Page 58 - Studio International - January February 1975

When Marcel Duchamp had his
first direct experience of futurist
painting, he was twenty-five years
old and fresh from the completion of
the final version of Nude Descending
a Staircase. His own ideas about the
representation of movement in painting
were already highly developed by
February 1912, the date of the first
futurist exhibition in Paris, and they are
reflected in the way he chose to see the
work of the Italians : 'The futurists also
were interested in movement at that time
and when they exhibited for the first
time in Paris in January (sic) 1912, it was
quite exciting for me to see the painting
Dog on a Leash by Balla, showing also the
successive static positions of the dog's
legs and leash.''
Although he was surely cognizant of
futurist ideas, both from Severini who
lived in Paris from 1906 and from the
first futurist manifesto published in Paris
in 1909, Duchamp's description of Balla's
painting indicates an entirely different
and in fact opposed conception of the
subject of motion, based on analytical
discontinuity rather than the synthetic
continuity to which the futurists aspired.
This concept developed in relation to
sources within Duchamp's Parisian
context, particularly the work of
Francois Kupka, and implies an attitude
to the relationship of matter to space and
time that is incompatible with the futurist
experience.
Duchamp's sole explanation is the
following: 'This final version of the Nude
Descending a Staircase . . . was the
convergence in my mind of various
interests, among them the cinema, still in
its infancy, and the separation of static
positions in the photochronographs of
Marey in France, Eakins and Muybridge
in America." Duchamp's knowledge of
Marey and Muybridge was no accident.
These were interests that Francois Kupka
and Raymond Duchamp-Villon shared,
and which they applied to their art as
early as 1908-09. The Kupka/
Duchamp-Villon family friendship
dated from at least 1900, the year Kupka
moved in next to Jacques Villon on the
Rue de Caulaincourt in Montmartre.
Kupka followed Villon to 7 rue Lemaitre
in Puteaux in 1906 where they were
joined in 1907 by Raymond Duchamp-
Villon. In this small community of men,
Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 1912 Kupka seems to have played a crucial role.
He had arrived in Paris from Vienna in
1896 at the age of twenty-four. Shortly
Kupka after, he discovered the first cinema or
`moving picture' in the form of the
`praxinoscope' perfected by Emile
Reynaud. 3 This rather primitive
apparatus consisted of two nested
cylinders: the outer one was lined with
Duchamp panels on its inner face, each one
depicting a different and consecutive
phase of a figure in motion; the centre
drum was sheathed with mirrors. As the
outer cylinder revolved around the
and, Marcy stationary inner drum, the mirrors
registered the turning images,
reconstituting them into one consecutive
movement.
Already by c.I900-02, Kupka had
experience of the `praxinoscope'. ' In this
executed a drawing inspired by his
drawing, The Horsemen, the