My interest in Duchamp is likely colored by my long-ago love affair with an artist (now gone) who could plausibly claim to be one of Duchamp’s descendants. My ex had big ambitions for his own art, which he mostly achieved, though he worried that his unprepossessing appearance posed a serious impediment to his career. Duchamp and Picasso, he would moan, were both lookers. What about him?
“Duchamp was a handsome Norman,” wrote Peggy Guggenheim in her memoir Out of This Century. “Every woman in Paris wanted to sleep with him.” And quite a few did, though not Guggenheim, despite her infatuation with him. (Instead, she profited from his counsel and connections beginning in 1938, when, knowing little about modern art, she opened her first gallery in London.)
Secretive, elegant, exquisitely polite, creatively open yet emotionally withholding, and as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa (a postcard of which he transformed into another infamous readymade), Duchamp was the type to inspire mad, often unrequited crushes. “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell,” the German-born, Greenwich Village–based artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven would recite at dadaist soirees…and she may have meant it literally. (A 1920 photograph of her portrait of Duchamp—an airy assemblage including feathers, a spring, and a fishing lure, all perilously balanced in a wine glass—is included in the MoMA exhibition.)
Surely he must have harbored some feelings for his great patron and supporter, Katherine Dreier, a cofounder, with Duchamp and Man Ray, of the Société Anonyme (which promoted modern art in the 1920s). But it was a friendship he navigated for three decades with delicacy.
Yet Duchamp was not immune to love. And since art historians have often viewed the stylistic transformations in Picasso’s oeuvre as evolving in tandem with his significant amorous encounters—see Sue Roe’s recent group biography, Hidden Portraits: Six Women Who Shaped Picasso’s Life—I wondered if a consideration of the women who belonged, at least for a time, to this most elusive of Modernists might bear similar fruit. Rrose Sélavy’s name was, after all, a pun in French: Éros, c’est la vie. (“Eros is life.”) What was the effect of Eros on Duchamp’s creative endeavors?
At MoMA, while listening to strains of experimental music that Duchamp had composed, I thought of Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, an accomplished musician who abandoned her promising career in composition after marrying the painter Francis Picabia. The couple’s passionate love triangle with Duchamp (recounted in sisters Anne and Claire Berest’s novel, Gabriële) ignited years of intense creative ferment for both Duchamp and Picabia; it was followed by a lifetime of friendship for all three.
