sur 4 murs (Numéros 107-108-109, 1958)

Artist various

Publisher Maeght Éditeur, Paris, 1958

Printer [Imprimerie Union, Paris]? lithographs: [Mourlot Frères, Paris]?

Author various

Author Various artists

Date1958

Dimensionsportfolio: 15 1/2 x 11 7/8 in. (393 x 302mm)
page: 14 13/16 x 11 in. (377 x 279mm)

MediumOriginal prints: lithographs (Miró, Giacometti, Tal Coat, Chagall) Reproductions: collotypes, photolithographs Text: letterpress Paper: cream wove paper

ClassificationBooks

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, and from the Mrs. George W. Stevens Fund

Object number

1997.107

Not on View

Label TextMarcel Duchamp not only designed this catalogue for the 1953 Dada exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, he also assembled and installed the retrospective show. The catalogues were distributed as balls of crushed tissue paper, placed in a wastebasket where they were retrieved by visitors. At New York City’s 1913 Armory Show of modern European art Marcel Duchamp scandalized the American public with his painting Nude Descending a Staircase (Nu descendant un esclalier). The scandal was not, as one might assume by the title, related to the subject of the painting. Duchamp had painted the figure in motion, producing multiple cubist-like figures overlapping as they descend across the canvas. Indeed, it was, in part, because the figure did not resemble a nude woman—but rather a sort of mechanized figure—that the critics and public protested. By the time the French artist came to the United States in 1915, he had given up painting, and his artistic pursuits were becoming even more surreal and conceptual in nature. Duchamp began planning and executing constructions that he called readymades, based on common, manufactured articles (found objects) such as snow shovels, bicycle wheels, and even urinals.. Duchamp returned to Europe in 1919. He made several short trips to the States until the outbreak of World War II. Forced to leave Paris disguised as a cheese merchant, Duchamp settled in the U.S., though he often returned to Paris for short visits, where he died in 1968. This book-object is a quasi-document of Duchamp’s creation of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), one of Duchamp’s major assemblages and most important works. The book-object itself is an assemblage consisting of loose page gatherings; a book; a torn-paper collage; paper patterned with reproductions of Duchamp’s artworks; and a construction enclosing a reproduction of The Large Glass under acrylic. On the front cover is a reproduction, in smaller scale, of an “imitated readymade”—a facsimile of a sign often attached to Paris apartment houses, which gives the book-object its title. When opened, the linen-bound case includes, on the left, a partition with magnetic closing for a collotype print with pochoir (stencil) coloring of The Large Glass under an acrylic sheet, and a collotype reproduction of the first pencil sketch for the work. On the right there is a compartment for the book with a signed self-portrait by Duchamp, a print of the Large Glass colored and signed by Duchamp, and a box with a pochoir print of a readymade also signed by Duchamp.