616
PARTISAN REVIEW
York Dadaist-in-residence, Duchamp published an elaborate document
for which his major painting,
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even,
had been in some way the illustration. And with this
editorial act, Duchamp smuggled allegory back into the heart of
modernism.
The Bride Stripped Bare.
.. ,
also known as the
Large Glass,
was
finished in 1923 and publically exhibited in 1926. The
Green Box,
which served as the text for the work, was published in 1934. In 1945
Andre Breton wrote "The Lighthouse of the Bride," the first major
essay on Duchamp, which, though it took account of the information
available in the
Green Box,
nevertheless maintained the
Large Glass
in
the tradition of mainstream Dada, that is, in the tradition of the
"amorous machines" of Picabia and Max Ernst. "We find ourselves
here in the presence of a mechanistic and cynical interpretation of the
phenomenon of love," Breton declared. But twenty years later, in the
midst of that decade whose art was to become a monument
to
the work
of Duchamp, another poet produced a serious study of the artist.
Octavio Paz's
Marcel Duchamp
or
the Castle of Purity,
published in
1968, established the essentiall y mythic and esoteric nature of the
Glass:
the painting and its text formed a system decipherable through
elaborate hermeneutics. Paz's attempt was not the first of these, and
certainly not the last. The work has been submitted to psychoanalytic,
cabalistic, and linguistic interpretation. The special prestige of Paz's
essentially mythopoetic interpretation comes not only from its own
lucidity, but from Paz's status as a major poet once associated with
surrealism.
Ten years later Paz has published another book on Duchamp.
Appearance Stripped Bare
is not exactly a new work. It combines a
1973 text written for the Museum of Modern Art Duchamp retrospec–
tive with the earlier
Castle of Purity,
to
which an extensive new section
has been added. The 1973 text addresses itself to the shock Duchamp
delivered to the art world from beyond the grave. The last twenty years
of his life had been given over to the production, in secret, of a
companion piece to the
Large Glass.
Installed in the Philadelphia
Museum three months after his death, this work is an intricate,
diorama-like assemblage whose name is taken from the prefatory note
of the
Green Box: Etant Donnes:
1°
La Chute d'Eau,
2°
La Gaz
Jlluminant
(Given:
1.
The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). By
enlarging his study to include the final work, Paz is attempting a
definitive interpretation.
Appearance Stripped Bare
proposes a key that
will unlock the whole system of Duchamp's production.
