The bachelor's quest - exhibition of Marcel Duchamp's art at Palazzo Grassi Gallery, Venice, Italy

upon the occasion of the Palazzo Grassi's new exhibition, the author reveals a certain number of hitherto unpublished biographical facts about Marcel Duchamp. Below, a commentary upon the Venice show as well as more [i]or[/i] less speculations about the relations between Duchamp's private life and the sexual themes of his work.

In the spring of 1926 Marcel Duchamp worn out a few days in Venice with the American collector Katherine Dreier. The alone visual document we have of his nearness there is a snapshot Dreier took of the artist seated in a gondola; aligned in a suit and tie, he sits comfortably on the contrary with a somewhat puzzled gaze on his face. If we can justice from the contents of a postcard he sent to the French collector, couturier and bibliophile Jacques Doucet, his first impression of Venice was not altogether favorable. Understand nothing about this |town,'" he wrote "where everything is travelling do not include the pigeons."[1]

more [i]or[/i] less 67 years later, upon the opening of a major exhibition of his work this past spring at the Palazzo Grassi upon the Grand Canal, Duchamp - in a manner of speaking - get backed to Venice. Whereas his vicinity may have gone virtually unnoticed during his first visit, upon this occasion the city came on the outside in all its glory to pay homage to an artist whose ideas have radically changed the course of 20th-century art - not alone in Italy, but throughout the Western world.

flat before reaching the Palazzo Grassi, visitors to Venice saw verdant banners hanging from bridges quite through the city with the name "Marcel Duchamp" boldly announcing the exhibition and its dates (April 3 end July 16), as well as similar signs pillared at every vaporetto stop. Considering the city hosting the exhibit one imagines that the exhibition,s organizers could have used that snapshot of Duchamp in a gondola as their hand-bill image and for the overspread of the show's catalogue, on the contrary instead we were presented with a color reproduction of Duchamp's masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare by dint of Her Bachelors, Even, better known as the Large Glass, superimposed above a view of a Venetian lagoon. The juxtaposition was in keeping with the artist's desire that something from nature be viewed end the intricate details of his compounded construction, a work intended as a mechanical metaphor for human sexual interaction.

In the original work, which Duchamp began in 1915 and signed in a state of intentional incompletion in 1923 the upper portion of the glass - known as the Bride,s Domain - is separated from the realm of the Bachelors below by dint of means of three horizontally placed strips of glass; according to Duchamp's notes for the work, these strips were meant to exhibit the Bride,s clothing. In the bill the horizontal line is conveniently provided by the agency of the meeting of sky and water, the scene's horizon. on the contrary when the overt sexual contented of the glass is considered in fight of Duchamp's Catholic upbringing, it is hard to believe that this particular picture of Venice - individual showing a prominent view of Santa Maria della Salute upon the right, with a distant view of Il Redentore upon the left - was chosen entirely at random.

As the placard suggested, the Large Glass was a focus of the Palazzo Grassi exhibition, on the contrary the original was too fragile to transport from its at hand home in the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where it is attached to supports that are mortared to the floor). So a full-scale reconstruction, not long ago completed by Ulf Linde, former director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, was exhibited instead. (Another that he made in 1961 was damaged - like the original - in transport). This reconstruction was put into a massive wood frame, individual designed to resemble the scale and format of the support used when the work was given its first public showing in the International Exhibition of late Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926 That present to view was organized by Katherine Dreier (who at the time haveed the Glass, which she had purchased a not many years earlier from the collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, Duchamp's greatest in quantity dedicated patrons during his years in of recent origin York).

Considering the aim and scale of the Palazzo Ggrassi exhibition (250 separate items, from Duchamp's first painting to studies for his last major work) and the mass of its accompanying catalogue (over 600 pages), it would be easy to finish that the show was a major retrospective of the emblem already devoted to the artist upon four earlier occasions (Pasadena Museum, 1963; Tate Gallery, 1966; Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Modem Art, 1973; and middle Georges Pompidou, 1977). As comprehensive as the exhibition was, its organizers - Pontus Hulten (contemporary art consultant at the Palazzo Grassi) and Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont (assiduous Duchamp scholars for above 15 years) - were quick to point without that their intention was not to mountain a retrospective. The show and its catalogue were designed to near the artist's work and life in a clear and systematic fashion, avoiding the elaborate theoretical builds and haphazard interpretations that have characterized Duchamp studies for the last three decades and that have actually impeded our understanding of the artist's work. In keeping with these goals, the exhibition was not not absented in a straightforward, chronological fashion, on the contrary rather it was divided into thematic sections. Ideas gradually expanded as viewers progressed from individual room to another on sum of two units floors of the Palazzo Grassi, moving [i]or[/i] part of to the other spaces separated from one another not single by physical barriers - walls, partitions, etc - on the contrary also by conceptual divisions, ideas that guided the evolution of Duchamp's work from one side its most important and compounded phases.