Duchampian News & Views
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Last Week for “Twilight Visions” in Nashville
December 28, 2009 Bringing together over 100 iconic photographs as well as a wealth of Surrealist ephemera, a recent exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts explores, contextualizes and interprets the dream-life of Paris between the wars. Works on display include images composed by Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and others. Through January 3 in Nashville; the show will then travel to New York and Savannah, Georgia. For more information, fristcenter.org has details... read more... -
Major Surrealist Retrospective Coming to Edinburgh
December 24, 2009 Next summer the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will exhibit all of its Surrealist art -- one of the largest public collections in the world -- as part of the extensive "Another World" retrospective show. Works on exhibit will include paintings by Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miro; sculpture by Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp; and previously unexhibited print portfolios by Dali, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy among others. For more details.. read more... -
The Irreverent Object
December 23, 2009 The recently closed show at New York's Luhring Augustine Gallery, The Irreverent Object: European Sculpture from the '60s, '70s and '80s, gave connoisseurs a chance to view what amounts to the evolution of the readymade art object and prompted discussion of the family resemblance between the exhibits and the work of Marcel Duchamp. What role does humor play? Does bringing the "irrelevant" object into the museum necessarily entail a certain "irreverent" posture, or is the prod.. read more... -
Man Ray & Africa: Return to Egypt?
December 21, 2009 In an evocative review of the Phillips Collection's ongoing exhibition of Man Ray's interest in African art, painter Menachem Wecker ponders whether Ray's use of apparently Egyptian iconography points to a repudiation of his Jewish upbringing -- horses and pyramids skirt the edge of taboo -- or simple coincidence. The exhibit's curator, Wendy Grossman, inclines toward the latter view, since as she notes while Egypt is part of Africa, Ray focused most of his attention on Sub-S.. read more... -
Taking Duchamp’s Legacy for a Spin
December 20, 2009Nearly a century after Marcel Duchamp mounted a bicycle wheel on a rickety stool, his influence is everywhere in the art world, prompting long-time art critic Sebastian Smee to meditate on the triumphs — and pathos – of non-retinal art, which both confounds and disappoints the expectations of museum-goers worldwide.
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Man Ray/Nowhere Man
December 17, 2009The occasion of the ongoing Alias Man Ray retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York, along with the accompanying and eponymous biography of the notoriously peripatetic artist, recently prompted newspaper critic Robert Fulford to reflect on how Ray’s self-invented life exemplifies the tension between Dada and Surrealist ambitions.
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Picabia Brings Top Price at Auction
December 16, 2009A rarely seen 1935 painting by Francis Picabia led the way at an unexpectedly strong auction of impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s Paris, fetching over 700,000 euros. Three other works by Picabia, including Tournez Rare (ou Sirenes), briefly owned by Marcel Duchamp, sold, as did paintings and sculpture from Man Ray, Picasso and others.
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Louise Bourgeois, the Web & the Wheel
December 15, 2009 While Louise Bourgeois knew Miro, Ernst and other members of the Surrealist circle, her work is its own territory and must be approached on its own mordant terms. But as the recent documentary Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine demonstrates, elements of her sculpture bear a family resemblance to Duchamp's -- as when, for example, the plates from her book He Disappeared Into Complete Silence (1947) reflect the figures in the Large Glass, or when a mus.. read more... -
“Fresh Widow,” or the Postwar Paradox
December 14, 2009 While often dismissed as simply an exercise in metaphysical punnery, the perpetually blackened eyes of Fresh Widow become somber when considered as both a memorial of and a barrier against the chaos of World War I, which left 1.4 million French citizens dead and hundreds of thousands of widows in its wake. In this context, Duchamp's instructions that the blind leather panes be polished every morning (to keep the widow "fresh") become both poignant and perverse: the memory so .. read more...