Marcel Duchamp: A Retrospective Exhibition

The first solo exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s work was staged in the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in 1963. The artist was then seventy-six. It is evidence that Duchamp’s work did not attract widespread interest until the end of his life. This discovery or rediscovery of his oeuvre came about in the context of the new art trends and movements of the 1960s: Neo-Dada, Nouveau Réalisme, Pop Art, Op Art, Fluxus and conceptual art. Previously Duchamp’s work had only been seen in group exhibitions of Surrealism and Dada. The fact that Duchamp attracted the attention of a new generation of artists is also clear in photographs of the opening in Pasadena. Many artists who would soon break through internationally were present. One was Andy Warhol, who had exhibited his series of Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings (1962) in the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles the year before, along with artists from the West Coast such as Ed Ruscha, Billy Bengtson, Dennis Hopper, Larry Bell and Edward Kienholz.^[1] The British Pop artist Richard Hamilton, who three years later would stage The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp in London, was also at the opening.

The catalogue and the poster for the exhibition in Pasadena refer to other works and catalogues by Duchamp in which his oeuvre was ‘packaged’. The poster was a repeat of Wanted, the poster he made in 1923 when he left the United States. He replaced the photographs of a wanted criminal with photographs of himself and added his alter ego Rrose Sélavy to the list of aliases. This time he wrote ‘By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy’ and ‘at the Pasadena Art Museum’ beside it in black ink. He had the same signature printed in red on the cover of the catalogue over an illustration of the first sketch of Le Grand Verre (1915-23), the key work in Duchamp’s oeuvre. He had drawn this sketch in Paris in 1913-14 and taken it with him when he went to New York in 1915. The olive green background would later return on the cover of La boîte verte (see no. 36), in which the sketch and other notes for Le Grand Verre were brought together. The title, in English, is identical to that of La boîte-en-valise (see no. 41) which, like this exhibition, was a collection of his oeuvre in one place. The content of the catalogue is also reminiscent of an earlier retrospective of his work, in book form. The object texts are actually photocopies of the list of works in Sur Marcel Duchamp (no. 42), the 1959 catalogue by Robert Lebel which for this occasion in Pasadena was updated with handwritten additions and corrections. This series shows how much attention Duchamp devoted to the design of posters and catalogues in which he presented his oeuvre and how in their turn these forms of presentation became part of his oeuvre.