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Fasten your Seatbelts
as we Prepare for our Nude Descending

Rites of Passage: t / here

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Figure 8

Paul Cézanne, Bibémus Quarry, c. 1895, Museum Folkwang, Essen

Figure 9

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [the Large Glass], 1915-23

Contrary to de Duve's claim of the somehow epiphanic significance of Kandinsky and "Secession"--to which Duchamp was introduced during his 1912 Munich sojourn⁽¹⁸⁾--even in Germany, the artist still speaks the lingua franca, not of Kandinsky and non-objective art, but rather of Cézanne and Cubism (Fig. 8). The Berlin "Secession", he writes to his brother Jacques Villon, "finally allowed me to see how young French painting was looking abroad... I was really pleased to find they have Cubism here, it was so long since I'd seen any. And that certainly played a part in my having a soft spot for Berlin".⁽¹⁹⁾ Indeed, in their analogous obsession with the problem of the background, Duchamp spends the better part of a lifetime pursuing both the Cubists, and especially the Master of Aix. As he explains to Francis Roberts:

The main point is the subject, the figure. It needs no reference. It is not in relation. All that background on the canvas that had to be thought about, tactile space like wallpaper, all that garbage, I wanted to sweep it away... The question of painting in background is degrading for the painter. The thing you want to express is not in that background.(20)

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Figure 10	Figure 11	Figure 12
Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of the Artist's Father, 1910	Marcel Duchamp, The Chess Game, 1910	Marcel Duchamp, Avoir l'apprenti dans le soleil [To Have the Apprentice in the Sun], 1914

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Figure 13
Marcel Ducahmp, Musical Erratum, 1913

In Apprentice, then, although figuration is inherently opposed to the space of musical notation, nevertheless, the ascending figure of the bicyclist is, at once, conceptually assimilated to the ascent of the musical scale itself. For "sol" refers not only to the title sun ["soleil"] of the drawing--the very precondition of what is given to sight--but also to the rising ground ["sol"] which the bicyclist ascends, exactly as the musical scale does also ["sol" = key of G⁽²²⁾]. In the relationship of its imprint ["empreinte"] to its sheet-music paper as ground ["sol"], Apprentice in fact revisits another work of just the prior year, Musical Erratum (1913) (Fig. 13), which Duchamp scores for three voices, and whose lyrics he exactly appropriates from a dictionary definition of imprint ["imprimer"].⁽²³⁾ In this "musical mistake", both the aleatory lyrics themselves, as well as the equal value of the notes, and their arbitrary order and range, all participate in the artist's contemporary experiments with objective chance. Most telling of all, however, are the respective relationships of the "imprints", or "figures", in Musical Erratum and Apprentice to their otherwise identical "ground". However unconventional the lyrics and notes in Musical Erratum, nevertheless, their relationship as musical notation to their sheet-music paper as ground is entirely conventional. In Apprentice, by contrast, that relationship--analogizing the ascent of the bicyclist to that of the musical scale and, therefore, the figure to the ground--has been entirely conceptualized. As Duchamp explains, "before the Nude my paintings were visual. After that they were ideatic":⁽²⁴⁾ not only in how they convey the "passage" from figure to ground, however, but also in how they figure the ascent of a bicyclist, like the descent of a nude, and movement more generally.

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Figure 14	Figure 15
Marcel Ducahmp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912	Marcel Ducahmp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1, 1911

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Figure 16	Figure 17
Marcel Ducahmp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 3, 1916	Marcel Ducahmp, Sad Young Man on a Train, 1911

The male-ish gender of the second Nude, whose title is admittedly neutral on this score,⁽²⁷⁾ is further confirmed by Duchamp's inscription of the third Nude (1916) (Fig. 16) as the son ["fils"], presumably, of the second: "Marcel Duchamp [Fils] / 1912-1916", as the third Nude reveals at recto. Doubtless, "daughter" would have better served the same filial purpose, were not the second Nude male; the third Nude a replica of the second; and both, in this sense, a reprise of another nude young man, from just the month before the second Nude: Duchamp's Sad Young Man on a Train (1911) (Fig. 17). Sad Young Man is a painting of "two parallel movements corresponding to each other" which, Duchamp elaborates, are those of the train and of the sad young man passing through its corridor.²⁸⁾ However, the artist also provides us with two further and frankly anomalous details: the nude young man is a self-portrait--"Marcel Duchamp / nu (esquisse) / Jeune homme triste dans un train...", as he inscribes the picture at verso--in which he is smoking a pipe.⁽²⁹⁾ An entire series of only barely symbolic, yet closely related "parallel movements" thus emerges, according to which everything rather starts to resemble the phallus: from the erect young man penetrating the train's "corridor"; to the train, itself, surely entering the tunnel of his symbolic; where the pipe he smokes is no longer one--for, "faire une pipe" is not to make a pipe, as Magritte's picture famously disavows (Fig. 18), but rather "to give a blow job". Indeed, the "parallel movements" of Sad Young Man and, separated by only a month, the second Nude are entirely comparable: the nude young man, who at first penetrates a venerably Freudian corridor, in turn, descends an equally venerable staircase:⁽³⁰⁾ exactly the psycho-sexual Passage which the title work nominally regenders. No differently, the swing of his "pipe" in Sad Young Man, at first replaced by that of his "pendu"(lum) in the second Nude, Duchamp analogously regenders as "Le Pendu Femelle" in both Passage and Bride. Rather, the salient difference between Sad Young Man and the second Nude is the use of chronophotographic cues in the latter -- to supplement the similarly chronophotographic process of successively doubling the figure in both works--in a way which specifically isolates and identifies "Le Pendu Femelle". The source of these chronophotographic cues--in the time-lapse imagery of the foils Marey's fencers wield -- exactly re-emphasizes the phallic aspect of "Le Pendu Femelle" by transforming Marey's fencers' foils into the "phallic barbs" which, as John Golding observes, everywhere proliferate throughout Duchamp's first stab at The Bride Stripped Bare By The Bachelors (1912) (Fig. 19).⁽³¹⁾ >>Next

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Figure 18	Figure 19
René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929	Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By The Bachelors, 1912

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