Duchamp in Context - Hardcover

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691055513 ISBN 13: 9780691055510

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Between 1915 and 1923, Marcel Duchamp created one of the most mystifying art works of the early twentieth century: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass). The work is over nine feet tall, and on its glass surface Duchamp used such unorthodox materials as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, and dust, in addition to more conventional oil paint and varnish. Duchamp's declared subject is the relation between the sexes, but his protagonists are biomechanical creatures: a "Bride" in the upper panel hovers over a "Bachelor Apparatus" in the panel below, stimulating the "Bachelors" with "love gasoline" for an "electrical stripping."


In preparation for the Large Glass, Duchamp wrote hundreds of notes, which he considered just as important as the work itself. He published 178 during his lifetime, but over 100 more notes relating to the Glass were discovered and published following his death. In this landmark book, Linda Henderson provides the first systematic study of the Large Glass in relation to the entire corpus of Duchamp's notes for the project. Since Duchamp declared his interest in creating a "Playful Physics," she focuses on the scientific and technological themes that pervade the notes and the imagery of the Large Glass. In doing so, Henderson provides an unprecedented history of science as popularly known at the turn of the century, centered on late Victorian physics. In addition to electromagnetic waves, including X-rays and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy, the areas of science to which Duchamp responded so creatively ranged from chemistry and classical mechanics to thermodynamics, Brownian movement, radioactivity, and atomic theory. Restored to its context and amplified by the information in the posthumously published notes, the Large Glass appears far richer and more multifaceted and witty than had ever been suspected.


Henderson also includes a close examination of Duchamp's literary and artistic models for creative invention based on science, including Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Frantisek Kupka, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The book will not only redefine scholarship on Duchamp and the Large Glass, but will be a crucial resource for historians of literature, science, and modernism.

About this title

About the Author

Linda Dalrymple Henderson is David Bruton, Jr., Centennial Professor in Art History and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

From the Back Cover

"Linda Henderson's work stands out as a truly original contribution. . . . She has enlarged and illuminated our understanding of the most intelligent, elusive, and influential artist of the twentieth century."--Calvin Tomkins, author ofDuchamp: A Biography

"Henderson's book is the most thorough and dedicated analysis ever written about Duchamp's work. It represents the single most complete study of theLarge Glass and its scientific sources-one that is unlikely to be surpassed."--Francis Naumann, author ofMarcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

"In tracing the emergence of Duchamp's artworks from their actual cultural/scientific context, Henderson has produced what is quite simply an indispensable book."--Marjorie Perloff, author ofWittgenstein's Ladder and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

"Among the readers of Linda Henderson's brilliant book, historians of science will be especially rewarded by her thorough research into an area hitherto insufficiently explored-how artists and other laypersons during Duchamp's time came to learn of, and draw upon, the stream of exciting results of early twentieth century science."--Gerald Holton, Harvard University

From the Inside Flap

"Linda Henderson's work stands out as a truly original contribution. . . . She has enlarged and illuminated our understanding of the most intelligent, elusive, and influential artist of the twentieth century."--Calvin Tomkins, author ofDuchamp: A Biography

"Henderson's book is the most thorough and dedicated analysis ever written about Duchamp's work. It represents the single most complete study of theLarge Glass and its scientific sources-one that is unlikely to be surpassed."--Francis Naumann, author ofMarcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

"In tracing the emergence of Duchamp's artworks from their actual cultural/scientific context, Henderson has produced what is quite simply an indispensable book."--Marjorie Perloff, author ofWittgenstein's Ladder and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

"Among the readers of Linda Henderson's brilliant book, historians of science will be especially rewarded by her thorough research into an area hitherto insufficiently explored-how artists and other laypersons during Duchamp's time came to learn of, and draw upon, the stream of exciting results of early twentieth century science."--Gerald Holton, Harvard University

Reviews

Two art historians contribute these most recent additions to the greatly expanding library of Duchamp literature. The more far-reaching of the two is Joselit (Univ. of California, Irvine), who ambitiously attempts to find a "center" for Duchamp's multifarious oeuvre. No other artist of such great influence and importance produced a body of work that is so complex (so constantly turning in on itself), and Joselit feels scholars have too often focused only on one theme, period, or medium. Simply put, Joselit argues that Duchamp's transformations are that center and are "organized around a consistent dynamic or interplay between materiality and its measure or the body and its (self) identification." Along the way he does touch on virtually all periods; his analysis of Duchamp's often neglected linguistic readymades is especially fresh and elucidating. Joselit makes good use of a good deal of recent scholarship, but most of all his achievement is tying a string around Duchamp's plurality. By contrast, Henderson (Univ. of Texas at Austin) focuses on a specific theme, albeit one that Duchamp himself found endlessly fascinating. The author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1975), she seems particularly well qualified to examine how the discussions and discoveries of the early 20th centuryAfrom X-rays, wave theory, and optics to notions of the fourth dimensionAaffected Duchamp's art. While not the first to touch on these matters, Henderson rightly argues that too many previous scholars have ignored the humor in the artist's relation to "playful physics." She also makes use of all the notes on the large glass (including those posthumously published) and brings a broad understanding of turn-of-the-century science to the work. Joselit's work belongs in all art and academic libraries; Henderson deserves a place in larger academic art or history of science collections.ADouglas McClemont, New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691055513
• ISBN 13: 9780691055510
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 516