The Large Glass and Related Works (Volume I)

Author: Bert Jansen

Following on from the replicas of the readymades, Marcel Duchamp and gallerist Arturo Schwarz came up with the idea of making Duchamp’s key work Le Grand Verre (1915-23) accessible to a wider public, too, by repeating a series of etchings in a limited edition. In 1964 and 1965 Duchamp made etchings of seven separate passages from Le Grand Verre and an etching of the work as a whole. There is also one etching, The Large Glass Completed, in which the passages in red were added from the notes that were not included in 1923, when Duchamp signed the work as unfinished.^[1] In addition to the nine etchings, 144 notes were included in facsimile, which referred to the planning and production of the work, together with an English translation. These notes were previously published in La boîte verte and La boîte blanche. The whole was published in 1967 as loose-leaf illustrations in Schwarz’s book titled The Large Glass and Related Works (Vol. I) in an edition of 150. The book and the etchings are contained in an acrylic glass slip-case with a colour reproduction of Le Grand Verre.

The individual etchings illustrate the narrative of Le Grand Verre. The story can clearly be deduced from the notes, although those containing a cryptic use of language and associative references do call for a degree of imagination on the reader’s part. In the middle of the domain of the bachelors there is a ‘chocolate grinder’ in which three millstones rotate behind one another. Beside it a water wheel drives a ‘glider’, which like the monotonous lives of the bachelors, according to Duchamp, goes back and forth to the rhythm of the litany: beer drinking, lazy living, masturbating etc. The bachelors consist of hollow shapes that look like mannequins, a ‘cemetery of uniforms and liveries’ as Duchamp also called them.
           
The bride appears to be built from engine parts and internal organs derived from the Cubist paintings he made in Munich in 1912. She gives orders to the bachelors from the Milky Way by way of ‘draft pistons’. Thereupon the bachelors start to exude ‘the illuminating gas’ which crystallises in ‘capillary tubes’ and ‘sieves’ into ‘spangles of frosty gas’. After acceleration in a ‘toboggan’, they splash upwards and by way of ‘Oculist Witnesses and ‘the Handler of Gravity’ cross the horizon into the bride’s domain, ‘the Milky Way’, where they hit their objective as ‘shots’.^[2]

A second volume appeared a year later, likewise in an edition of 150, in which 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.^[3]
           
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.^[4] 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).^[5]