Word: duchamp
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...last analysis," wrote Marcel Duchamp, the most cerebral artist of the 20th century, "the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of art history." Right now Oldenburg-and some of his fellow Popsters as well-seems assured of a place in the primers...
...came out of his self-styled retirement only once, in 1938, to construct a valise containing each of his important works in miniature, really a portable Duchamp museum. He kept a studio, but visitors hunting for some clue that the aging enfant terrible was working again searched in vain. Duchamp died last October, having created little except for occasional graphics, a few objects and the inevitable puns he uttered, in almost 30 years...
Triumphant Denouement. Or so everyone thought. This week the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns the largest collection of Duchamp's work, reveals that the conniving chess player had prepared one final gambit after all. On view is an entire room designed by Duchamp to accommodate a life-size environmental work on which he had secretly worked over a period of 20 years. He had even planned its installation at the museum, but the work's existence was known only to his wife and a few friends...
From a variety of materials, Duchamp created a surprising wedding of illusion and reality. He used pigskin for the girl, as well as a blonde wig, picked up twigs and leaves on forays into the countryside. The landscape is painted, but the waterfall was created by a play of lights. "He wanted to make a direct statement without words," recalls Duchamp's widow. "Something you look at and just feel." The museum permits no photographs; the implications and the richness of innuendo must rest solely in the mind. What has one really seen? Is this a celebration...
Critics and connoisseurs will undoubtedly spend years tracing the imagery through earlier works. For the average viewer, the power and the majesty of Duchamp's last work lies suspended somewhere among its multiple metaphors and in the sage, sure wisdom imparted by an aging iconoclast that with every autumn comes the spring...