Spellbound by Marcel

Duchamp, Love, and Art

Ruth Brandon

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781643138626
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

In 1913 Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase exploded through the American art world. This is the story of how he followed the painting to New York two years later, enchanted the Arensberg salon, and—almost incidentally—changed art forever. In 1915, a group of French artists fled war-torn Europe for New York.In the few months between their arrival—and America's entry into the war in April 1917—they pushed back the boundaries of the possible, in both life and art.The vortex of this transformation was the apartment at 33 West 67th Street, owned by Walter and Louise Arensberg, where artists and poets met nightly to talk, eat, drink, discuss each others' work, play chess, plan balls, organise magazines and exhibitions, and fall in and out of love.At the center of all this activity stood the mysterious figure of Marcel Duchamp, always approachable, always unreadable.His exhibit of a urinal, which he called Fountain, briefly shocked the New York art world before falling, like its perpetrator, into obscurity. Many people (of both sexes) were in love with Duchamp. Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood were among them; they were also, briefly, and (for her) life-changingly, in love with each other.Both kept daily diaries, which give an intimate picture of the events of those years.Or rather two pictures—for the views they offer, including of their own love affair, are stunningly divergent. Spellbound by Marcel follows Duchamp, Roché, and Beatrice as they traverse the twentieth century. Roché became the author of Jules and Jim, made into a classic film by François Truffaut.Beatrice became a celebrated ceramicist. Duchamp fell into chess-playing obscurity until, decades later, he became famous for a second time—as Fountain was elected the twentieth century's most influential artwork.

Part One PREWAR

1 THE ARMORY SHOW, 1913

In 1912 Walter and Lou Arensberg bought Shady Hill, the enormous house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that had previously belonged to Charles Eliot Norton, America’s leading man of letters.

The Arensbergs were in their early thirties. They had been married five years, and were living in Pittsburgh, where Walter’s father was president and part owner of a crucible steel company. Lou, née Stevens, the sister of one of Walter’s Harvard classmates, was even wealthier: her family owned one of the largest and oldest-established textile mills in Massachusetts.

Neither Walter nor Lou wanted to stay in Pittsburgh. Lou missed her family, while Walter was still much involved with his alma mater and the East Coast’s intellectual life. He published poems and translations in Harvard Monthly, which he had once edited, and described himself to the Cambridge Tribune, which carried an article on the Shady Hill sale, as “a journalist and writer and a student of Dante.” Buying Shady Hill must have felt a little like buying into Harvard; perhaps he hoped he might channel the august spirit of its previous owner.

Apart from installing electric light, the Arensbergs kept the house much as it had been. But it must have echoed with the absence of everything that had filled it previously: children (Norton had six; the Arensbergs, none) and purpose. A comfortable but aimless life stretched endlessly ahead of them.

A little less than a year after they moved in, Walter received a call from an artist called Walter Pach, an old friend from his bachelor stint as an occasional journalist in New York. Pach wanted the Arensbergs to visit, before it closed, a show he had helped organize: the International Exhibition of Modern Art, put on by the American Association of Painters and Sculptors at the 69th Regiment Armory on New York’s Lexington Avenue.

The phone rings. Everything else follows.

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The Armory Show opened on February 17, 1913. It had two aims: to break down “the stifling and smug condition of local art affairs as applied to the ambition of American painters and sculptors,”^I and to exhibit the kind of new European art of which most Americans knew little or nothing. Among the exhibitors were Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Kirchner, Cézanne, Braque, Gris, Picabia—and Marcel Duchamp.

Walter Pach had spent some years in Paris, knew all the artists there, and was deeply familiar with the European art scene. He had helped select the European artworks, had arranged the logistics of getting the vast stash of paintings and sculptures onto a ship, and had then boarded a faster ship in order to greet them in New York. There followed a fortnight’s terrified wait during which the Atlantic was beset with storms, the ship carrying the artworks did not arrive, and everyone feared she had sunk. Finally, however, she berthed. The pictures were hung, the sculptures placed, the critics invited.

The show received plenty of notice, but for the first two weeks hardly anyone came. And then, on the second Saturday, “the storm broke… Old friends argued and separated, never to speak again. Indignation meetings were going on in all the clubs. Academic painters came every day and left regularly, spitting fire and brimstone—but they came—everybody came.”^II

The Armory Show wasn’t the only artistic event to arouse violent antagonisms that year. 1913 also saw the riot that greeted the opening performance, in Paris, of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps. That was so unlike any music the audience had ever heard before, and created such new difficulties for the orchestra, that the musicians broke down several times, and various factions in the audience took the opportunity to vent other furies, not least with Diaghilev, the impresario who had commissioned the work. By contrast, the Armory Show controversy had comparatively little to do with the art. Rather, it was about politics. For those few weeks the battlefront in America’s perpetual war, begun when the fundamentalist descendants of the Plymouth colony confronted the secularizing Founding Fathers and still ongoing, was an art show. Conservatives detested it: former president Theodore Roosevelt, reviewing the show for The Outlook as “a layman,” declared these works “not Art!” And even if they were art, a vociferous faction thought them unacceptable. When, in April, the show moved to Chicago, the Illinois legislature’s white slave commission and Lieutenant Governor Barratt O’Hara ordered an immediate inquiry. “We will not condemn the international exhibit without an impartial investigation,” the lieutenant governor impartially declared. But although the investigator found a number of the pictures “immoral and suggestive,” he was unable to unearth any connection to white slavery. One unforeseen consequence of his activities was an enormous increase in attendance. As Maurice Girodias, the publisher of upmarket pornography, cheerfully observed, “Ban a book and everyone wants to read it.”^III

In particular, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase became a focus for the show’s detractors. Aggressively Cubist, absolutely unpretty, and indefinably subversive—what was that joking title doing, written on as though this were some sort of comic book? This was art, or supposedly so, and everyone knew what nudes did in art. They reclined gracefully, and they were not made of squares! It might have been (and as we shall see, perhaps had been) designed to aggravate. If so, it triumphantly succeeded in its aim. Famously dismissed by a New York Times critic as “an explosion in a shingle factory,” it was the subject of derisive cartoons in almost every American newspaper.

The modernists, for their part, also recognized its urgent relevance. The doctor-poet William Carlos Williams wrote of the Armory Show: “There had been a break somewhere, we were streaming through… I had never in my life before felt that way. I was tremendously stirred.” And of the Nude, “I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief.”^IV

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Some facts about the Arensbergs in 1913:

Walter was thirty-five. He had hamster cheeks, close-set eyes behind rimless glasses, thin lank hair that constantly fell into his eyes, and drank too much. His wife, Mary Louise, always known as Lou, was a year younger. She was extremely shy, and although she was an accomplished pianist and singer, and enjoyed playing the piano for close friends, she could never have brought herself to perform in public. A photo shows her arranged on a chaise longue: she has full lips and a dreamy expression. She was not, however, a beautiful woman. In the words of her lifelong friend Beatrice Wood, “Her nose was short and upturned, with lines on either side that ran down to her chin like streams trying to find a river, and her brown and curly hair was not flattering to her face. But she was direct and sincere, and it gave her great charm.” Walter “was also charming, but he was not quite so sincere. His cordiality lit up for callers… Men liked his intellect, while women responded to his warmth like moths to light.”^V

Walter was brilliantly clever, but wanted above all to be a poet, a calling in which even the brightest intellect cannot guarantee success. His verse was accomplished, but (unlike that of his Harvard contemporary Wallace Stevens) derivative and unremarkable. He spent a year in Europe, returned to Harvard for graduate studies, which he did not complete, then plunged into cryptography and the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare controversy. An avid Baconian, this would occupy the rest of his life.

Walter was a liberal; Lou, a conservative. They liked to joke that their votes canceled each other out.

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The Arensbergs were so wealthy that Walter did not need to work. But work gives life a framework. When everything is possible and nothing compulsory, where to begin? Walter—extremely intelligent, compulsively active, relentlessly well-informed—pursued his cryptography. For Lou, children would have provided a focus, but they didn’t arrive, and she did not particularly enjoy social life. Nor was love a consolation—what Lou mostly recalled of their wedding night was that she had felt cold and Walter had refused to shut the windows.^VI Admittedly, this memory surfaced at a moment when her marriage was at a low ebb, but even so, it hardly suggests passionate transports. And everyone knew Walter chased other women. But he and Lou got on well enough. And given the endless time at their disposal, and since Pach was so insistent, why not visit the Armory Show and see what all the fuss was about?

The Arensbergs knew nothing about modern art. They owned some early American pieces that came from Lou’s family and had bought one or two pictures, including a Whistler. The Armory Show was a revelation, especially for Walter. At long last, he knew what he had been born to do. He would become America’s leading collector of avant-garde art.

The piece he really wanted to buy was, predictably, the most controversial: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Unfortunately for Walter, it had been bought on the day the show opened, by a San Francisco lawyer called Frederick C. Torrey.^VII Instead, he bought a Vuillard print, and later, a painting by Duchamp’s brother Gaston, who painted under the name Jacques Villon: first steps in what would become a spectacular collecting career.

It was clear that if Walter was serious about his new calling, the Arensbergs couldn’t stay in Cambridge. The modern art scene, insofar as such a thing existed in America, was all in New York. In 1914, therefore, they sold up (Shady Hill was bought by a school) and moved to Manhattan, where modern people congregated.

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At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, studio buildings were all the New York rage. Completed in 1905, The Atelier, at 33 West 67th Street, was one of the most luxurious. Although l’atelier means “the studio,” the building’s residents, then as now, were more the artistically inclined wealthy than actual artists. It suited the Arensbergs perfectly.

The Atelier is now part of New York’s Artists’ Colony Historic District, and is little altered since the Arensbergs’ day. Its thirty-four units range from single studio rooms with a sleeping alcove to luxurious three- and four-bedroom duplexes whose double-height reception-room/studios have huge windows two stories high. The Arensbergs’ apartment was one of the three-bedroom units. Decoratively, the effect was somewhat random: the double-height walls showcased an expanding gallery of modern art (years later, Walter told an interviewer that he and Lou had disagreed over only two purchases,^VIII which might mean that their taste was in perfect accord, or simply that she was usually happy to go along with him); the floors were covered with oriental rugs on which stood small sculptures, some of them African, some by Brancusi; and the furniture was a mix of Lou’s dark, sparse Shaker pieces, her piano, and scattered armchairs and sofas.

Once they were settled in, and since Walter was a poet and a friend of poets, he began to finance, wholly or partly, two poetry magazines. Others published work by, among others, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, and William Carlos Williams; Rogue (“Advertise in Rogue, it doesn’t pay”) was edited by a young poet called Allen Norton. The poets and their friends routinely met downtown in Greenwich Village.

The Arensbergs’ beautiful new apartment, their growing collection, and all these interesting friends made the next step obvious. They would collect not just art, but the people who made it. They instituted a nightly open house for friends, acquaintances, and the friends of friends, at which guests could be sure of food, drink, chess, music, and congenial company. “The Walter Arensbergs are at home a great deal, and… they are seldom at home alone,” remarked art critic Henry McBride. “People seem to like to come to see them. In particular the new poets and the newest artists flock to the studio. In addition to the pleasure that young people evince in merely being together there is always the further excitation that comes from a consciousness of being in the van of the movement.”^IX

For the poets and artists, who like all poets and artists were mostly broke, there was the added incentive of a good feed. And for the Arensbergs, instead of long, solitary evenings à deux, or where Walter chased company in the city while Lou lingered at home, there was the constant pleasure of filling not only the walls of their apartment with great artworks, but the void in their marriage, with the best company in New York.

1. I. Kuhn, The Story of the Armory Show, 4
2. II. Kuhn, 17
3. III. In Hulten, Paris-New York.
4. IV. Williams, Autobiography.
5. V. Wood, I Shock Myself, 27.
6. VI. Roché, Carnets, September 17, 1918.
7. VII. Arensberg commissioned a replica from Duchamp "(No. 3)" now at Philadelphia Museum of Art.
8. VIII. For this section I have largely relied on Francis Naumann’s article “Walter Conrad Arensberg: Poet, Patron and Participant in the New York Avant-Garde 1915–20,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 76 (Spring 1980), and Robert Buttel, The Making of Harmonium, Princeton, 1967.
9. IX. Henry McBride, “The Walter Arensbergs,” Dial, July 1920.

2 MARCEL, 1912

Marcel Duchamp was born in Normandy in 1887, the third of six children of a notary. His brothers, Gaston and Raymond, were, respectively, twelve and eleven years his senior. A sister, Suzanne, two years his junior, was his special friend; there were also two much younger sisters, Magdeleine and Yvonne. Marcel had red hair; a long, straight Norman nose; a thin, wide mouth; and an overwhelmingly abstract mind. His chief interests were art, chess, and puns, visual and verbal.

The mother of this brood, a talented pianist, had become profoundly deaf and withdrawn. All four elder children found her cold and distant, and disliked her; ^I it may or may not be coincidental that none of the six chose to have a child of his or her own. Relations with their father, by contrast, were cordial.

Marcel was, in a small way, financially independent. The Ducham...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chief Dramatis Personae
• Introduction
• Part One: Prewar
• Part Two: Wartime
• Part Three: Between Continents
• Part Four: Late Fame
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright