The Large Glass and related works with nine original etchings by Marcel Duchamp on the theme of the lovers (Volume II)

Author: Bert Jansen

A second volume of The Large Glass and Related Works (Volume I) appeared a year later, likewise in an edition of 150, in which gallerist Arturo Schwarz examined the formal and psychological starting points of Duchamp’s early work. Duchamp illustrated this publication with nine etchings, The Lovers, in which love and eroticism were key – a returning theme in his oeuvre. The linen slip-cover is signed three times by Rrose Sélavy. Most of the prints consist of references to key works from art history that Duchamp satirized mischievously. In Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss (1889), for example, he moved the man’s hand from the woman’s thigh and stuck it between her legs. He also combined two works, as in the case of Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808) and the Turkish Bath (1862), both paintings by Dominique Ingres, in which Oedipus’s pointing hand encircles a breast of a woman from the Turkish Bath. For the etching after the painting Adam and Eve (1533) by Lucas Cranach he used a Man Ray photograph of Ciné Sketch, the performance on 31 December 1924 in which Duchamp adopted the pose of Adam alongside the likewise nude model Bronja Perlmutter during the interval of Francis Picabia’s Surrealist ballet Relâche.^[1]

Duchamp’s visual rhymes can be compared to the wordplay in the titles of the readymades and in the captions to the humorous prints he made until 1910. A linguistic example of this kind is also present in this set of prints; in the etching after Femme aux bas blancs (1864) by Gustave Courbet, a painting that gives a revealing look at the nether regions of a woman taking off her stockings. Duchamp combined that image with a falcon that watches with interest. ‘Un vrai con et un faux con’, said Duchamp of this print where con means ‘falcon’ as well as an obscene word for the female genitals.^[2] This etching would prove to be a prelude to the work Étant donnés (1946-66), which only came to light after Duchamp’s death; it places the viewer in a position similar to the falcon’s. This installation is displayed opposite Le Grand Verre in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The viewer looks through a gate like a voyeur and sees beyond it a scene with a nude woman lying in a landscape.

One etching in The Lovers series is not an art-historical quotation. It shows a naked woman at a prie-dieu. In the second etching run the background is shaded dark apart from the area around the girl. In a preliminary study for the second etching run Duchamp gave the instruction that this outline had to look like a wedding dress and veil. ‘The bride is finally stripped bare’, he said when he saw the result, referring to the title of La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre).^[3]