Word: duchamp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...past 30 years, Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, a French aristocrat of Polish extraction better known by his painting name of Balthus, has been one of the least available major artists in the world. The fame of a star painter, Marcel Duchamp once shrewdly observed, depends on an inflation of small anecdotes. About Balthus, none are in circulation. At 69 he has no public face. When André Malraux made him director of the French Academy in Rome-a post Balthus held for 16 years until his retirement a few months ago-Balthus kept fastidiously to himself even...
Through judiciously chosen examples, one sees Europe's insemination of America: the work of Matisse's American students and the New York Cézannists, the traumatic blow of the 1913 Armory Show (partly reconstituted here, with 19 of its more aggressively modern works, including Duchamp's then infamous Nude Descending a Staircase), and the absorption of cubism by New York, which was itself, as the Dadaist Picabia remarked, "the only cubist town in the world." And so on to the surrealist artists who, sponsored by Peggy Guggenheim in the '30s and '40s, helped provoke...
...Cunningham, the dancer-choreographer, were among the innovators living there. If it can be said that advanced art in America through the '50s and early '60s had one single native guru, that man was Cage: at once the most avant-garde and the most transparent of composers, the Marcel Duchamp of music, the man who erected combinations of silence and random sound into an aesthetic strategy in order to give art the inclusive density of life. It was Cage's example that prompted Rauschenberg to formulate his much-quoted remark that "painting relates to both art and life...
Rauschenberg's combines, like the work of his friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp, are seeded with such puns, parallels and quirks of meaning. Like Duchamp, he was given to embedding a kind of ironic lechery in his images?the supreme example being Monogram, 1959. Monogram remains the most notorious of Rauschenberg's combines: a stuffed Angora goat, girdled with a tire. The title is self-fulfilling?it is Rauschenberg's monogram, the sign by which he is best known?but why did it become so famous? Partly because of its unacknowledged life as a powerful sexual fetish. The lust...
...Retroactive I, 1964, are such soaring bel canto that one is apt to skip over the odd resonance of their images. Consider the red patch in the lower right corner: a silk-screen enlargement of a stroboscopic photo by Gjon Mili of a walking nude, done in imitation of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was itself based on an earlier sequential photo by Marey. The image stutters backward through technological time. But then it also looks like the grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden, and that turns the enormous grainy effigy of John...