Eau et gaz, à tous les étages

Author: Bert Jansen

Robert Lebel’s monograph Sur Marcel Duchamp was published in 1959. It was the first catalogue raisonné of Duchamp’s oeuvre in which the relationship between the works is also clear. As well as the bound edition, Duchamp designed various special loose-leaf editions in a box. Eau et gaz, à tous les étages is a sequel to La boîte-en-valise, in which Duchamp himself put together a retrospective of his oeuvre. Stuck on the box in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection is an imitation enamel plate of the kind that was fastened to buildings in Paris around 1900 to indicate that a property was connected to mains water and gas. Water and gas were the two factors with which Duchamp started the ‘foreword’ in his notes for Le Grand Verre (1915-23): ‘Given: 1. the waterfall 2. the illuminating gas’. Duchamp saw the presence of these conveniences in a modern dwelling as a metaphor for the residents: a man and a woman and their sexual relationship – running water and flickering gas. Aside from the loose-leaf version of Lebel’s book, the box contains a hand-coloured photograph of Le Grand Verre on plastic and a proof of the stencil of the first pencil sketch from 1913 for that work (see La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Boîte verte)). By way of a ‘signature’ Duchamp added a black-and-white self-portrait in profile: an outline of his face, torn from paper around a zinc template. The illustration is captioned Marcel dechiravit (Marcel tore it), a witty allusion to the word pinxit (painted it) that painters in previous centuries added to their signatures.

The publication of an English translation of Lebel’s monograph in that same year, as a regular edition, marked the start of the rediscovery of Duchamp by a new generation of artists in the United States and Europe, and the beginning of his renewed influence on the development of modern art. Before the publication of the book, Duchamp was an ‘almost forgotten artist’.^[1] As a consequence of several exhibitions on Dada, he was rediscovered in the 1950s by artists such as Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Richard Hamilton, in particular for his use of the readymade artwork.

The presence of Eau et gaz, à tous les étages alongside La boîte-en-valise, La boîte verte and La boîte blanche in the museum’s collection makes it possible to show a balanced overview of his oeuvre, in context with objects and other publications in which Duchamp looked back on his earlier work in the 1960s.