De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (La boîte-en-valise)

Author: Bert Jansen

La boîte-en-valise is a kind of personal oeuvre catalogue, made as a portable miniature museum. It contains sixty-eight of Marcel Duchamp’s most important artworks in the form of photographic reproductions and some miniature replicas. He began to make it in Paris in 1935 after the publication of the notes for Le Grand Verre in La boîte verte. By that time a large part of his oeuvre was already in one American private collection, that of Walter and Louise Arensberg, and so not accessible to the public. He used La boîte-en-valise to make his oeuvre public and show it as a coherent entity. The valise is essentially an expandable box which can be transformed into a three-dimensional scale model to mimic the walls of an exhibition gallery. For the most part the material came from earlier publications, of which Duchamp had had extra copies made.

The artist put together the first three valises in Paris in the spring of 1941. During the Nazi occupation he secretly moved the material to Vichy, after which it was shipped to New York by way of Portugal. At the end of 1942, Duchamp himself returned to New York, where he continued to assemble the material. The first twenty versions of La boîte-en-valise were reserved for friends and a few museums and contained an original artwork that he considered appropriate for the recipient. The valises were produced in different stages.^[1] The last series appeared in 1971, three years after the artist’s death. As planned, three hundred copies were made. Arturo Schwarz, who worked on an oeuvre catalogue in collaboration with the artist, identified seven series, from A to G. The example owned by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, from the B series, is one of the fifteen copies the New York gallery owner Rose Fried sold between 1952 and 1954.

With the acquisition of La boîte verte and La boîte-en-valise in 1990 the museum obtained two key works in the artist’s oeuvre. Both give an idea of the way Duchamp put the concept of uniqueness and reproducibility into perspective. They also make clear that an essential aspect of Duchamp’s oeuvre lay in the relationship between the individual works – a relationship which, in the case of La boîte-en-valise, was expressed in his decision to make a miniature museum he put together himself. The fact that ideas about uniqueness and multiples in post-1960 art have changed is to a significant extent attributable to Duchamp. He had a huge influence on the development of the post-modern concept of art and his influence still makes itself felt in contemporary art. Duchamp’s position in Dada and Surrealism and his impact on generations of artists that came after him is why Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has been collecting his work since 1989.^[2]