Mariée

Author: Bert Jansen

In 1912 Marcel Duchamp showed his painting Nu descendant un escalier 2 (1911-12) at a group exhibition of work by the artists’ collective Section d’Or.^[1] His artist friends and his brothers criticized the work, probably because the suggestion of movement called to mind Italian Futurism, which was seen as a rival to Cubism. Duchamp withdrew the painting from the exhibition and from then on was never part of an artists’ group. Instead he began to question the very nature of painting. This insight occurred during and soon after a solitary stay of three months in Munich, where he made his last Cubist works: two drawings entitled Vierge (1912) and the paintings Le passage de la vierge a la mariée (1912) and Mariée (1912). The Mariée shown here is a repeat of the latter painting. Duchamp had this lithograph printed in 1935 so it could be included in La boîte verte (see La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Boîte verte)). He also had a limited number of extra copies made in which the margin – which is usually cut off – remained below the lithograph. On it he stuck a French 5-centimes tax stamp on which he placed his signature and dated it ‘oct 1937’.

The titles of the 1912 paintings suggest a change from a chaste to a sexually active life. In the different works Duchamp was seeking an ever stronger concentration in the composition by leaving out the shadow and the details in the background. This is continued in the bride in Le Grand Verre (1915-23), in which all the background elements of the preliminary studies from Munich are as it were dissolved in the transparent glass. In one of his notes Duchamp described Le Grand Verre as a skeleton on an X-ray. He called it a retard en verre, a delay in glass. What remains is a shadow of a four-dimensional virtual image. In his notes Duchamp identified its components in an associative, poetic way: he refers to a ‘wasp with a secretion of love gasoline’ and of the ‘sparks of the desire magneto’. This mechanized view of sex is also present in the painting Mariée. The figure appears to be constructed from an assortment of engine parts and internal organs. And it is painted in the same way; without expression and with the precision of a technical draughtsman.

On his return to Paris in the autumn of 1912 he gave the painting to his friend Francis Picabia, the husband of Gabrielle Buffet, the woman he was secretly in love with and whom he may have had in mind when he was devising the bride.^[2] We also know of a number of drawings Picabia did in subsequent years in which the woman and her sexual activity are depicted as a machine; with electrical wiring and with engine parts like a spark plug or a cylinder.