Word: duchamps
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...Throughout his life, legends stuck to Brancusi like burrs; he was apt to be seen as a peasant sage, a Carpathian exotic (to most Parisians, Romania barely qualified as part of Europe). And he seemed even more of an original to American collectors, who, fervently egged on by Marcel Duchamp, were his chief support...
...fact, he was an artist of immense sophistication, the friend of Duchamp, Erik Satie, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. His work, with its flowing contours and obsessively refined surfaces, was one of the main sources for Art Deco style. Imagine the top of the Chrysler Building carved from oak, and you have something very like his sculptural bases. As Rowell points out in the catalog, guests in his Paris studio would be regaled with homemade sheep's milk cheese and a glass of iced champagne--funk and chic together, essential Brancusi. He loved contrasting the rough with the smooth...
...oblivion that the new show brings to an end. This was partly her own doing: for all her love of camp flamboyance, Stettheimer wanted to arrange the disappearance of her own work and ordered her executors to destroy the contents of her studio. Fortunately, they disobeyed. Her friend Marcel Duchamp arranged an exhibition for her at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, two years after her death, but it had no impact. Nothing could have been less in synch with the industrial-strength seriousness of postwar American painting than the froufrou, gilt and needling little ironies of Stettheimer...
What mainly preserved her work was homosexual taste: in various ways it influenced Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns (who would take over the device of monogram letters around the frame of her portrait of Marcel Duchamp) and a host of others. The ghost of Florine also hovers, one feels, behind the marvelous illustrations of Edward Gorey...
Best of all, apparently, she liked Marcel Duchamp, artist and gigolo to the rich, who appears to have had a role in the sentimental education of her sister Ettie. (Since Ettie cut many pages from Florine's diaries after her death, one cannot be sure.) Florine's portrait of Duchamp in an armchair, turning a slender crank that raises his invented feminine alter ego Rrose Selavy into the air, is one of the most stylish tributes offered by one American artist to another...