Morceaux choisis d'après Courbet ( Selected Details after Courbet), 1968 However, it is the artist's deliberate allusion to Courbet's once-risqué painting of a woman putting on her stockings that deserves further consideration, since Duchamp discussed the nineteenth-century artist frequently and publicly after World War II.

In 1962-63, Duchamp had used a similar play on words, possibly in reference to the artificial sex of the Étant donnés mannequin, when he turned the red- and-white French license plate for his Volkswagen car into a readymade after noticing the homophonic connection between Volkswagen and foux vagin, or 'false vagina,' a pun that he later commemorated in a poem (FIG. 2.55), to which he added a rather nondescript bird, creating a delightful pun on faucon (falcon) - although the creature looks more like a lovebird than a bird of prey - a pun that also can be read as faux con, or 'false cunt' (FIG. In another etching from the 1968 series, Duchamp appropriated the image of a seated nude from Gustave Courbet's painting Woman with White Stockings (1864 fig. The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania. Repeating The Large Glass's theme of frustrated desire, Duchamp placed the physical barrier of the wooden door between the viewer and the recumbent figure to ensure that such a scene could take place only in the mind of the beholder.įrom The Large Glass and Related Works, with Nine Etchings by Marcel Duchamp This depiction of intimacy between a female nude and a male suitor creates an alternative, never-to-be-realized scenario for Duchamp's sculpture-construction. In one instance, the faceless mannequin holding aloft the Bec Auer lamp in Étant donnés is shown with a dark-haired male figure, his hands clasped behind his head (FIG. The prints frequently make reference to his final work and its shared affinities with the sexual iconography and meaning of The Large Glass. Traces of the secret Étant donnés project also can be found in Duchamp's 1968 portfolio of erotic etchings based on amorous scenes from the art of the past.

(Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Aug. Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, Philadelphia Museum of Art & Yale University Press, 2009, pp.

The Genesis, Construction, Installation, and Legacy of a Secret Masterwork

L'Origine du monde by Thierry Savatier