380 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST

27.1 Nude Descending a

Staircase No. 3, 1916
Philadelphia Museum of Art
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mechanical reproduction 381

THE ART OF MAKING ART IN THE AGE

OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION *

27 To create is divine.
To reproduce is human.1

— Man Ray, 1973

Marcel Duchamp professed an aversion to any form of artistic repetition. “The idea of repeating,
for me,” he told an interviewer in 1960, “is a form of masturbation.”2 Not that he had anything
against the practice; in 1946, at the age of fifty-nine, he produced—or perhaps “issued” is a
better choice of words—one of the most original works of his artistic career: Paysage fautif,
or Wayward Landscape (15.1), an essentially abstract composition made entirely out of his
own semen. Since the work was not intended for public consumption, but rather made for
an audience of one (a female friend with whom Duchamp then shared an intimate and very
private relationship), it is logical to conclude that the medium—à la Marshall McLuhan—was
its message. When Paysage fautif was made, the use of human sperm for artistic expression
was unique within the history of art; today, in more ways than one, the work can be considered
seminal, for as future generations would prove, it was to have many followers. In the 1940s,
however, originality was not a word any longer associated with Duchamp; by then, the art
world had relegated him to the dubious status of “former artist,” someone who had long ago
stopped making art in order to play chess. In actual fact, Duchamp was still making art, but
he had come to the conclusion that if an artist wanted total freedom, he would have to be
removed from the mainstream of artistic activities, or, as he put it, go underground, out of sight
from the critical opinions and gazing eyes of his peers. (What better environment, we might all
agree, in which to create his Wayward Landscape?)
For Duchamp, repetition was an activity in which many financially successful artists engaged.
Of course, by repetition Duchamp was not referring to the literal replication of imagery, as in
making multiple impressions of a print, or in issuing limited-edition casts of a sculpture. What
he had in mind was those artists who produce little more than mere variations on a theme,
signature styles that—once established—lead to reliable sales and financial security. Such a
mindless activity, he felt, thwarted any possibility of true artistic innovation. As a result, it was
a practice he consciously avoided, a self-imposed discipline he once characterized as “a little
game between ‘I’ and ‘me’.”3 It can be demonstrated that Duchamp’s successive attempts to
avoid repetition led to a consistent artistic practice, one that established a duality of opposition
that he systematically attempted to reconcile.4 With time, Duchamp came to the conclusion
that the only way to avoid doing the same thing over and over again would be to confine
himself to the repertoire of images that he had already made. In other words, just as Parisians
still maintain that the only way to avoid a view of the Eiffel Tower is by climbing to its summit,
Duchamp determined that the only way to completely avoid repetition in his work was to
literally replicate it.

* From the “Introduction” and “Aftermath and Conclusion” of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (Ghent: Ludion Press, 1999); distributed in the United States by Harry N. Abrams (French
edition by Hazan, Paris; Dutch by Fonds Mercator, Antwerp).
382 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST

It may have been precisely this line of reasoning that led Duchamp in the 1930s to come up
with the idea of producing a miniature museum of his own work, the Boîte-en-valise, essentially
a suitcase that contained reproductions of his most important earlier work (see Chapter 14).
The Boîte was to be released in an edition of 300 copies, and it was originally planned that they
would all be exactly the same, except for the first 20, which, an announcement stated, was to
be a deluxe, numbered edition “accompanied by a signed original work.” These originals were
mounted onto the inside lid of the box, which is where the Wayward Landscape was intended
to reside. But the inclusion of a unique work such as this was an exception to the rule; initially,
Duchamp had planned for each of the deluxe editions to contain a work that few, at the time,
would have considered original: a hand-colored reproduction of one of his own earlier works,
which, although he had applied the coloring himself, would have appeared to most as little more
than a glorified reproduction. Nevertheless, Duchamp identified these prints as coloriages
originaux, for they were the original images given to printers and used as color guides.
In having signed reproductions of his work in this fashion, Duchamp threw into question the
differences that exist between an original work of art and its replica. Issues such as these form
the basis of a theory that he developed in the mid- to late 1930s, which he called inframince, or
“infrathin,” a subject that concerned itself with the subtle, sometimes imperceptible differences
that exist among things, not only objects, but even concepts that are assumed to be similar or
identical. His first note on this subject dates from the summer of 1937, in which he speculates
about the differences that exist between two forms cast in the same mold, but which cannot
be, of course, absolutely identical. “It would be better to go into the infrathin interval which
separates 2 ‘identicals’,” he wrote, “than to conveniently accept the verbal generalization which
makes 2 twins look like 2 drops of water.”5 Although few of Duchamp’s friends would have
been aware of his philosophical musings at the time, in the period when he produced most of
the reproductions for his valise, inframince was a subject that was very much on his mind, and
it is a theme to which he would continuously return throughout the remaining years of his life.
Coincidentally, at just about the time when Duchamp was developing his theory, the
German cultural and literary critic Walter Benjamin had just published an essay that concerned
itself with the philosophical and perceptual distortions that result from the endless repetition
of images produced in the modern era by mechanical means. “The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction” was written, we can presume, without a thorough knowledge
or understanding of Duchamp’s work, although it is ironic that in the conclusion of his essay,
Benjamin cites the shock value of Dada as a precedent to the barbarisms of contemporary
film. If he were familiar with Duchamp’s readymades and had accepted their status as genuine
works of art, it is doubtful that Benjamin would have come to the same conclusion as he did
about the aura of an original work “withering” as a result of having been replicated.6 Ironically,
a year after Benjamin’s essay was published, he ran into Duchamp in a café on the Boulevard
St. Germain in Paris. In his diary, Benjamin noted that Duchamp showed him a reproduction
of his Nude Descending a Staircase, probably the hand-colored black-and-white study he had
been working on at the time (27.4) and which, a few months later, he issued in the form of a
signed and stamped limited edition (27.6). Benjamin found the work “breathtakingly beautiful,”
so much so that he wondered whether or not it might not be worthy of mention in one of his
future writings.7
Beyond this single reference, exactly what Benjamin might have thought about Duchamp
and the pertinence of his work to his thesis on mechanical reproduction is unknown. Be that
as it may, both the techniques and conceptual implications inherent in reproducing a unique
work of art in multiple form are issues that, I believe, can be traced to the core of Duchamp’s
creative production. Indeed, when taken as a whole, it could be argued that they represent the
single most significant contribution his work has made to the art of this century.
Replication and appropriation are artistic strategies that were operational in Duchamp’s
work as early as 1905, when he reprinted his grandfather’s copperplates of Old Rouen. But
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they were not employed with consistency until after the spring of 1912, when his Nude
Descending a Staircase (2.1) was rejected from the Salon des Indépendants, an event that he
later acknowledged was a critical turning point in his artistic career. It was then that he
decided to consciously seek an alternative to accepted artistic practice, something that would
remove him from the system of producing works of art that only reflected his unique artistic
sensitivities, something less physically emotive than painting. Although he had gone through
an Impressionist phase in his own development as a painter, he eventually grew to detest what
he called the patte in painting, the personal handiwork detectable in all works of art that made
it possible for viewers to identify an artist’s unique style. Eventually, he came to describe
artists like Monet as “just housepainters who painted for the great pleasure of splashing greens
and reds together and having fun.” Whereas he admitted that a certain degree of aesthetic
pleasure could be derived from viewing images of this type, he insisted that “you can’t call it
mental... it’s just pure retinal.”8 Duchamp’s solution to this aesthetic dilemma was to adopt a
more mechanically generated style, using the tools and techniques of a professional draftsman,
thereby removing his hands from the creative process. It may have been this colder, more
scientific approach that led Guillaume Apollinaire to write the following about Duchamp in
his book The Cubist Painters (1913): “Perhaps it will be the task of an artist as detached from
aesthetic preoccupations and as intent on the energetic as Marcel Duchamp, to reconcile art
and the people.”9
Years later Duchamp would dismiss Apollinaire’s remarks as little more than “a joke,”
written by a man who “would say anything.” Yet, at the same time, he admitted that Apollinaire
“sometimes guessed what I was going to do.”10 Indeed, the full ramifications of what Duchamp
was about to embark upon were something not even the insightful Apollinaire could have
wholly anticipated: the invention of the readymade, an artistic process that allowed Duchamp
to remove himself totally from the physical creation of the work, or as he expressed it years
later, “to cut my hands off.” The readymade allowed Duchamp to take everyday objects “out of
the earth and [place them] onto the planet of aesthetics,” a cerebral act whereby he “reduce[d]
the idea of aesthetic consideration to the choice of the mind, not to the ability or cleverness
of the hand.”11
What modern artistic innovation better serves “to reconcile art and the people,” we might
well ask, than a readymade, which, after all, is an object appropriated from the environment
of the people and made compatible (reconciled) within the higher plane of aesthetics? This
was not, of course, Duchamp’s original objective in coming up with the idea for readymades.
Rather, he wanted to eliminate the possibility of all artistic formula; above all, he did not want
to be enslaved to a specific theory or guiding principle that would determine his next work. “I
do not believe that art should have anything in common with definite theories that are apart
from it,” he told an interviewer shortly after arriving in the United States in 1915. “That is too
much like propaganda.”12 It may have been for these reasons that almost immediately after he
came up with the concept of the readymade, on a small scrap of paper he scribbled down the
following warning to himself: “Limit the number of r[ea]dymades yearly.”13
It was in America that Duchamp discovered the English word “readymade,” which, he said,
“thrust itself upon me” shortly after he arrived.14 With readymades, the issue of differences
that exist between an original and a replica is inevitable. If a snow shovel, for example, were
accepted as a work of art (12.3), it is logical to question whether or not all shovels—not
only the one he selected, but those that he left behind in the hardware store—should also be
considered within the same category. This was not likely an issue that was raised immediately,
for outside of Duchamp’s closest friends, few knew anything about the readymades. On the
one occasion when they were exhibited, they were ignored, and when people saw them in the
artist’s studio, he simply dismissed their significance, saying only: “Cela n’a pas d’importance” (a
situation that would change, of course, after the famous urinal incident at the Independents in
1917).15
384 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST

Whereas the distinction that exists between an original and a replica may not have been
raised immediately with the readymades, it is an issue that was impossible to avoid when,
in 1916—to satisfy the desires of his patron, Walter Arensberg, who missed acquiring the
Nude Descending a Staircase from the Armory Show in 1913—Duchamp prepared a full-
scale, hand-colored photographic replica (27.1). To my knowledge, outside of the field of
commercial illustration, this work represents the first attempt by an artist in modern times
to replicate a painted image by purely mechanical means, and although it is exactly the same
size as the original (and virtually indistinguishable from it in reproduction), he and his patron
considered the new work unique. The replica was prominently displayed in the main studio
of the Arensberg apartment in New York and, even after the original painting was acquired in
1919, the photographic replica remained on display, as it would in the Arensbergs’ Hollywood
home during the 1930s and 1940s. Today, the two works hang side by side in the galleries of
the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where close inspection reveals that they manifest a completely
different tactile quality and physical presence.
In order to produce the replica, Duchamp arranged for a commercial photography firm
located in the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street in Manhattan to prepare a black-and-white
print of the Nude exactly the same size as the original.16 Duchamp then painstakingly hand-
colored the image, making no attempt whatsoever to replicate the color scheme and tonality
of the original (which he had not seen for well over three years). Instead, he strengthened and
27.2 Nude Descending a
Staircase No. 2 (detail of 3.1),
visually reinforced the painting’s linear components, so much so that details in the facsimile
1912 more closely resemble the abstract watercolor compositions of Picabia (whose show of
machinist paintings was held at the Modern Gallery in New York in January 1916) than they
27.3 Nude Descending a
Staircase No. 1 (detail of 27.1), do any earlier works by Duchamp. Indeed, if one compares a detail of the painting with
1916 corresponding passages in the photographic replica (27.2 and 27.3), it appears as though
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mechanical reproduction 385

Duchamp consciously sought to differentiate this new work from its model. Rather than try
to mimic the brown, yellow and ochre tonality of the original (Duchamp later said that its form
was derived from a chess piece, and the wood used for the light pieces often share this same
general color scheme), using watercolor, ink, crayon and pastel, he colored the replica with
tints of black, white, gray and turquoise, rendering the figure more metallic in appearance than
woodlike. Through the process of replication, the erotic and sensuous qualities associated
with the original painting were effectively eliminated; instead, we are left with a cold, almost
robotic Nude whose position and step-by-step descent down the staircase are now defined
with mechanical precision. In the replica, the title—which some might argue was the most
scandalous component of the original painting—is made even more emphatic by “shadowing”
the letters. Finally, Duchamp signed the photographic facsimile, adding the word “FILS” in
brackets after his signature, as if to indicate in a humorous way that in his capacity as creator
of this work, he should be thought of in the role of a “son” to the person who had made the
original painting.
It was not long after Duchamp made this photographic replica that he came up with an idea
that would further expand upon the concept of artistic replication. If one could appropriate
one’s own work to create something new, he might have reasoned, why not also consider using
someone else’s? So one night, while dining with the Arensbergs at the Café des Artistes, a
restaurant a few doors down the street from the building in which both he and the Arensbergs
then resided, Duchamp jumped up from the table and penned his signature to a large painted
battle scene, thereby establishing it as “a readymade that had everything,” he later explained,
“except taste.”17 To my knowledge, Duchamp’s gesture was unprecedented in the history of
art; outside of cases involving undisputed criminal forgery, it is the first known example of pure
artistic appropriation, where an artist has willingly claimed the work of another into the corpus
of his own artistic production.
Another alternative to traditional artistic practice came to Duchamp in the form of book
design, which, he later explained, was another activity that freed him—to a degree—from being
obligated to make certain aesthetic decisions. “A book can be artistically designed and printed,”
he said, warning, however, that “there is always some art introduced in anything produced by
man.” Nevertheless, he went on to say that when man “does things for the pure idea of
functional reasoning, then the idea of aesthetics disappears.”18 As early as 1914, Duchamp
produced a limited-edition photographic facsimile of his notes for the Large Glass, The Box
of 1914 (4.4), a work that was followed by two subsequent attempts to issue his writings
in facsimile form: the Green Box (4.1) in 1932, and the A l’Infinitif (4.8) in 1966. These works,
as well as many other publications that Duchamp designed himself or contributed to, were
discussed at length in my study of Duchamp and mechanical reproduction, for they represent
his most dedicated and sustained involvement with the art of these activities.
The differences that exist between an original and its copy are not only concerns that
affect the world of art, but they are matters of critical importance within the legal profession.
Duchamp was keenly aware of this fact, for his father had worked as a notary, first serving
in the town where Duchamp was raised, Blainville-Crevon, and later in Rouen. The young
Duchamp would have had many opportunities to witness the activities of his father, who was
frequently called upon to authenticate the validity of legal documents, deeds, trusts, real estate
transactions and property settlements. After these papers were carefully reviewed, the notary
applied his signature over the surface of a small-denomination postage stamp (a practice still
followed in France today), thereby diminishing the potential for forgery and elevating the status
of the document to legal tender. Duchamp followed this very same procedure when in 1924
(three months before his father’s death) he issued examples of his Monte Carlo Bond (11.1)
and, some years later, deluxe hand-colored reproductions of his earlier paintings for inclusion
in his valise.
386 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST

In order to raise money for the production of his valise, in 1937 Duchamp decided to issue
limited reproductions of two of his paintings—the Bride and Nude Descending a Staircase—
envisioned as independent works of art, each individually signed and dated (27.6 and 27.7).
For the Nude, he carefully retouched a black-and-white photograph of the painting with ink and
gouache (27.4), highlighting various details so as to create an image of exceptionally sharp visual
contrast. More an ébauche than a finished work of art, the retouched photograph nevertheless
demonstrates Duchamp’s technical abilities, for a careful examination of the image reveals that
the ink and gouache are applied with the accuracy and precision of a surgeon.19 This work was
in turn photographed and reproduced as a collotype (27.5), an image that was printed with an
intentionally light tonality so as to be suited for the application of color by means of pochoir. In
a pochoir, individual colors are precisely and consistently applied to multiple impressions of the
same image by means of stencils or templates cut from a thin sheet of metal. “The main work
[of the ‘colorist’] consists of cutting out in the zinc foil the areas for each color,” he explained
in a letter to Katherine Dreier (for whom he was having some pochoirs made for a portfolio
of her design). “The actual brushing of the color does not take so much time.”20 Indeed, with
experience, a pochoir colorist is able to work quickly, aligning his templates carefully over each
image and, in an assembly-line fashion, brushing separate colors over select areas of each image.
The same procedure was followed for the Bride (27.7) and, when completed, to the bottom
border of each reproduction Duchamp pasted a 5-centime French revenue stamp, over which
he signed his name, echoing the procedure he had used years earlier to certify the monetary
value of his Monte Carlo Bond (11.1).
Throughout his life, Duchamp felt no compunction about issuing the replica of an
earlier work, particularly if the original was lost or otherwise unattainable (as in the case of
Arensberg’s inability to acquire the Nude). He even accepted replicas produced by others, as
long as the replica captured the spirit of the original. He made no objection, for example, when
Picabia replicated his L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919 (8.1) for the cover of his magazine 391 (8.5), although
Duchamp later delighted in pointing out the fact that his friend had forgotten the goatee. But
in April of 1942, when Duchamp was residing in the south of France in the months immediately
preceding his departure for the United States, he was presented—probably by Jean Arp—with
another reproduction of his Mona Lisa (8.3), a work heretofore unknown in the literature on
Duchamp. Like Picabia’s variant, this replica bore a mustache but no goatee. Directly below the
reproduction are inscribed the letters L.H.O.O.Q.—with the central “O” dropped below the
line of type to avoid obliterating the printed caption—and at the base of the image appears the
name MARCEL DUCHAMP spelled out in capital letters. Apparently, for reasons that are still
unclear, Duchamp did not feel this work conformed in appearance to the original, so he wrote
on the right margin: pour copie non conforme, after which he added his signature.21
This particular work represents the earliest known case where Duchamp is documented
as having expressed his opinion on the conformity—or lack thereof—of a work attributed to
him. The term pour copie conforme (or non conforme, whatever the case may be) is one that
Duchamp knew well, for it is still used in France today (particularly by notaries) to certify that
a document is an accurate reflection of an original. In most cases, Duchamp insisted that any
replicas made of his work should conform as closely as possible in appearance to the original,
a procedure to which he had himself rigorously adhered.
Although Duchamp wanted his replicas to resemble the general appearance of the work
from which they were derived, a certain degree of control was relinquished when he authorized
others to make them for him, as he did in the spring of 1950, when he authorized Sidney Janis
to create a replica of Fountain (7.5) and, later in the year, of his Bicycle Wheel (6.1). Both of
these replicas differ in comparatively slight, though telling, details from the originals (cf. 7.1 and
6.2), but Duchamp willingly signed both, for he felt that the replicas conformed closely enough
in general appearance to serve as an adequate representation of his original concept. If there
were details in the replication of his readymades to which Duchamp objected, however, he
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27.4 Nude Descending a Staircase,

ca. 1936-37
ébauce (study), black and white
pigment over photograph
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery,
New York

27.5 Nude Descending a Staircase,

ca. 1936-37
Collotype
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery,
New York

27.6 Nude Descending a Staircase,

December 1937
Pochoir
Francis M. Naumann Fine Art,
New York

27.7 Mariée [Bride], October 1937

Pochoir
Francis M. Naumann Fine Art,
New York
388 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST

exhibited no hesitancy in relaying them to the maker, or, if the opportunity presented itself, in
making the changes himself. When the Swedish art historian Ulf Linde made a replica of the
Fountain in 1963, for example, he used press-type letters to provide the name “R. MUTT” and
the year “1917” (7.8); when Duchamp saw the work for the first time a year later in Milan,
he removed the letters and hand-painted the name and date in black pigment (7.9), just as he
had with the original (7.1). With Duchamp’s authorization, to this day, Linde improves upon
the replicas he made whenever a change brings them closer in appearance to the original.
Coincidentally, but quite independently, this very same procedure is followed by a number of
young contemporary artists, several of whom have elected to create new versions of earlier
work whenever they discover the existence of an artifact that more closely resembles the one
used by Duchamp.22
After Robert Lebel’s monograph on Duchamp appeared in 1959, there developed a sudden
need to create replicas of other works by the artist, not only the readymades, but, to satisfy the
increasing demand for exhibitions, several of the more intricate and fragile constructions made
on glass that could not be subjected to transport. Duchamp invariably signed these replicas
and reconstructions and, if they met with his approval, added the usual inscription pour copie
conforme. Whereas most of Duchamp’s colleagues accepted his willingness to authorize single
replicas of this type, they vehemently renounced his decision in 1964 to issue an edition of his
readymades through the Galleria Schwarz in Milan. Robert Lebel objected to the inclusion of
these works in any Duchamp exhibition, and some accused Duchamp of having relinquished
his principles, in essence, of having sold out to more commercial concerns. Upon further
contemplation, however, most of these very same individuals eventually came to the conclusion
that Duchamp knew exactly what he was doing. Max Ernst is a good case in point:

When I learned that Marcel allowed an art dealer from Milan to replicate the
readymade (to make multiples of them), I was surprised at first. The value of the
gesture that gave all the beauty to the readymade seemed to me compromised. The
provocation that scandalized the United States and set off a storm of enthusiasm in
European capitals where Dada was established, risked falling to zero. Afterwards, I
asked myself if this wasn’t a new attempt to throw public opinion, to confuse minds,
to deceive his admirers, to encourage his imitators by his bad example, etc. When I
asked him, he answered laughingly: “Yes, it was all of that.”23

There can be no doubt that when it came to issues involving his work—like any good
chess player—Duchamp fully anticipated the potential repercussions of his actions, not only as
they applied to his own artistic development, but as they related to larger aesthetic concerns
affecting the very definition of art. It is, of course, in this capacity that Duchamp’s legacy
lives on, through the work of young artists today who are also devoted to investigating the
conceptual strategies inherent in replication and appropriation, increasingly recurrent themes
in contemporary art that—like so many others—Duchamp ingeniously pioneered.

Aftermath and Conclusion

“Death is an indispensable attribute of a great artist,” Duchamp told an interviewer in 1936.

“His voice, his appearance, his personality—in short, his whole aura—intrudes such that his
pictures are overshadowed. Not until all these factors have been silenced, can his work be
known for its own greatness.”24
Although this statement may be perfectly true for most artists, it was not an accurate
prediction of what happened to Duchamp himself. In the last decade of his life, he witnessed his
own historical resuscitation as an ever-increasing number of artists, critics, museum curators,
dealers and art historians began to recognize the significance of his contribution to the history
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of 20th-century art. In an obituary written by Jasper Johns, Duchamp was described as “one
of this century’s pioneer artists,” who “moved through the retinal boundaries which had been
established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one
another.” Johns, who once said that he never objected to any comparison that might be made
between his work and Duchamp’s, claimed quite accurately that Duchamp was an artist who
would not soon be forgotten. “The art community feels Duchamp’s presence and his absence,”
he wrote. “He [Duchamp] has changed the condition of being here.”25
In a more recent interview, Johns recalled a conversation he once had with Duchamp
about Picasso. “I like Picasso,” Duchamp told Johns, “except when he repeats himself.”26 Johns
found the remark puzzling, for—so far as he knew—Picasso never repeated himself. Of course,
what Johns meant and what Duchamp was talking about were two different things. Duchamp
was voicing an opposition to artists who repeat a single style or approach that is intentionally
repetitious, one whose consistency is designed to secure recognition and, eventually, its
inevitable by-product: fame and fortune. Apparently, what Johns meant was more literal: in a
relentless and exhausting effort to probe the very existence of form, Picasso never repeated
exactly the same image twice. On a more recent occasion, when I pointed out to Johns that he
and Duchamp seemed to exercise a similar strategy in the appropriation of their own earlier
work, he responded: “My guess is that Duchamp felt that the various replicas of his work show
as precisely as possible his original and central concerns and, one assumes, without involving
the sort of repetition for which he, not infrequently, expressed distaste.” When I asked if Johns
saw any similarities between his approach and Duchamp’s, he responded: “Flux in the state of
affairs as images are reformed or restated in other materials has always been an interest of
mine.”27
After his death in 1968, Duchamp may no longer have been physically present on the
New York art scene, but his spiritual presence and influence were so strongly felt that for
years, people—not only his friends, but even those who knew him only through his work—
continued to refer to him in the present tense (a practice continued by his widow, Teeny, until
her death in 1995). In an even more mysterious way, Duchamp made such specific plans for
the disposition of work that, in the years after his death, some must have felt he was continuing
to issue actual works of art from the grave. He authorized his widow and stepdaughter to
complete the remaining run of the valise, thereby finishing off the planned edition of 300. The
last 47 examples were encased in dark green leather, with a slightly lighter shade of green linen
to line the interior (14.30). Each example was signed in red ink by means of a rubber stamp
simulating the artist’s signature, below which Alexina Duchamp placed her name.
Of course, there was nothing all that unusual in completing a planned edition of an artist’s
work after his death, but virtually no one was prepared for what came next. On July 7, 1969—
just over nine months after Duchamp’s death—the Philadelphia Museum of Art placed on
public display a previously unknown work by Duchamp that shocked virtually everyone who
saw it (16.1 and 16.2), not only those of a puritanical disposition, but even those who were
more open-minded and who (like myself at the time) were possessed of a fairly thorough
knowledge of the artist’s work. At the end of a long gallery displaying the works by Duchamp
in the Arensberg Collection, there is a dimly lit, roughly square-shaped room, where, without
warning, viewers encounter an antique wood door surrounded by bricks, the whole seemingly
installed directly into the face of a wall at the far end of the room. Further inspection reveals
a pair of circular holes in the upper section of the door. When we look into these small
openings, our field of vision is filled by a scene that many consider a visual violation: through an
irregular opening in a brick wall, we gaze upon a nude female figure lying on her back, her face
hidden almost entirely from view, but her lower extremity clearly visible. Her legs are spread
wide apart, revealing more of her anatomy than most people are accustomed to seeing in a
public place. In her upraised left hand, she holds a flickering gas lamp, and in the far background
a waterfall glistens as it appears to cascade silently down the side of a mountain.
390 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST

These two elements—the gas lamp and waterfall—are provided in the work’s
title—Etant donnés: 1º la chute d’eau, 2º le gaz d’éclairage [Given: 1. the Illuminating
Gas, 2. the Waterfall]—and they are the critical clues that link the theme of this
environmental tableau to the iconography of the Large Glass (3.1), which visitors
to the museum would have seen a few moments earlier in the adjacent gallery. Of
course, it is not within the scope of the present study to analyze this particular
work in depth; suffice it to say that only when it was placed on public view could
any sense be made out of the three small erotic objects that Duchamp made in
the 1950s and included in various exhibitions: Female Fig Leaf (17.1), Objet-Dard
(17.2) and Wedge of Chastity (17.3). Moreover, for the Duchamp specialists who
recalled the mysterious nude female torso covered with leather in the Tate Gallery
exhibition (17.13), a formal relationship to the reclining figure in the Etant donnés
was immediate. But, of course, Duchamp was not around to verify or affirm any
interpretations of his work, for he had gone underground for good, and we were
left on our own to make sense out of the sequence of events he had masterfully
engineered.
Even after Duchamp’s death, the practice of replicating his work continued.
Pontus Hulten, who had always been dissatisfied with the scale of his reconstruction
of the Rotary Glass Plates (13.8), arranged for the Renault Company in France to
make another in 1976, and as noted, Ulf Linde has continued to make improvements
27.8 Paris Air, 1919/74
to his replicas of the readymades, as well as to his reconstruction of the Large Glass. The artist
(Linde replica) authorized him to make the necessary alterations if, at any point in time, Linde discovers a
Moderna Museet, Stockholm means by which to make his replicas conform more closely in appearance to the original, a
process he has felt free to continue to the present day. When Paris Air was stolen from the
Moderna Museet in the early 1970s, for example, Linde replaced the replica by purchasing
another glass ampoule, breaking it at the neck and resealing it (27.8). In spite of its title,
Linde did not feel compelled to make this work in Paris; instead, while the ampoule was
being resealed in Stockholm, he arranged for the playing of an aria by Jacques Offenbach (a
composer of operettas who, although German-born, was favored by the French in late-19th-
century Paris).28 And in 1977, Linde changed the appearance of the Bicycle Wheel he had made
in 1960 by replacing the stool (which had smoothly turned legs and four horizontal rungs:
6.11) with one that more closely matched the one Duchamp used for the replica he made in
New York in 1915 (which had more ornately turned legs and eight horizontal rungs: 6.2), being
sure to retain the seat, which, of course, bore on its underside Duchamp’s signature (6.12).
None of the readymades changed more in appearance than In Advance of the Broken Arm,
the snow shovel that Duchamp bought in a hardware store on Columbus Avenue in New
York in 1915 and hung from the ceiling of his studio (12.3). For an exhibition of the three
Duchamp brothers organized by George Heard Hamilton for the Yale University Art Gallery in
1945, Dreier asked Duchamp if he could provide another example of the original (which, years
earlier, had been lost or discarded). The snow shovel fascinated Dreier, who, in her 1923 book
on modern art, Western Art and the New Era, used it to illustrate a clearly misguided explanation
of Duchamp’s readymades. “In selecting a common snow shovel out of a variety of maybe sixty
different ones he had looked at,” she wrote, “he [Duchamp] laid emphasis on the one good
design he found.”29 For the exhibition at Yale, Duchamp purchased another snow shovel from a
hardware store in New York (27.9) and inscribed the title and date in white paint on the back
lower edge, after which he added: “replica 1945.” The Linde replica of 1963 was the closest in
appearance that could be found in Swedish hardware stores (27.10), although it has a tubular
handle (as opposed to the square shape of the original) and, curiously, the handle is attached
to the front side of the blade, which carries only two raised vertical ribs for reinforcement (as
opposed to multiple flutes on the American versions). When Schwarz produced his edition of
the readymades in 1964, he had a draftsman execute detailed drawings from photographs of
 27
mechanical reproduction 391

27.9 In Advance of the Broken Arm,

1915, replica selected by George
Heard Hamilton in 1945
Yale University Art Gallery,
New Haven

27.10 In Advance of the Broken Arm,

1915, replica selected by Ulf
Linde in 1963
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

27.11 Drawing for In Advance of the

Broken Arm, 1915
BIGI Art Space, Kyoto

27.12 In Advance of the Broken Arm,

1915, replica made in edition by
the Galleria Schwarz in 1964
Collection Joseph Kosuth, Rome,
Italy
392 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST
27.13 The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23,
reconstruction made by Ulf Linde
in 1961
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
27.14 The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23,
reconstruction made by Richard
Hamilton in 1965-66
Tate Gallery, London
the lost originals, each of which was painstakingly reproduced by craftsmen in Milan. Elevation
and profile drawings were made of the shovel (27.11), so the final readymade produced in the
edition (27.12) closely matched the appearance of the original (12.3).
In the years after Duchamp’s death, the demand for his work has naturally increased,
both from museums and collectors of modern art. Although original works by Duchamp do
occasionally come onto the market, for the most part, latter-day collectors must be satisfied with
the various Duchamp-designed publications (like the Green Box, Boîte-en-valise and A l’Infinitif),
or with replicas of the readymades (usually stray examples from the Schwarz edition). Even
when a major Duchamp retrospective is planned, the Large Glass and Etant donnés cannot be
moved from their permanent positions in the Arensberg galleries of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art; for traveling exhibitions, subsequent venues are often forced to represent these works
by photographic enlargements, which, all too often, are proven woefully inadequate. As a result,
additional attempts to create full-scale reconstructions of the Large Glass have been attempted,
but in one way or another, they all lack the “aura” (to use Walter Benjamin’s term) of the
original. Even though these works were made in the form of true reconstructions—that is
to say they were made following the same procedures and techniques employed by the artist
when he made the original—none of them duplicate or even simulate the cracks in the glass
that are such an important chance-created feature of the original (a detail missing from these
reconstructions that Duchamp recognized and welcomed).30
Over the years, no fewer than four separate full-scale reconstructions of the Large Glass
have been made, each emulating as closely as possible the laborious and time-consuming
techniques employed by the artist. Two were made in Duchamp’s lifetime—the first by Ulf
 27
mechanical reproduction 393

Linde in 1961 (27.13) and the second by Richard Hamilton in 1965-66 (27.14)—and two were 27.15 The Bride Stripped Bare by
made posthumously—one by Yoshiaki Tono and his students in Japan in 1980 (27.15) and, with Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23,
reconstruction made by
the authorization of the artist’s widow, a second by Ulf Linde with the assistance of Henrik Yoshiaki Tono
Samuelsson and John Stenborg in 1991-92 (27.16). This second example was designated as a Art Museum of the College of Arts
and Sciences, University of Tokyo
traveling example of the work (since the one Linde had made thirty years earlier was signed by
Duchamp, and therefore considered too valuable to submit to the potential peril of transport).
27.16 The Bride Stripped Bare by
This second attempt differs most noticeably from the first by the addition of an imposing wood Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23,
frame, which was copied from one that had temporarily served as a support for the original (as reconstruction made by Ulf Linde
recorded in a photograph taken when the work was on display in the exhibition of modern art in 1961 (27.13) with new frame
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926: 3.8). There is some evidence that Duchamp himself might
have designed this imposing Arts & Crafts-style frame.31 Whether this is the case or not, the
new frame was considered so successful that Linde arranged for another to be made in order
to replace the metal support that had been used in his earlier reconstruction (27.17). Today,
Linde’s two reconstructions—both in the collection of the Moderna Museet—are virtually
identical in appearance, excepting the fact that only the first carries Duchamp’s signature and
the important inscription: pour copie conforme.32
Of course, whenever any of these reconstructions of the Large Glass are placed on public
display, they are always clearly identified for what they are: posthumous reconstructions
presented in the form of a substitute for the original, which cannot be moved from its permanent
installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For the two reconstructions of the Large Glass
made in his lifetime, we know that Duchamp was pleased with the results, even though he did
394 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST
27.17 The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23,
reconstruction made by Ulf Linde,
Henrik Samuelsson and John
Stenborg, 1990-91
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
not always look upon his own efforts at replication with the same degree
of enthusiasm. In 1966, for example, when his retrospective was being
organized by Richard Hamilton for the Tate Gallery in London, Duchamp
thought it would be best to leave out his photographic replica of the
Nude Descending a Staircase (27.1), and at around the same time, he told
Pierre Cabanne “it’s not the work I’m proudest of.”33 His reason for
dismissing the importance of these efforts at literal replication is obvious:
He knew the average visitor to the exhibition would fail to see anything
creative in a work he had reproduced by mechanical means, particularly
since it came from an artist who was outspoken in his admonition of
others who make a living by repeating themselves. At the same time,
it is curious that Duchamp would not have associated this early act of
replication with the various efforts he and others had made over the
years to replicate his readymades, particularly since the international
multiples movement of the 1960s had consistently identified Duchamp
as their historical model.34
Duchamp’s reasoning might very well have been influenced by
the negative opinions expressed by many art critics, several of whom
renounced the multiples movement as yet another example of the brash
commercialization of art in the 1960s. “The influence of Duchamp’s
gesture,” wrote Max Kozloff in 1965, “is now spreading with plague-like
virulence,” leading to what he described as a “retreat from originality”
brought about by the existence of “multiple originals” (which he described
disparagingly as “three-dimensional prints”). “One cannot now do what
Duchamp did, extend his spirit, of issuing editions of readymades,” he
wrote, “without being esthetically repetitious, without relinquishing
discovery.”35 At about the same time, Nan Rosenthal observed that
nearly everyone in the art world was—in one way or another—involved
with the new phenomenon. “Suddenly artists all over are creating work,”
she wrote, “mostly 3-D work, in large editions of identical or nearly identical objects, and
the international art world is rushing to produce, display, describe, and sell at low cost these
multiple-originals as if they were madly pedaling through a six-day race.”36
Some critics, on the other hand, saw the multiples movement as a welcomed opportunity
to devalue art. In terms that bring to mind Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on mechanical
reproduction, the German critic Werner Rhode spoke of multiples as a means of “demolishing
the aura” and “demythologizing art,” while John Christopher Battye wrote: “Multiples destroy
the value of private and total possession, and the concept of the individual status through
ownership. They hack at the idea of power through appropriated objects, the concept of
divinity. They erase the concept of the preciousness of a work of art.”37 We know from
Duchamp’s commentaries about his own work that he could not have disagreed more. In
1961 he emphasized that one of the essential characteristics of a readymade was “its lack of
uniqueness,” and he flatly stated that the replica of a readymade “delivered the same message.”
In 1964 he told Otto Hahn that one of the primary purposes of his work was to “wipe out the
idea of the original,” and at around the same time, he told Calvin Tomkins that “the readymades
were a way of getting out of the exchangeability, the monetarization of the work of art, which
was just beginning about then. In art, and only in art, the original work is sold, and it acquires a
sort of aura that way. But with my readymades a replica will do just as well.”38
“I’m not at all sure that the concept of the Ready-Made,” he told an interviewer in 1962,
“isn’t the most important single idea to come out of my work.”39 Indeed, if Duchamp had not
introduced the concept of the readymade, he would probably have been remembered in the
history of art as a perfectly proficient Cubist painter, one acknowledged for his experimentation
 27
mechanical reproduction 395

and scientific leanings, but who, otherwise, produced very little over the course of a long career.
Instead, the readymade earned him a secure position in history, one that forever altered our
understanding of what could be accepted as a work of art. After viewing an exhibition of Dada
art in 1958, for example, John Cage remarked that because of the passage of time, everything
in the show could easily be accepted as art, with one exception: the work of Duchamp, which
he said “remained something that invited one and sharpened one’s awareness to something
outside the work itself, so that as one went around the rooms of that exhibition—because of
the Duchamps—one noticed the handles of doors, vents in the walls and ceilings, and so forth.”
Years later, Cage expressed the same thought more succinctly when he said: “Say it’s not a
Duchamp. Turn it over and it is.”40
The readymade effectively blurred the distinction that had existed between works
of art and the common, ordinary objects that surround us in our everyday lives. Robert
Rauschenberg echoed these very principles when he explained his own approach to painting
as relating to both art and life. “Neither can be made,” he said. “I try to act in the gap between
the two.” Similarly, he once described Duchamp’s contribution to the history of art in terms
that emphasize the dual identity of readymades: “His recognition of the lack of art in art and
the artfulness of everything, I think, is probably his most important contribution.”41
Of course, Duchamp was well aware of the fact that once his readymades were removed
from the environment that established their identity as works of art, they could easily be
mistaken for the functional objects they were originally designed to be. We know that this is
precisely what occurred on at least three separate occasions: (1) in 1946 a janitor in Minnesota
removed Duchamp’s shovel from display in an exhibition (27.10) and used it to shovel a
snowdrift outside the museum; (2) in 1963 customs officials clearing works for the Pasadena
retrospective refused to recognize the readymades as works of art and tried to charge a
fee for their import as commonplace commodities; and finally (3) in 1978, workmen for the
Venice Biennale mistakenly identified the detached door 11 rue Larrey (25.8) as part of the
surrounding architecture, installed it into the corner of a gallery and painted its entire surface.42
It might have been the inherent potential for readymade objects to be confused in this fashion
that prompted Duchamp to contemplate a possible inversion of the concept—what he called
a “reciprocal readymade”—where a well-known masterpiece (like a painting by Rembrandt)
might be used to perform an everyday function (like being used as an ironing board).43
At certain points in his life, Duchamp seems to have seriously contemplated the possibility
of establishing an actual connection between his art and his life, as if in an effort to fulfill
Apollinaire’s prophecy that he would be the artist “to reconcile art and the people.” There are
many instances where Duchamp toyed with the possibility of turning his art-related activities
into a profession: in 1922, for example, he entered into a fabric-dying business with a colleague
in New York (reporting to friends that he had gone from being a peintre to becoming a teintre);
in the early 1920s he proposed becoming a fenêtrier or windowmaker; after purchasing a
camera, he wrote to a friend and declared that he was thinking about becoming a professional
cameraman; in a letter to another friend, he proposed marketing the word “dada” in the form
of an insignia, cast in silver, gold or platinum; he gave some thought to manufacturing a chess
set he had designed; originally he wanted his rotoreliefs to be sold as toys and later tried selling
them as scientific devices at an inventors’ fair; he published his own writings and designed his
own books; he wanted his optical machines to be understood as technical instruments (and
not works of art); and, finally, he almost succeeded in his effort to become a professional chess
player (an activity he often compared to drawing or painting).
It could be argued that we cannot gain a thorough understanding or appreciation of the
readymade without considering its relationship to the popular culture from which it emerged,
as well as the audience for whom it was intended. It is ironic that an artist who so effectively
challenged the traditional definition of art did so with commonplace objects appropriated
from the environment of our everyday world, especially since the majority of inhabitants
396 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST
27.18 Walter Benjamin working in the
Bibliothèque National, Paris,
Spring 1937
(photograph by Gisèle Freud)
in that world will never come to accept these objects as works of art. Of course, the
aesthetic dilemma presented by the readymade is something Duchamp clearly anticipated, a
philosophical contradiction that lies at the heart of the question he asked himself in 1913: “Can
one make works that are not works of ‘art’?” (4.10). By 1945 he had openly acknowledged
the contradictory nature of his work, proclaiming this very feature to be a motivating factor
in its development. “I have forced myself to contradict myself,” he said, “in order to avoid
conforming to my own taste.”44
The inevitable outcome of an art based on contradiction is its termination, which may be
the best explanation for why Duchamp stopped active artistic production shortly after having
introduced the concept of the readymade. After having run through several permutations of
the idea, little more would have been accomplished in continuing the practice. But Duchamp
never intended for his ideas to be applied universally—to all artists. “I don’t want to destroy
art for anybody else,” he said in 1961, “but for myself, that’s all.”45 Over time, the underlying
contradictory structure of Duchamp’s work diminishes as exposure and familiarity nurture
acceptance. As André Breton noted in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism: “There exists a
certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the
communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”46
For those who believe that the art and ideas of Marcel Duchamp are among the most important
and influential factors to shape the course of 20th-century art, the contradictions presented by
his work could well be considered its most engaging feature.
Afterthought:
Ruminations on Duchamp and Walter Benjamin *
The elaborate subtitle of my book on Marcel Duchamp—The Art of
Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction—was a fairly obvious
reference to the celebrated essay by Walter Benjamin, “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in 1936. Not
only had I intended this reference, but in having written “The Art of
Making Art,” I wanted the repetition of words to emphasize the theme
of reproduction, one that I felt was at the core of Duchamp’s work,
while, at the same time, central to the subject of Benjamin’s essay.
Logical though this approach may have seemed to me at the time, in
retrospect, I now realize that it was somewhat misleading. To some,
the title may have suggested that my book was heavily dependent on
theory, which, in actual fact, could not be further from the truth. I
consider myself a contextualist, that is to say, an art historian whose
sole goal is to place the work of art in its proper context, within the
artist’s oeuvre and that of his contemporaries, as well as—and perhaps
even more importantly—within the larger framework of the social,
economic and cultural climate from which it emerged (the latter factor
being the main reason why I brought up the subject of Benjamin in the first place).47
Benjamin’s essay is—without doubt—the most penetrating analysis ever attempted to
evaluate the effects of photography, film and the newest innovations within the print media—
which he indicates are the most recent advancements in the art of mechanical reproduction—
on the way in which society will come to envision the concept of originality in a work of art.
He feels that these new forms of reproduction have created a sudden and undesirable break
from the traditions of the past, a time-honored and respected hands-on approach to the
* Published in Tout-Fait:The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, vol, 1, issue 1, (December 1999).
 27
mechanical reproduction 397

making of art that had characterized its production from the very beginning. In emphasizing
this particular point, a comparison with Duchamp’s approach to mechanical reproduction
might appear—at face value—perfectly legitimate. The techniques he employed, particularly
in preparing reproductions for his valise, were, for the most part, methods already developed
for well over a century.48 Duchamp had a special fascination for the technique of pochoir,
for example, a stenciling process whereby every image reproduced was—for all intents and
purposes—an original.
This having been said, it is equally important to clarify the fact that the pochoir process
is a means by which to eliminate the individuality of the artist, for if it was to be employed
in any significant numbers (as was the case for the more than 300 copies of the valise), then
it was usually carried out by a battery of professionals who specialized in the application of
this technique, craftsmen who carefully and systematically applied the colors in the fashion
of an elaborate assembly line. For all intents and purposes, the process denies any possibility
of expressiveness on the part of its maker, eliminating the “patte,” as Duchamp called it, or
artist’s personal touch. From the years of his earliest mature works (ca. 1913-14), Duchamp
maintained that he was devoted to “discredit[ing] the idea of the hand-made.”
In essence, he wanted to operate in the fashion of a machine, for he wished “to wipe
out the idea of the original, which,” he later explained, “exists neither in music, nor in poetry:
plenty of manuscripts are sold, but they are unimportant. Even in sculpture, the artist only
contributes the final millimeter; the casts and the rest of the work are done by his assistants.
In painting, we still have the cult of the original.”49 In effect, then, Duchamp strove to eliminate
the aura intrinsic to an original work of art, a position that certainly would have placed him
in opposition to Benjamin, who—as a result of its mechanical replication—considered this
particular aspect of art its most endangered feature.
Duchamp used the pochoir process because he wanted his paintings to be reproduced in
color and—at that point in time—color photography was simply not sufficiently developed to
accurately record the subtle nuances and tonal gradations in a painting. During the summer
of 1935, when Duchamp was gathering photographs for his valise, Walter Arensberg wrote to
explain that “the truest color notation can be obtained from a black and white photograph
hand colored by some specialist who does work for floral catalogues.”50 Indeed, the hand-
coloring process was one Duchamp would employ throughout his career, inscribing these
works in Latin “Marcel coloriavit” to indicate that he had himself applied the color. Once the
technique of color printing achieved the results he sought, however, he did not object to its
usage; in the early 1960s, for example, he added twelve new printed color reproductions to
his valise, images that he must have felt adequately reflected the paintings and sculptures they
represented.
The ultimate problem with my pairing of these two great thinkers (Duchamp and Benjamin)
is that the profound implications of Benjamin’s writings are unintentionally obfuscated when
we attempt to integrate them with Duchamp’s equally profound concept of the readymade,
of which, we can be reasonably safe in assuming, Benjamin had no knowledge at the time
when he wrote his essay. Although we now know that Duchamp and Benjamin met on at
least one occasion—in a café in Paris a year after Benjamin’s essay had been published—
it is doubtful that the readymade would have been one of the issues they discussed. The
subject of reproduction may very well have come up, however, since Duchamp showed him a
reproduction of his Nude Descending a Staircase (27.4, or possibly 27.6), which Benjamin noted,
was “breathtakingly beautiful, maybe mention...”51 It is tempting to speculate that Benjamin
might have found this particular reproduction possessed with a quality (an aura) that he had
only previously associated with original works of art. Could it have been—as I speculated
in the introduction to my book—that in having written “maybe mention,” Benjamin might
have intended to take this fact into consideration in a possible future revision of his essay on
mechanical reproduction? Subsequent to this writing, it has been drawn to my attention that
398 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST

Benjamin had indeed intended to write more about Duchamp, and that he eventually even
learned about the readymades (although exactly what he understood about them remains
unclear). In the French edition of his essay, Benjamin intended to add the following passage:

We think of Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is one of the most interesting manifestations

of the French avant-garde. His production is quite limited, but his influence is far from
negligible. He was not attached to any school; he was close to Surrealism [and] a
friend of Picasso, even though he was always unclassifiable. His theories of the work of
art (of the value of art) which he recently illustrated (without explanation) by a series
of large panels, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, is close to the following: as
soon as an object is regarded by us as a work of art, it absolutely ceases functioning
as such. That is why, as for the specific effect of the work of art, contemporary man
will benefit from experience (Erfahrung) in the case of objects released from their
functional context—taken out of context or discarded (objects such as a potted
palm with piano keys, a top hat riddled with holes)—rather than with a work of art
authorized to play this role.52

The insertion was never made, for the essay was never formally revised, and Benjamin died
three years later (fearing possible deportation, he committed suicide at the beginning of the
war).
The issues Benjamin addresses in his essay are, admittedly, somewhat difficult to grasp, due
in part to a circuitous method of reasoning that, in a relentless attempt to explicate every point
he brings up, inevitably loses sight of its subject. The intellectual gymnastics are, nevertheless,
a feat to behold, and well worth the process of engagement, although I am still convinced that
the ultimate conclusion he draws—that the aura of an original work of art “withers” as a result
of its reproduction—is inherently flawed. In a long footnote to my text, I refer readers to the
opinions of Benjamin’s contemporaries and a number of subsequent writers who were critical
of his theory. Unknown to me at the time, however, was an excellent analysis of Benjamin’s
essay by Jacquelynn Baas, who not only challenges the wholesale acceptance of Benjamin’s
theories by present-day critics but, in a careful reading of the text, finds serious flaws with
the theory itself. “The aura or perceived potency of presence of the art object is seemingly
enhanced,” she concludes, “not diminished, in ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’.”53
This is precisely the conclusion I came to. Moreover, in spite of the theoretical shortcomings
I have acknowledged, I remain convinced that if one reads Benjamin’s essay with Duchamp’s
concept of the readymade in mind, the issues he addresses are contradicted throughout the
text. But, again, we could argue that this is not what Benjamin had in mind. Yet there is no
question that, in emphasizing various techniques of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin believed
he had identified the source of a phenomenon that was then in the process of transforming the
very nature of art. Indeed, his essay begins with a long quote from the writings of Paul Valéry
(1871-1945), a French poet and essayist whose writings Benjamin greatly admired. “We must
expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts,” wrote Valéry, “thereby
affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very
notion of art.” What contributed more to altering “our very notion of art” in this century, we
might well ask, than the readymade, a concept that has revolutionized the very way in which
we think about art and the art-making process?

Notes:
1
These words were inscribed below a reproduction of
Man Ray’s La Violon d’Ingres, which was used on a poster
to advertise an Italian exhibition of photography in 1973
(Collection Rosalind Jacobs, New York). They are also
the last two lines in an undated statement probably
written by Man Ray in the early 1960s (see “Autres
Objets,” in Man Ray, Objets de mon affection [Paris:
Philippe Sers, 1983], p. 158; for an English translation,
see Neil Baldwin, Man Ray: American Artist [New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, 1988], pp. 323-24).
2
Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp,
André Gervais, ed. (Marseille: André Dimanche, 1994),
p. 18. The original interview was conducted in Paris
for Radio Française on December 9, 1960 (see Jennifer
Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides on
and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy,” entry for
12/09/60, in Pontus Hulten, ed., Marcel Duchamp, exh.
cat., Palazzo Grassi,Venice, 1993).
3
Katherine Kuh, “Interview with Marcel Duchamp,”
in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 83. Duchamp was here
specifically referring to his efforts to avoid conforming
to tradition, especially his own.
4
Francis M. Naumann,“Marcel Duchamp:A Reconciliation
of Opposites,” (reprinted here as Chapter 25).
5
Note dated July 29, 1937; see Marcel Duchamp, Notes,
Paul Matisse, ed. and trans. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983),
note 35.
6
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung,
V, I, 1936; in Hannah Arendt, ed., Walter Benjamin:
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), pp. 217-51. Benjamin’s conclusion—
that the aura of a work of art “withers” as a result
of being replicated (p. 221)—was not only refuted by
his contemporaries (see Momme Bordersen, Walter
Benjamin: A Biography [New York/London: Verso, 1996],
pp. 223-24; see also Theodor Adorno’s letter to Benjamin,
March 1936; trans. by Harry Zohn in Adorno, et al.,
Aesthetics and Politics [London: New Left Books, 1977],
pp. 120-26), but has been found equally unconvincing
today (see Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy:
Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles [New York:
Zone Books, 1996], pp. 140-41). Admonitions of this
type do not seem to have affected art historians, many
of whom accept Benjamin’s theories unchallenged (even
in the case of those writing specifically about Duchamp:
see, for example, Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art
in Transit [Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1995], pp. 135, 140-41).
7
Benjamin’s diary entry dates from the late spring of
1937, and is quoted by Ecke Bonk, “Delay Included,”
in Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp ... In Resonance, The
Menil Collection, Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum
of Art (New York: D.A.P., 1998), p. 102.
27
mechanical reproduction 399
8
From an unpublished interview with Harriet and
Carroll Janis, with the participation of Sidney Janis, New
York, 1953 (typed transcription, Collection Carroll Janis,
New York, p. 63). Duchamp used the word patte in an
interview for BBC television in 1966 (“Rebel Ready-
Made Marcel Duchamp,” aired June 23, 1966).
9
Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic
Meditations, trans. Lionel Abel (New York: George
Wittenborn, 1970), p. 48. (For more on Duchamp and
Apollinaire, see Katia Samaltanos, Apollinaire: Catalyst
for Primitivism, Picabia, and Duchamp [Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1984], passim.)
Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans.
10
Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 37-38.
11
Janis interview, 1953 (pp. 25-26).
12
“A Complete Reversal of Art Opinions by Marcel
Duchamp, Iconoclast,” Art and Decoration 5 (September
1915), p. 428.
13
Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand
du Sel), Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 33.
14
Rhonda Shearer has argued that Duchamp derived
the term “readymade” from the words toute fait, as they
were used in an essay by the French mathematician Henri
Poincaré (see Rhonda Roland Shearer, “Coffee Mates,”
The Sciences 37, no. 2 [March/April 1997], pp. 14-15). I
have openly disagreed with Ms. Shearer’s conclusions
(see my letter to the editor and her response in “Peer
Review,” The Sciences 37, no. 5 [September/October
1997], pp. 7, 63-64). Linda Henderson has discussed
Henri Bergson’s use of the term Tout-Fait in association
with the “external” and “mechanical” modes of thought
that Bergson opposed to the intuitive expression of the
“fundamental self” (see Henderson, Duchamp in Context:
Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998], p. 63).
15
A phrase, apparently, that he liked to repeat almost
in the fashion of a refrain; quoted in Beatrice Wood,
“Marcel,” in Naumann and Kuenzli, eds., Marcel Duchamp:
Artist of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), pp.
12-17.
16
The shop was called Ye Little Photo Shoppe and
specialized in “developing, printing and enlarging”
photograph prints, as indicated on a label that still
remains attached to the verso of the Nude Descending No.
3; see Michael R. Taylor, “New York,” in Leah Dickerman,
ed., DADA, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 19
February – 14 May 2006, p. 295.
17
As described in an interview with Dore Ashton, Studio
International 171, no. 878 (June 1966), p. 247. André
Breton was the first to mention the existence of this
work in his essay “Phare de La Mariée,” Minotaure (Paris),
vol. 2, no. 6 (Winter 1935), p. 46; trans. by Simon Watson
400 THE RECURRENT, HAUNTING GHOST
Taylor in Breton, Surrealism and Painting (London:
MacDonald, 1972), p. 87.
18
Janis interview, 1953, p. 26.
19
In the most recent edition of his catalogue raisonné,
Schwarz dates this work to 1915 (The Complete Works
of Marcel Duchamp [New York: Delano Greenidge
Editions, 3rd revised and expanded edition, 1997], cat.
no. 335), presumably believing it to be a study made
in preparation for the hand-colored replica Duchamp
made for the Arensbergs in 1916. My disagreement
with this reasoning was raised in a review of the Schwarz
book (see Chapter 23).
20
Duchamp to Dreier, June 25, 1937 (Papers of
the Société Anonyme, Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New
Haven). Ecke Bonk observed that Duchamp’s first use
of the pochoir technique was in 1914, in coloring the
second version of the Chocolate Grinder, and that the
artist seems to have undertaken a thorough study of
the process at this time; Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Box
in a Valise (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), pp. 153-54). For
Duchamp’s notes on the pochoir technique, see Paul
Matisse, Notes, notes 126 and 127.
21
This work—which I have examined carefully—is
currently in a private collection in the United States.
For more on the L.H.O.O.Q. and replicas made of it, see
Chapter 8.
22
I have in mind artists like Mike Bidlo, who discovered
and signed no fewer than three separate examples of a
urinal (1986, 1989, and 1995), and Sherrie Levine, who,
in 1991, issued the urinal in a bronze edition and, when
she discovered a model that more closely resembled the
one used by Duchamp, produced a new edition in 1995
(see Chapter 31).
23
This passage was brought to my attention by
Thomas Girst. The same passage was cited by Dieter
Daniels, Duchamp und die anderen: Der Modellfall
einer künstlerischen Wirkungsgeschichte in der Moderne
(Cologne: DuMont, 1992), p. 232. The entire interview
with Robert Lebel is published in Max Ernst, Ecritures
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 419-36. Lebel expressed
his sentiments in a letter to Bernard Dorival (quoted
in Cooper and Caumont, “Ephemerides,” entry for
12/22/66).
24
“Artist Must Die to Be Great, Frenchman Says,” The
Berkshire County Eagle, June 17, 1936 (quoted in Cooper
and Caumont, “Ephemerides,” 6/16/36).
25
Jasper Johns,“Marcel Duchamp [1887-1968],” Artforum
7, no. 3 (November 1968), p. 6.
26
Quoted in Edmund White, “Moma’s Boy,” Vanity Fair
(September 1996), p. 304.
27
My questions to Johns were made in a letter dated
December 17, 1995, and Johns’s reply is dated January 30,
1995 (both letters preserved in the author’s archives).
28
Information relayed to the author in a telephone
conversation, November 29, 1995.
29
Katherine S. Dreier, Western Art in the New Era (New
York: Brentano’s, 1923), pp. 70-71.
30
Conveyed in his interview with Robert Lebel, “Marcel
Duchamp: Maintenant et ici,” L’Oeil no. 149 (May 1967), p.
77 (quoted in the present text: see Chapter 8).
31
As noted by Linde (in conversation with the author,
November 29, 1995), who drew to my attention the
sketch for a wood frame (clearly labeled “bois”) in one
of Duchamp’s notes for the Large Glass dated “1915
N[ew] Y[ork];” see 4.15, (Paul Matisse, Notes, note 171).
Although this note is not included among those dealing
with the subject of the Large Glass, in the “Translator’s
Note” that appears at the close of the volume, this is
acknowledged to be a mistake.
32
Among the posthumous works under consideration,
I have intentionally omitted the reconstruction of the
Etant donnés that was made by Richard Baquié in 1991
for the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon (16.13).
The construction of this work was not authorized by
the artist’s widow (letter to the author from Jacqueline
Monnier, December 9, 1997), and it was not made with
the intention of re-creating the effect produced by the
original.
33
Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 52 (I am grateful
to Hans de Wolf, who drew this citation to my attention);
although the French edition of Cabanne appeared in
1967 (Paris: Pierre Belfond), the interviews themselves
took place in 1966. For Duchamp’s letter to Hamilton,
see Gough-Cooper and Caumont, “Ephemerides,”
4/7/66.
34
The most detailed study of Duchamp’s critical
role in the multiples movement of the 1960s is that
undertaken by Danielle Fox, “Original Reproductions:
Art Publishing in the 1960s US,” unpublished Ph.D
thesis, Northwestern University (currently in progress).
For a somewhat more critical overview of Duchamp’s
remade readymades, see Martha Buskirk, “Thoroughly
Modern Marcel,” in Buskirk and Mignon Nixon, eds., The
Duchamp Effect (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 191-
203.
35
Max Kozloff, “Three-Dimensional Prints and the
Retreat from Originality,” Artforum IV, no. 4 (December
1965), pp. 26-27.
36
Nan Rosenthal, “The Six-Day Bicycle Wheel Race,” Art
in America 53, no. 5 (Fall 1965), p. 100.
37
John Christopher Battye, “If You’ve Seen One,
You’ve Seen Them All,” Art and Artists 5 [London], no.
8 (November 1970), p. 64; Werner Rhode, quoted
by René Block, “The Significance of Multiples,” Studio
International 184, no. 947 (September 1972), p. 98 (both
authors quoted in Danielle Fox, “Remade Readymades:
Originality and Reproduction in the Work of Marcel
Duchamp,” a paper delivered in “Marcel Duchamp and

the Readymade: From Origin to Consequence,” a CAA
session that I chaired for an annual meeting of the
College Art Association, Boston, February 21, 1996; I am
grateful to Ms. Fox for having provided me with a copy
of her paper).
38
Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades’,” talk
presented at the Museum of Modern Art in October
1961, published for the first time in Art and Artists 1
[London], no. 4 (July 1966), p. 47. The interview with
Otto Hahn (“Passport No. G255300”) appeared in
the same issue of Art and Artists (July 1966), but was
published earlier in L’Express [Paris], July 1964. See
Calvin Tomkins, “Marcel Duchamp,” The Bride and the
Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art (New
York:Viking, 1965), p. 40.
39
Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen
Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 92.
40
John Cage, “26 Statements re Duchamp,” in A Year from
Monday (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969),
p. 72. The first quotation was transcribed from Cage’s
appearance in “Rebel Ready-Made: Marcel Duchamp,”
a film made for BBC Television, aired London, June 23,
1966.
41
Transcribed from the film “Rebel Ready-Made: Marcel
Duchamp,” BBC Archives, aired June 23, 1966. The oft-
quoted remark about acting in the gap between art and
life was written by Rauschenberg for the catalogue 16
Americans, Dorothy C. Miller, ed. (Museum of Modern
Art, New York, 1959), p. 58.
42
The shovel incident is reported in George Heard
Hamilton, “In Advance of Whose Broken Arm?,” Art
and Artists 1, no. 4 (July 1966), p. 29; the exchange
with customs officials occurred during the time of
the Pasadena retrospective (see Naumann, The Art of
Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999], p. 236); and the damage
to the door is reported in Naumann, The Mary and
William Sisler Collection (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1984), p. 212.
43
Sanouillet and Peterson, eds., Salt Seller, p. 32.
Quoted in Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp:
44
Anti-Artist,” View, series V, no. 1 (March 1945), p. 18.
45
In response to a question addressed by William C.
Seitz, “The Art of Assemblage,” a symposium held at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961
(transcribed in John Elderfield, ed., Essays on Assemblage
[New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992], p. 150.)
46
“Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 1930, in André
Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard
Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1972), p. 123.
27
mechanical reproduction 401
47
The inspiration for this essay came from a review
by Mark Daniel Cohen of two exhibitions that I
organized to coincide with the release of my book:
“Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction,” Achim Moeller Fine Art,
October 2, 1999 – January 15, 2000, and “Apropos of
Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art After Duchamp
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Curt Marcus
Gallery, October 8-30, 1999 (Review, October 15, 1999,
pp. 38-40). It should be noted that Cohen’s criticism was
aimed at my exhibitions and not the book (which, at the
time of his writing, he had not yet seen).
48
The outdated quality of the pochoir technique was
first brought to my attention in 1991 by Jan Ceuleers,
a Belgian writer with whom I discussed the approach I
had planned for my book on Duchamp. It is with regret
that I did not discuss this particular aspect of Duchamp’s
work at greater length in my text, for it would have
strengthened a rapport with Benjamin’s theories,
thereby better justifying the subtitle I had chosen.
49
Hahn, “Passport G2553000,” p. 10 (for full citation see
note 38).
50
Walter Arensberg to Marcel Duchamp, September 1,
1935 (Duchamp Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art);
quoted in Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making
Art, p. 127.
51
Duchamp’s meeting with Benjamin was noted in the
latter’s diary and is cited in Bonk, “Delay Included” (see
n7 above), p. 102. Although Duchamp and Benjamin
met in the spring of 1937, the finished pochoir of the
Nude Descending a Staircase is dated “December 1937.”
The time discrepancy is probably a result of the fact
that all of the pochoirs in the series had not yet been
completed, and it is likely that Duchamp awaited their
return before signing and dating them.
52
From “Paralipomènes et variants de la version
definitive,” a text prepared by Benjamin for a French
edition of his famous essay; see Jean-Maurice Monnoyer,
ed., Walter Benjamin: Ecrits français (Paris: Gallimard,
2006), p. 231. I am grateful to Catherine Perret for having
drawn this passage to my attention (email message to
the author, July 4, 2001), to Severine Gossart for having
provided me with a scan from the publication, and to
John Cauman for having helped me to translate the text.
53
Jacquelynn Baas, “Reconsidering Walter Benjamin:
‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Retrospect,”
in Gabriel P. Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon, eds.,
The Documented Image: Visions in Art History (Syracuse
University Press, 1987), p. 346; I am grateful to Linda
Henderson for having drawn this essay to my attention.
For the footnote in my text, see p. 24, note 6.