Volume 44, Number 5 · March 27, 1997
Confidence Man
By Roger Shattuck
Duchamp: A Biography
by Calvin Tomkins
Henry Holt/a John Macrae book, 550 pp., $35.00
Among The Books Also Discussed in this Essay
The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture
by Jerrold Seigel
University of California Press, 291 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism
by Jeffrey Weiss
Yale University Press, 331 pp., $45.00
The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp
edited by Thierry de Duve
MIT Press, 488 pp., $29.95 (paper)
New York Dada 1915-23
by Francis M. Naumann
Abrams, 255 pp., $60.00
Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York
edited by Francis M. Naumann, with Beth Venn. Catalog of the Whitney Museum exhibition, which closed on February 23.
Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams, 304 pp., $49.50
Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Esthetics
by Heather Busch, by Burton Silver
Ten Speed Press, 96 pp., $16.95 (paper)
For fifty years after he had avowedly ceased painting, Marcel Duchamp spent much of his time advising friends what art works to collect. He helped Katherine Dreier form the one-woman museum of modern art called the Société Anonyme, Inc. When plans were made to donate the collection to Yale University in the Forties, Duchamp wrote thirty-three one-page biographical and critical notices on artists from Archipenko to Jacques Villon. If he had decided, not uncharacteristically, to include a notice on himself as one of Dreier's artists, he would probably have produced an astute blend of truth and fable, like the others he wrote. Let me imagine such an account by lifting terms and phrases from the notices he did write.
Review, 6346 words
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