Ruth Brandon - Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love, and Art

Spellbound by Marcel

Duchamp, Love, and Art

Ruth Brandon

To Phil, who first introduced me to Duchamps strange world

Marcel Duchamp: French artist, the originator of conceptual art

Beatrice Wood: American would-be artist, later a successful ceramicist

Henri-Pierre Roch, aka Pierre: French artistic hanger-on and compulsive womanizer, later the author of Jules et Jim

Walter Arensberg: Collector of modern art

Louise Arensberg: His wife

Marcels Brothers and Sisters

Gaston, aka Jacques Villon: Painter and cartoonist

Raymond, aka Raymond Duchamp-Villon: Sculptor

Suzanne: Artist

Yvonne

Madeleine

Marcels Paris Friends

Guillaume Apollinaire: Poet

Francis Picabia: Playboy, artist

Gabrile Picabia: His wife

Beatrices New York Friends

Beth Reynolds, later Hapgood: School friend, Russian linguist

Norman Hapgood: Magazine editor

Charles Coburn: Theatrical impresario

Ivah Coburn: His wife, theatrical producer

Alissa Franc: Journalist

Madame Yorska: Director, French American Theater

The Arensberg Circle: Americans

Walter Pach: Artist, organizer of the Armory Show

Allen Norton: Poet, editor of Rogue magazine

Louise Norton: His wife, later the wife of Edgard Varse

Joseph Stella: Italian doctor, New York artist

William Carlos Williams: Doctor, poet

Mina Loy: Poet

Arthur Cravan: Poetic beefcake

Man Ray: Photographer

The Arensberg Circle, French

Francis Picabia

Gabrile Picabia

Edgard Varse: Composer

Jean Crotti: Ex-husband of Yvonne Chastel, later husband of Suzanne Duchamp

Henri-Pierre Roch

Marcels Wealthy Middle-Aged Lady Friends

Ettie Stettheimer

Florine Stettheimer: Painter

Carrie Stettheimer

Katherine Dreier

In Canada

Paul Ranson: Bigamous husband to Beatrice

Marcels Women, Buenos Aires and Paris

Yvonne Chastel: His lover in Buenos Aires and Paris

Mary Reynolds: His longtime lover, Paris

Lydie Sarazin Levassor: His first wife, Paris

Maria Martins: Brazilian sculptor and diplomatic hostess, with whom he falls blindly in love

Teeny Matisse: His second wife

T his is a story about war, love, memory, fame, art, and the endless conflict between those who want to shape the future and those who would prefer to keep it at bay. The action takes place in New York and Paris: the New York of the Arensberg salon, and the American Paris of Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, and Man Ray. The pivotal moment was World War I, which both destroyed an old way of life and opened the doors to a new one, in which people felt free to follow their inclinations untrammeled by social conventions they now perceived as useless.

In 191516 a group of French artists fled war-torn Europe for New York. In the few months between their arrival and Americas entry into the war in April 1917, they pushed back the boundaries of the possible, in both life and art. The hub of this transformation was the apartment at 33 West 67th Street owned by Walter and Louise Arensberg, where artists and poets from both sides of the Atlantic met nightly to talk, eat, drink, discuss each others work, play chess, plan balls, organize magazines and exhibitions, and fall in and out of love. None of the participants ever again experienced so thrilling a moment.

At the center of all this activity stood the mysterious figure of Marcel Duchamp, always approachable, always unreadable. Many people, of both sexes, were in love with him, but although he was blithely friendly to them all, his own feelings, if any, remained opaque. Decades later, when Duchamp became famous for the second time and was reincarnated as the twentieth centurys most influential artist, anyone still living who had been present during those all-consuming months was avidly sought out. Most of their accounts, however, were more a study of memorys vagaries than an accurate record of what actually happened.

Henri-Pierre Roch and Beatrice Wood were both in love with Duchamp, and briefly, and (for her) life-changingly, with each other. Both kept daily diaries, which along with other contemporary writings give a picture of events very different from what they later remembered. Or rather two picturesfor the views they offer, including of their own love affair, are stunningly divergent.

Rochs reminiscences of the Arensberg years are contained in a novel Victor, unpublished because it was still unfinished when he died in 1959; Beatrices form part of a memoir, I Shock Myself, published in 1985 when she was ninety-two. When put side by side with the contemporary accounts it becomes clear that both these books often misrepresent both the sequence of events and how people felt at the time. What they do reveal is how the writers prefer to remember what happened. So in Victor the Beatrice character is called Patricia, which was the name of her doga detail that says quite a lot about Rochs post-hoc diminution of her importance to him; while Beatrice, in her memoir, says she met Duchamp after Roch, and that he (Duchamp) was in love with her, when in fact she was madly in love with Duchamp, who introduced her to Roch in hopes that she might find another object for her romantic yearnings. In I Shock Myself this is rendered thus: Marcel knew I was in love with his good friend Roch and did not approach me amorously. Secretly I wished he would. My love for Roch could not keep me from being a little in love with Marcel.

Duchamp, too, left a contemporary record of his life in the shape of the artworks he produced. They obviously reflect the frame of mind in which he made them, but as they are also, like their maker, open to infinite interpretation, he remains an enigma. He never wrote any autobiographical account of any aspect of his life, and often said different things to different people. The principle he applied to all his works, however, was that any and every interpretation was correct. And if, as Roch remarked to Franois Truffaut, Duchamps greatest work was his lifea verdict with which Duchamp himself heartily agreedall his accounts should perhaps be taken as correct. Truth takes many forms, and Duchampian truth embraces most of them.

1. . Truffaut, introduction to Roch, Carnets, les annes Jules et Jim.

I n 1912 Walter and Lou Arensberg bought Shady Hill, the enormous house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that had previously belonged to Charles Eliot Norton, Americas leading man of letters.

The Arensbergs were in their early thirties. They had been married five years, and were living in Pittsburgh, where Walters father was president and part owner of a crucible steel company. Lou, ne Stevens, the sister of one of Walters Harvard classmates, was even wealthier: her family owned one of the largest and oldest-established textile mills in Massachusetts.

Neither Walter nor Lou wanted to stay in Pittsburgh. Lou missed her family, while Walter was still much involved with his alma mater and the East Coasts intellectual life. He published poems and translations in Harvard Monthly, which he had once edited, and described himself to the