Page 36 - Studio International - January February 1975

Max Bill on Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp once wanted to
become the anti-artist par
excellence. He has become the
prototype of the artist. His
opposition to art, which he presented
carefully wrapped in irony, has
proved to be one of the most positive
contributions to the intellectual
history of the twentieth century.
There are personal reasons why I
suggested holding this exhibition and
took charge of it, and I would like to
give an account of them here. I met
Marcel Duchamp in Paris in 1938.
At that time I was working on a
volume of the `Le Corbusier and
Pierre Jeanneret' series and on
producing my '15 Variations on a
Theme' which was being prepared
for printing in Paris. The Pevsners
invited us for tea one afternoon,
together with Marcel Duchamp and
Piet Mondrian.
Tea consisted mainly of caviar (which I
do not like) and `rotoreliefs'. On a
portable gramophone — which stood on
the floor and was slowed down by hand
to a very few revolutions per minute —
Marcel Duchamp presented his
rotoreliefs. As always when something
did not quite suit him or seemed 'too
naturalistic', Mondrian was wrapped in
silence. The movements produced by the
rotoreliefs, the partly naturalistic
elements of a primitive movie, for
example, Lampe, Montgolfiere, Poisson
japonais, did not meet with our
unqualified approval, as optical
phenomena, or as a trick seeming to
produce space from flat forms by
revolving them: neo-Renaissance! But as
optical games they captivated us.
Duchamp gave me the series of rotoreliefs
and explained that he now had to go to
Puteaux. I offered to drive him out there
and bring him back. In Puteaux we
stopped in front of a high garden wall
with a narrow door. Duchamp went in,
returned five minutes later, and we drove
back. It was not until 1945 that I got to
know this wall and what was behind it
rather better; Duchamp's brother,
Jacques Villon, still lives there today, and
Francois Kupka used to live there.
The rotoreliefs had given me a slight contains a few of Duchamp's precious movement, which originated with the
shock, for these coloured discs, as long as originals; most of them are in the Italian futurists, over into French
they were not moving, seemed Philadelphia museum and, at the request painting. He brought these elements to a
perfidiously similar to some of my of the donors Louise and Walter synthesis in his main works of around
5 Variations' which were just going to Arensberg, are not allowed to leave the 1911, especially in Nu descendant on
press, and which I had been struggling United States. For the exhibition we are Escalier, which caused a scandal in the
with since 1935. Perhaps I owe it to this left with only the possibility of Salon des Indépendants and was
shock that Marcel Duchamp's work comprehensive documentation. On the withdrawn.
attracted me again and again, and that it basis of this documentation the following The involvement with presentation of
still remains up-to-date for me today. questions arise: on the one hand, what movement led, by 1913, to the invention
That meeting is one of the reasons for does Marcel Duchamp's work mean in of a new kind of image-mechanics. This
this exhibition taking place: Duchamp's the history of art, and, on the other, what is burdened with thoughts of a literary
first big individual exhibition in a public does it mean for us today ? symbolic kind, but also has a tendency to
museum and at the same time the only Marcel Duchamp's position in art apply a kind of super-precision which
authentic French contribution to this history is determined, in that he took up thrusts across the geometric-mechanical
year's Zurich June Festival, the theme of the results of Cézanne's image-structure reality into a meta-reality, where game
which is France. Of course, we must in his early years, and transferred them and precision, idea and reality coincide.
limit this statement a little: the exhibition into Cubism, at the same time as others; About 1913, aged 26, Duchamp began
begins at the end of the Festival and it also in that he finally took the elements of his most fundamental work: La mariée

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