With little-seen gems from Philadelphia’s historic scientific institutions, as well as side-by-side art history ground shakers including Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (no. 2), and Eadweard Muybridge’s early motion photographs, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art’s new exhibition, Anatomy/Academy, rephrases the dusty argument over the continued importance of human anatomy studies in art education while touching on a number of important sub-topics along the way. Rather than advocating a backwards or stodgy interest in the figure, this exhibition shows how the study of the human body progressed side by side with new technology, and how ways of seeing, even today, are inseparable from those tools which we use to see (tools which, in the age of Google, are in a state of constant renovation).

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875, oil on canvas, 96x78"

With works from Philadelphia’s various historic collections, the exhibit, in the Fisher Brooks Gallery in PAFA’s Hamilton Building centers around three main periods: the time of PAFA’s founding as the nation’s first art school in 1805, the tenure of professor Thomas Eakins in the late 1800s, and the first World War.

Jean Antione Houdon, l'Ecorche (Flayed Man), originial 1767, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

The first section of the show includes pieces from PAFA’s plaster cast collection (including Houdon’s Écorché—Flayed Man), early medical texts, and drawings that emphasize the links between the Philadelphia academy and early Italian and French arts academies, where life drawing and cast drawing, écorché* and anatomy study were central elements of the curriculum. Here, two early medical textbooks thrill with their surreal and macabre touches. A “flap anatomy” book presents human figures with body-part tabs (and even a pop-up loincloth) that can be lifted off the page to reveal their sub-epidermal structures—something like an anatomy-themed advent calendar. The other text (after Vesalius’ classic) features a skeleton with dangling veins and nerves frozen in an action pose, plunked right in the middle of a Renaissance landscape.

Jean Remellin, anatomy text, featured in the exhibit. Photo from the show's catalog.

Also fantastic are the enormous anatomical models created by PAFA’s cofounder, William Rush, which were used as teaching models for medical students in a large lecture hall. The inner-ear, sphenoid and eyeball models, in particular, are impeccably crafted, expressive sculptural forms that fit right into the art museum context.

William Rush, Model, Sphenoid Bone free-standing, ca. 1808, wood and paint, Courtesy of the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, PA

Across from these models hangs Eakins’ Gross Clinic, which, compared to its recent central placement in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Perelman Building, is nestled somewhat understatedly among other works. (PAFA and the PMA jointly own the painting and it travels back and forth.) A vitrine filled with Eakins’ paint box and brushes as well as several surgeon’s toolboxes sits alongside the masterpiece. The sight of the painting united with the tools of its making and the tools of the characters depicted is a rather moving; the juxtaposition implies a metaphorical connection between the surgeon’s carving of flesh and the painter’s.

Kenyon Cox's figure study. Photo from the show's catalog

Also thought-provoking is Kenyon Cox’s “Masked Female Nude”—a beautiful, if rather typical figure drawing of a female nude, striking, though, in that her face is masked (a method that we learn was used for preserving the nude female’s “dignity”.) This piece and others highlight changes in the role of women and in ideas about the nude body that took place in the arts and sciences of this time.

Thomas Eakins, Motion study: George Reynolds nude, pole-vaulting to the left, 1885, Dry-plate negative, Penn. Academy of the Fine Arts

The section of the show devoted to the 20th Century emphasizes the importance of new technologies and medical innovations. One piece, a haunting fish-bone-like array of what appear to be branching white wires is actually the entire nervous system, painted and mounted on a board, of a Hahnemann Hospital cleaning woman—not a “model” but the real thing. Also in this section are several Eadweard Muybridge motion photographs featured along with a vast display of Eakins’ motion photographs— these images recount the meeting of these two great innovators right here in Philadelphia in 1883. These photos changed scientific history by revealing to viewers truths about form that were visible through photography but invisible to the naked eye (the famous story recounts viewers’ amazement upon learning that horses in gallop always have one leg that remains on the ground—a truth that rendered many historic paintings of horses with all legs in the air at once something of a joke).

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912, oil on canvas, 57 7/8x35 1/8. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Across from these photographs hangs the other great challenge to traditional form, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (no.2), which, in its complete shattering of the human figure actually emphasizes the importance of understanding how to compose figurative form. Further variations on the shattered or fragmented figure are featured in the work of WWI painters, including Bernard Petlin’s graphic leg amputation paintings and Ivan Albright’s eerily luminescent Woman whose flesh seems to be in a state of disintegration.

These stronger works, however, are weighed down somewhat by other pieces whose relationship to the theme of the show is more tenuous (Robert Henri’s large females, for example).

The show concludes with a coda—contemporary pieces by Donald Lipski and the artist group TODT—which neither detract nor add much to the viewing experience.

The more exciting addendums to the show are located upstairs and downstairs: a show of work by current PAFA students in the basement and the upstairs companion show, Anatomy Now. Both exhibits showcase a variety of contemporary iterations of “figurative” work and show the way in which a figurative platform continues to birth new interpretations.

More than simply tracking a theme throughout history, this show situates a staple feature of art—an interest in the figure, and more generally, an interest in the visible, tangible, embodied world and what lies beyond it—in a greater context. It shows how artists and physicians in the 19th and early 20th Centuries both sought to make sense of life itself, and how their attempts to do this emerged very much in tandem.

This show begs us to consider, or reconsider, the relevance of figure study in the training of artists today.

Contributors to the exhibition include the Mütter Museum, the American Philosophical Society, the Wistar Institute, the PMA, and PAFA’s own permanent collection. View more of the historical material including Eakins’ sketches and one of the flap anatomy books here.

Anatomy/Academy and Anatomy Now, to April 17, 2011. www.pafa.org. Adults $15
Senior (60+) and Students with I.D. $12
Youth ages (13 – 18) $12
Child (12 and under, excluding groups) FREE

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*Écorché – the construction of a sculpted figure which begins with the skeleton and works outward to the skin

Hitler in Paris, June 1940.

Alan Riding's book is a rich history of a morally impossible time for artists.

Paris during the Nazi Occupation is the vast subject Alan Riding takes on with a minesweeper’s verve.  The former European cultural editor for The New York Times recounts in vivid detail the rich history of this errant half decade in And The Show Went On, (Knopf, 2010) laying out how the Nazis rolled over France and how France’s cultural institutions literally played on, staging shows and singing songs and painting pictures.  The author argues in this 400-page history that the pre-war French art industry managed the morally impossible middle ground surprisingly well, and that the artists of the Occupation and their murky history of existence and collaboration during wartime is as we might expect: Conflicted. Following is an interview with Alan Riding that took place in Paris via e-mail over the last week of 2010.

On June 14, 1940, the Nazis effectively rolled over Paris and thus began, you write, the city’s “worst political moment of the 20th century.”  Was it also, in your estimation, the beginning of the end of French dominance of the global aesthetics industry? Wasn’t it almost just after the war that Pollack, de Kooning, Gorky and other Ab Ex painters were “exported” to a global audience? All the Surrealists had left Paris for New York and of course without full access to the press, disseminating French (or European art) was nearly impossible.

I am struck by your phrase “global aesthetics industry” because, when it comes to looking beautiful, the French still have a pretty firm grip on the luxury goods, fashion and frills business. But in the visual arts above all, the occupation permanently undermined Paris’s position as the cradle of artistic creativity and, as you point out, by the mid-1940s the vanguard had moved to New York. Most of the great post-war names on French art scene were already great pre-war names, giants like Matisse and Picasso but also many others like Dufy and Derain and even Chagall, who returned to Paris after fleeing the occupation in 1941. But few French artists who emerged after the liberation came to rank as household names. Even the Surrealists, who in the main followed André Breton to New York in 1941, never recovered the power they had enjoyed in France or beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. So why did New York take over from Paris? Well, it had money and collectors and crucially it also had art dealers. And post-war Paris had none of the three.

When you write about an artist’s moral responsibility, you touch upon both talent and status. During the occupation, one assumes the greater artist (more talent, more wealth, higher stature) would seem to have more responsibility. But is this true? Not many artists swim in the deep moral waters of any age, so why should these French and émigré artists have acted any differently, that is other than your basic, terrified neighbor during wartime?

Well, the premise of my book is that artists, writers and intellectuals – what one might call “cultural celebrities” – do have special responsibilities in times of trouble just as they enjoy special privileges during the good times. Why should that be asked of them since they are likely to be as brave or cowardly as anyone else? The reason is that in many countries, certainly France and many other Latin countries, people expect artists and writers to be more thoughtful, perhaps more intelligent, probably more independent than the rest of us. If someone is famous for possessing some creative or artistic talent, he or she is somehow regarded as spiritually superior.

Even in the US, where the notion of the “intellectual” is viewed with suspicion, public opinion is open to be swayed today by famous actors or pop singers who take public positions on, say, famine in Africa or violence in Darfur or even global warming. Of course, during the occupation of France, it was a bit one-sided: the artists and writers who were most visible were those who showed sympathy for or willingness to collaborate with the Germans or their puppet Vichy regime, while those who opposed the occupiers struggled to be heard through clandestine newspapers and the like. So the example being given to the public at large was invariably a bad one. But it is worth recalling that, after the liberation, artists and writers who collaborated were often punished more than “ordinary” citizens specifically because they were perceived to have had special responsibilities. Between heroes and collaborators, of course, there were also many artists who simply tried to make ends meet, which meant performing before German audiences but not being seen socializing with the occupier. Still, one fact cannot be denied: among non-Jewish artists and creators, those who refused to paint, compose, write, publish or perform during the occupation can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Guernica, 1937. Picasso rarely ventured into politics, but his portrait of the bombed city is a masterpiece.

Picasso famously stayed in Paris during the Occupation. Do you think it was Picasso’s stature that made him fearless and invulnerable to Nazi threats? Clearly Picasso wasn’t a political artist, but Guernica is of course one of the great political artworks of the 20th century.  How do you see Picasso standing out from other painters at this time? Did the war years, for example, enhance his reputation? When, during a visit from Nazi soldiers questioned him about Guernica (1937), “Did you do this?” the artist, replied, “No, you did.”  True story?

Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress from late in the occupation, insisted to me that the Guernica story was true. Beyond that, I have no way of knowing, though it does seem like the kind of remark that the self-confident Spaniard might have made. On the other hand, as a Spaniard and an outspoken critic of General Franco, he was also vulnerable since Franco’s idea of neutrality placed him very close to Hitler. But perhaps even the Germans might have thought twice about interning the world’s most famous artist. Picasso himself was not a trouble-maker during the occupation: he continued to work in his Left Bank studio, was visited occasionally by German officers (including the writer Ernst Jünger), ate in neighborhood restaurants and was visited by his mistresses, Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter (until Ms. Gilot came along).

Perhaps what distinguished him most was that, unlike Matisse and many of his contemporaries, he remained in Paris and, in a sense, his very presence was an act of defiance. But, nothwithstanding Guernica, he was never a political artist as such and, even after he joined the French Communist Party after the liberation, he was hardly one to follow orders from Moscow-line apparatchiks. In fact, in the end, I think that Picasso’s reputation was barely touched by either the occupation or his membership of the Communist Party. Today, with endless exhibitions still keeping Picasso in the public eye, neither of these periods is more than very occasionally mentioned.

You write that artists of all flavors moved to Paris to escape the confines of their native Catholicism and traditional norms in order to peel apart their potential and change the world.  French filmmakers, however, at first welcomed these actors, writers, doers but because they were slowly being crushed by Hollywood in the 1930s, sought some leverage and funds.  The Germans provided it, and a collaboration ensued. Because cinema was a powerful, new art, with the potential to spread both images and sound, and therefore ideas as well as current events (or propaganda) in the newsreels, how do you assess the French filmmakers on this score?  Are they more “guilty” than others in collaborating with the Nazis?

A German choir giving a lunchtime concert on the steps of the Paris Opera, during the Occupation. Photo: LAPI/Roger Viollet

French filmmakers generally had a “good” war, not least because the exclusion and departure of Jewish producers, directors and screenwriters left them more room. And soon they also had no competition from British or American films. Add to this, the Nazis, notably Goebbels, wanted the French to be distracted as much as possible – and movies could do a good job at that. Indeed, Goebbels even sent a German producer, Alfred Greven, to Paris to found his own studio, Continental Films, to make French movies.

The question that arose after the liberation was whether making an apolitical “entertainment” movie during the occupation comprised collaboration. Well, it transpired that, except for Jean Renoir and a handful of others who left for the US, everyone else among non-Jews continued working, which meant accepting German censorship of screenplays, casts, director and even technicians. So it was difficult for some who worked to condemn others who also worked. There was a small resistance group within the industry – portrayed in Bertrand Tavernier’s film, Laissez-Passer – but its impact was minimal.

Photograph by Brassaï showing artists gathered in 1944 in Paris after the private production of Picasso's surrealist play, Le Désire attrapé par le queue (Desire Caught By the Tail). Jean-Paul Sartre is seated on the floor with his pipe, Simone de Beauvoir is holding a book, Camus is staring at the dog, Picasso in the middle; his paintings seen in the background. Photo: Estate Brassaï - RMN.

The Occupation did not arrive in Paris without collaboration, you write, implying that no conquering army could come into a country, take it over without insider help. What shocked you most about some of the artists – people we would assume to be morally courageous against the Nazi regime and fight it – who not only fell in line with the Nazis, but advanced their cause?

I think I was most struck by how blind ideological faith – in this case, in fascism and even National Socialism – led some French writers actually to celebrate Hitler’s crushing of “corrupt” and “decadent” France. For them, France’s defeat proved them right: parliamentary democracy and socialism were destroying France; now the country could be rebuilt from scratch. In a way, these writers – men like Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle – were not collaborators seeking some advantage for themselves; they were true believers. One other thing struck me forcefully, even if I was not exactly shocked: it was the vanity and narcissism of some artists, writers and performers who needed to be in the limelight – even if Nazi officers and soldiers were the ones applauding them. Among visual artists, for instance, why on earth did the likes of Derain, Vlaminck and van Dongen accept invitations from Goebbels to visit the Third Reich? The answer has to be that Goebbels made them feel important.

Once it was clear the Nazis would invade France, the Louvre was emptied of its paintings. Nazi looting focused almost exclusively on the Jewish collections in Paris. Here, the Louvre's Grand Galerie, 1939, stripped of its paintings. Photo: Roger-Viollet.

The Louvre was emptied out of its paintings, and yet many museums were looted by the Nazis.  What kind of operation was the preservation of art works in the great museums?  Still, the Nazis waltzed out of Paris with hundreds if not thousands of paintings… Do you think many of them were ultimately destroyed or lost during this time period?

The Germans – inspired by Hitler and Goering – helped themselves to thousands of works of art, but the overwhelming majority of these were taken from Jewish collections and not French museums. The Louvre and other leading museums were emptied of their paintings – most large statues had to remain – and these were placed in rural chateaux, but the Germans knew where they were (one exception is Mona Lisa which was kept hidden until the liberation). Of the Jewish-owned art that left France, some of the major collections, such as that of the Rothchschilds, were recovered and restituted after the war. But several thousand works brought back to France in the late 1940s were never returned to their owners. In fact, only after Hector Feliciano denounced France’s minimal efforts to restitute this art in his book The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art did the French government begin to advertise the existence of “looted” art in its museums.

The degenerate art exhibition (entartete Kunst) shown in Munich in 1937 was a  reaction, among other notions, against Modernism. The Nazis attempted to purify art… yet as the war churned on, and the Nazis obviously attempted to control French cultural output, they didn’t exactly stamp out what was then the center of Modernist creation.  What’s your take on the historical task the Nazis set themselves up for and yet couldn’t quite manage?

Hitler and Goering were interested principally in Renaissance and post-Renaissance northern European art and they took what they wanted from Jewish collections to fill their planned museums. But since the Nazis were grabbing everything they could find belonging to Jews, they also collected a large quantity of Modern art, much of its classified by them as “degenerate.” There is one report of several hundred such works being destroyed by fire outside the Jeu de Paume in Paris, but Nazis often preferred to exchange or sell works by the likes of Picasso, Klee or Kandinsky. Fauvist art had also been included in the Entarte Kunst exhibition, but, as noted, leading Fauvist painters like Vlaminck and van Dongen were “forgiven” when they agreed to travel to Germany. Still, apart from Picasso, Braque, Dufy, Bonnard and others continued to work and exhibit and a new generation of abstract artists first made its appearance in small discreet shows in Paris during the occupation. In other words, when the liberation came, Modernism soon followed.

German propaganda poster in French: "Abandoned Populations, Have Trust in the German Soldier." Photo from Paris, 1942.

The rise of Soviet Socialist Realism, or “tractor art” in both the USSR and China, was a marriage of artists and politicians with the goal of strengthening society… What were the equivalents that stand out for you in Nazi-occupied Paris?  From the French or the Nazi point of view?

The Vichy regime felt that artists could contribute to France’s moral rebirth and it promoted music, dance and theater to this end. But, for instance, when artists belonging to a nationwide cultural movement called Jeune France began displaying too much independence, the organization was hurriedly closed. In practice, apart from writers like Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle who spouted pro-Nazi propaganda as journalists and those like Céline who spewed anti-Semitic venom in all directions, there was almost no political – in the sense of pro-Nazi or pro-Vichy – art created between 1940 and 1944. In fact, even in movies, apart from propaganda newsreels, there were no more than two blatantly pro-fascist films among the 220 released during the occupation. Somehow the aesthetics of occupation never caught on.

Surrealist artists at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York apartment, 1942. Front Row: Stanley William Hayter, Leonara Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann. Second Row: Max Ernst, Amedee Ozenfant, Andre Breton, Fernand Leger, Berenice Abbott. Third Row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian.

How would you assess contemporary French art (and writing) 70 years later… are there traces of this legacy?

Evidently both French art and literature have failed to recover their pre-war glory. In the case of art, the lead passed initially to New York, but now it is shared by many other cities, with Paris still lagging behind as a motor of contemporary art. With literature, I believe that French writing is only just recovering from the impact of the Nouveau Roman which, from the 1950s, gave stylistic experimentation precedence over narrative. That said, not all is lost in French culture! The New Wave cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s demonstrated that French creativity was alive in other art forms. To this I would add dance because, while the likes of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham led the way in transforming contemporary dance, French choreographers and companies have proven talented disciples. And, by the way, the Paris Opera Ballet is rightly considered one of the world’s best classical dance companies.

"In His Infinite Wisdom" by British artist, Damien Hirst. London, victor in the artworld lottery, boosted Hirst to the top of the pile. Few Frenchman have equalled Hirst's success since WW II.

Do you believe that New York and London are the aesthetic victors of a war fought more than half a century ago?  Or has the very idea of contemporary creation resisted national borders and gone “wifi” – that is, international, decimating the need for some kind of national cultural, aesthetic creation?

The true victor in any aesthetic post-war “war” has of course been American popular culture which is now so engrained around the world that everywhere it blends with local cultures to reproduce itself in new forms. Conversely, national cultures take on international characteristics so that world music was merely the first in a long line of world arts, such as world movies, world conceptual art, world architecture, etc. Artists like to win recognition in, say, New York or London because both cities have media that can multiply the impact of their success. And in the case of visual artists, the auctions in New York and London are still those that bring the highest prices. In other words, money and recognition go hand-in-hand. And as evidence of this, I would say no more than Damien Hirst. Had he been French, without a scandalous tabloid press willing to draw attention to his gimmicks, without a collector like Charles Saatchi eager to speculate in art, without a City of London swimming in cash, he would have remained a peripheral figure. Instead, Hirst became a commercial phenomenon in which Being Damien was more important than any art he created. Then the money ran out in Britain, the Damien bubble burst and it was time to look elsewhere for new fashionable artists. Shanghai? Mumbai? São Paulo? Why not? Just follow the money. And, as we all know, money no longer has borders.

ALAN RIDING WEB SITE.

Rubens, Peter Paul The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus c. 1618 Oil on canvas 88 x 82 7/8 in (224 x 210.5 cm) Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Nowadays, erotic art is more of a niche player and the art market (the closest thing to a royal court that we have) prefers its sexy in air quotes. Marilyn Minter uses hard core porn photographs and transforms them into glittering, wet-and-wild bauble-fests. They are not so erotic when she’s done with them but way “sexy,” hip and commercially viable.

Marilyn Minter, Split, 2003, C-print

When I emailed a bunch of Philadelphia artists recently to ask what was the most erotic art they’d seen and why, mostly I got no responses. One artist, Christopher Davison, demurred. Davison makes pretty darned sexy works himself, (his drawings of male and female nudes interacting in dark, eerie forest settings were a staple at the former Jenny Jaskey gallery). “While it would seem like I would have something meaningful to contribute on this topic I am actually not the best person to provide feedback,” he said, adding “Strange but true!”

They're On Their Way Flashe, watercolor, acrylic ink, gouache on Rives BFK 22" x 30" 2009

Gabriel Martinez, a mischievous artist known for his autobiographical works — and for a recent series of sexually-charged masturbation photos featuring anonymous men’s legs and feet at moment of orgasm — wrote back “I will think (hard) about this one…” Then he slipped away into the ether never answering the question. But Proximity Gallery owner and artist Janel Frey responded immediately and directly naming Philadelphia artist, Pete Checchia who, she says, “captures women in a very sensual and complex way.”

Gabriel Martinex, Self Portraits by Heterosexual Men (Anonymous), 2007. c-print

Artist and FLUXspace co-founder, Chris Golas, sent in an anecdote from his own life. While a student at Tyler he did a performance that was arguably erotic. He stood behind a shower curtain half-naked while a woman slapped him after her hands in different colored paints. Golas said “My intent was not to make erotic work but as I reflect on the experience it clearly had meaning that bridged into a certain eroticism for me. This particular performance could border on fetishism as well.”

Pete Checcia, Photo collage

Chris Golas, photo from a performance

Artists now don’t seek to titillate per se, but still the erotic will out especially in work by those who court the unconscious mind, like Louise Bourgeois, Lisa Yuskavage, Pipilotti Rist, Patty Chang, R. Crumb, Paul McCarthy, Philadelphia artist Tony Ward, Andy Warhol (films) and Marcel Duchamp (Etant Donnes) for starters. There are more of course.

Louise Bourgeois, photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1982

These artists all work in a narrative tradition and use figures or figure fragments (Bourgeois) and their works might give off a pleasurable erotic charge along with whatever other message is there. Warhol is in a class all his own with experimental movies that are sensual (Blow Job, Sleep) and those that are sexually explicit and close to porn (Blue Movie).

Andy Warhol, Blowjob

But postmodern erotic art usually has a conflicted sexuality. Pleasure is subsumed under oozing gooey messes (Paul McCarthy, Santa’s Cholocate Shop); or it’s accompanied by embarrassment (R. Crumb). In the case of Duchamp’s Etant Donnes — on view in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection — the erotic is tempered by a dose of pure weirdness as you look through a peephole at the work and what’s portrayed — the lower half of a nude woman on the ground, her legs splayed, one hand holding aloft a lantern and an eerie waterfall in the background — is creepy and inexplicable.

R. Crumb drawing

Artists now might deny the erotic in their art. Louise Bourgeois said “I wouldn’t say my work is erotic, even though this side of it seems obvious to many people.” Tony Ward, on the other hand, in an interview with Corey Armpriester on artblog, embraces sexual imagery as a way to put human sexuality into the art history canon. But even this artist — who shows with Sande Webster Gallery — seems to waffle on the erotic charge of his works saying he’s “looking for a means to express the art of it (human sexuality) not the sex of it.”

Photo by Tony Ward

Feminism took some of the sexy out of art by attacking the male gaze and by empowering women to make works about their own sexuality. Many early feminist works are angry, and while graphic, not sexy. The Visible Vagina at Francis Naumann Gallery which Andrea told you about recently, exposes many feminist works focused on the female sex organ. But as with much feminist work eroticism wasn’t the point of it and it doesn’t seem to be the byproduct.

Marcel Duchamp, Etant Donnes

But even before feminism, abstract expressionism and minimalism — both about as sexy as Benjamin Moore paint chips — put eros on the shelf.

Lust Caution, Ang Lee's movie about the Japanese occupation of China has scenes that feel like they're based on Japanese Shunga drawings

Photography went where painting and sculpture wouldn’t go and nude photography is our latter day erotic art. But more than that, today’s erotic art is the movies. Films may be the closest thing we have to Rubens, Boucher, Caravaggio, Bronzino. Movies use narrative– often extremely over the top dramatic — and add romance and the erotic scene or two. Art house movies are full of that mixture. These movies deliver erotic content without irony. It’s seriously sensual stuff, just like the old masters used to provide.

So if movies are how we get our erotic art it’s not a bad thing. It’s just another example of pop culture taking over what used to be in art’s domain — or art ceding something it didn’t want to deal with to pop culture, which very much wants to deal.  Hollywood sells sex because sex sells.

>>Etant Donnes, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gallery 183, Modern and Contemporary Art, first floor. 26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway Adults: $16 Seniors (ages 65 & over): $14 Students (with valid ID): $12 Children (excluding groups) ages 13–18: $12 ages 12 & under: Free First Sunday of each month: Pay what you wish all day.

>>The Visible Vagina, to Mar 20. Francis Naumann Gallery, 24 W. 57th St., Suite 305. NY NY 10019. 212 582 3201.

Mira Schor ‘Slit of Paint’ (1994) oil on canvas, 12 x 16"

Carolee Schneemann ‘Vulva’s Morphia’ (1995) wall installation 5 x 8', each panel 8 ½ x 11" ; installed with fans

I never shared Ensler’s discomfort with the word, vagina;  I was raised in a doctor’s family where all parts of the anatomy were fair game at the dinner table, as long as one used the correct term.  Speaking of which, while vagina has come to be popular shorthand, the word refers to the unseen part of the female sex organs (unless one has a speculum); the external portion is the vulva or pudenda.

Sarah Davis ‘Britney (Notorious)’ (2009) pastel on Somerset ‘velvet’ paper, 22 x 30"

The most striking thing about the more than one hundred artworks is how few of them objectify women or suggest a salacious use of the imagery, other than as humorous or ironic commentary; the most egregious exception is Mark Kostabi’s large close-up of a vulva in the pallate of Las Vegas at night.  The tone is rather searching, affectionate, wonderous, knowing, celebratory and humorous, with a fair number of nods to artistic precedents.  The obvious and most-cited of these are Courbet’s frankly-pornographic The Origin of the World, never intended to be seen in mixed or polite company, and Duchamp’s transgressive Étant donnés, which permanently brought the imagery into the art museum. Mira Schor’s Slit of Paint (1994, above) surely respond’s to Jasper Johns’ Painting with Two Balls and Cathy de Monchaux’s I saw the past splayed with the skin of my youth (2009) to Jay de Feo’s The Rose; Allyson Mitchell’s Hungry Purse; The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism (2006, below) pays homage both to Faith Wilding’s Crocheted Environment (aka Womb Room) at Womanhouse and Nikki de Saint Phalle’s Hon; and I suspect that Sarah Davis’ Britany (Notorious) (2009, above), based on a famous and revealing news photo of Britany Spears makes note of Richard Hamilton’s Swinging London, itself based on a news photo of Mick Jagger attempting to hide his face.

Nancy Grossman ‘Bride’ (1966) mixed media, 22 ½ “ diameter

The exhibition primarily covers recent work and the period from the late 1960s-1970s, when feminism encouraged women to look at their own and each other’s sex organs; workshops were arranged for the purpose.  This coincided with my own maturity and I can well-remember the frisson of transgression around such investigations.  Several works date from the period (by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Nancy Grossman, Barbara Hammer, Henri Maccheroni, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Watts and others) but perhaps none is more closely associated with the times than Judy Chicago’s Red Flag (1971): a photograph, slightly manipulated, so it takes a moment to recognize the subject as a woman removing a bloody tampon from her vagina.  Chicago’s in-your-face image of menstruation was produced against a background of ads for sanitary napkins that still showed ball-gowned women in grand settings, with the elliptical text: Modess…. because.

Peter Saul ‘Relax Sonny’ (2009) acrylic, colored pencil and marker on paper, 23 x 29"

The most striking sign of how far we’ve progressed is the fact that the exhibition was arranged by men and includes male artists.  Peter Saul’s drawing, Relax Sonny says it all concerning male anxiety about women’s bodies. Chuck Close’s Untitled Dauguerreotypes (2010), a diptych, is a loving study of what I assume to be the vulva of his beloved, and likely to raise no opposition. But I can’t help remembering the feminist objections (retrospective, I’d guess) to S0l LeWitt’s Muybridge I (1964), sequential photos of a nude woman as the facing camera moves closer and, focusing on her belly-button, includes ever closer views of her crotch. Is it just the times that make the Close acceptable, or is our tolerance based on the misconception that sixty year old men (Close or Picasso) can do nothing but look?

Beatrice Wood ‘Un peut d’eau dans du savon’ (1917, 1977 replica) Glazed earthenware and soap, 11 ¾ x 9 7/8 “

I’ve always been fascinated by what can and can’t be shown and The Visible Vagina raises the question again and again.  The earliest work is Beatrice Wood’s small clay relief, Un peut d’eau dans du savon (1917, shown in a replica of 1977), a woman’s body in the bath with a heart-shaped piece of carved soap functioning as a fig-leaf. I suspect that the charming image could appear on a Hallmark greeting card these days, but Naumann told me that when included in the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (which rejected Duchamp’s Fountain), it provoked a scandalized reaction and extensive press; Wood told of daily having to remove  calling-cards that men had left in the frame.

Allyson Mitchell ‘Hungry Purse; The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism’ (2006-7) view from within towards entrance

Each of the galleries includes and installation that visitors can enter. Allyson Mitchell’s wonderful and hilarious Hungry Purse; The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism at Nolan is a lair formed primarily of riotously-polychrome crochet of the sort recycled by Mike Kelly.  The large clitoris above the entry is discretely shielded as one enters by a fringed g-string and the throne opposite is decorated with owls — Athena’s, no doubt.  Pendant cages house chipmunks (squirrels?), one of which is visibly lactating.  At Naumann Carol Cole’s equally humorous Back into the Womb uses a pup-tent as armature for what reads as the skirt of a ball-gown of beige tulle over red satin, until the anatomical reference becomes clear.  Visitors can put their heads through the aperture where a handy flashlight is provided to illuminate the roof, decorated with baby pacifiers and nipples, and the floor, covered with red-sprayed egg-crate foam; certainly the most imaginative use of the material I know, although the referent was open for discussion.

Maureen Connor still from ‘Heads’ from ‘The Sixth Sense’ (1993) video

The installation at Nolan had a few delightful surprises: next to the entrance are two images by Mel Kendrick of bark on a tree, done in ink on Japanese paper.  The aperture on each is so subtle that one might believe he intended them as knots on the tree trunks.  In the second space the surprise is the pairing; I saw Judie Bamber’s astonishingly-lifelike, narrow close-up of a woman’s pudenda – surely a photograph, beside Beth B.’s delicate, pencil drawing of an equally-narrow view of pudenda and anus.  Or that’s what I thought I saw, for the Bamber is a tromp l’oel oil on panel, while Beth B.’ is a photo.  Close by is Maureen Connor’s wonderfully-deadpan video, Heads, from The Sixth Sense in which a woman’s thoughts are recorded on her forehead; as she puts on make up she fantasizes she’s Grace Kelly, then when she see’s a young Cary Grant and Paul Newman, she’s fingering her clitoris.

James Siena ‘Place’ (2008) ink on paper, 6 1/4 x 8"

The exhibition is accompanied by a 124 pg. catalog (The Visible Vagina, ISBN 978-0-98-00556-3-4) with extensive color photographs of many of the works on view and comparative material, and an essay by Anna C. Chave, ‘Is this good for Vulva?’; Female Genetalia in Contemporary Art.  Chave introduces the contemporary work with a history of pre-historic fertility figures that emphasize the vulva, and the man-made narrative that artistic generation is exclusive to men (human generation being unequivocally women’s work).  She traces the artistic emphasis on mother goddesses and generative forms during the early days of feminism  then looks at the dialectic of woman’s body as site of knowledge versus the concern that emphasizing the body is essentializing.  Chave situates the development of feminist art within changing social, legal and cultural currents and looks at several artists from backgrounds beyond the U.S. and Europe.  The catalog gives a unique presentation of several generations of women who use their most private anatomy as a subject for art.

All proceeds from the catalog sales will be donated to V-Day, the organization Eve Ensler founded to end violence against women.  It would make a wonderful Valentine’s Day gift!

The Visible Vagina coincides with another New York exhibition based upon vaginal imagery, Ida Applebroog; MONALISA at Hauser and Wirth, which will be the subject of my next post.

Magdalena Abakanowitz ‘Cercle Clair’ (1971) jute, 59" diameter

A symposium guest viewing 'Étant donnés'

The crowd for the event, co-sponsored by the Department of Art History at Penn and the PMA’s Center for American Art, included museum patrons, artists and art historians from the area as well as academics and museum staff from across the U.S. and Europe (Linda Henderson, Charlie Stuckey, Dawn Ades), dealers (Ron Feldman), notable artists (Mark Kostabi and Jeff Koons) and most of the Matisse family (Duchamp’s step-children).  I had two house guests who came for the event: Dali scholar Frederique Joseph-Lowey and Kate Dempsey, a doctoral student at the University of Texas working on Ray Johnson (one of the artists responding to Étant donnés whose work is in the exhibition).

The symposium opened with a talk by Jeff Wall on Friday evening; speaking in the language of one well-versed in theory and criticism he described the influence of Duchamp’s career on his own.  Wall said that in 1973 when he visited the PMA’s Duchamp retrospective he was in a crisis of several year’s duration, unable to produce work; he understood the importance of Duchamp’s readymades as a negation of the traditional artistic metiers and canon, but felt trapped by the Conceptualism which followed this stance.  Seeing Étant donnés freed Wall to proceed with his own practice; he understood that Duchamp, unwilling to repeat the readymades and unable to proceed from them, finally returned to challenge the canon on his own terms.

Mark Kostabi (leaving) and Gregory Tentler and Chris Poggi waiting to see' Étant donnés' during the symposium’s break

Saturday’s papers ended with a discussion by Francis Naumann of the influence of Duchamp on the most recent paintings of Jeff Koons, so the academic papers were bookended by talks addressing Duchamp’s continuing importance for artists.  Naumann began and ended by citing Picabia:

Our head is round to allow thought to change direction.

It was unclear whether this referred to Naumann’s changing understanding that  Jeff Koons could be influenced by Étant donnés, or Koon’s own mental circling;  but he did posit the novel suggestion that an artist’s intention (and hence acknowledgment of influence) could be established not only prior to or during the execution of a piece, but also at any time after its completion. Perhaps this follows Duchamp’s assertion that the viewer completes the work of art, the artist being the first viewer.

The symposium crowd meant there was a line to see Duchamp’s final work.

The papers in between included a discussion of Duchamp’s relationship with Mary Reynolds, his longest romantic involvement and collaborator on various book designs; a discussion of Duchamp’s attitude towards the concept of the oeuvre; the meaning of the inscription Hieronymous Duchamp in Frederick Kiesler’s photo collage of the artist in his studio (with jocular reference to the womanizing Duchamp’s frequent appeals to monastic seclusion); a long and complicated analysis of liberty in relation to Étant donnés by David Hopkins who began with the catchy but enigmatic statement that the nude in Étant donnés was metaphorically elevated, and literally violated; and  how to reconcile Duchamp’s comment that he would not exhibit his work, according to his principles, with his ongoing activity as a curator of exhibitions by fellow artists.

The final event was a conversation between PMA curator, Michael Taylor and Duchamp’s step-son, Peter Matisse who worked with Anne d’Harnoncourt in 1969 to install Étant donnés in the PMA.  On seeing the work in the artist’s studio after his death Matisse said he was most moved by the signs of Marcel’s personality,  including the ad hoc and jerry-rigged construction of those parts hidden from public view. Duchamp had prepared a lengthy and detailed book of instructions for its installation (reproduced by the PMA and available in the museum’s shop), but Matisse acknowledged that he hadn’t even glanced at it;  if he had, he said the installation wouldn’t have worked.  Commenting on the symposium he said:

If Marcel could see this he’d be amused.

Marcel Duchamp

Into this problematic morass, Michael Taylor, the effervescent curator of Marcel Duchamp: Étant Donnés, the art historical exhibit  of the work and related objects currently on view at the PMA (see Andrea’s post), cheerfully waded, in a talk Friday on a rainy night in August that attracted an astonishing crowd of about 200 fans, devotees and art insiders. The full title of the piece is Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, a2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) 1946-66, and this year’s exhibit celebrates the 40th anniversary of its installation.

Michael Taylor, curator of Marcel Duchamp: Etant Donnes exhibit at PMA

Taylor’s talk was a gossipy backgrounder on the history of the 1968 installation and Duchamp’s two-decade effort to create the work. Taylor manfully tackled with wry jocularity whatever vocabulary the discussion of body parts required, at the same time, promising not to take away the mystery of the piece. Shockingly, he didn’t.

“It’s the first site-specific art for a museum,” Taylor said, after laying out a story of secretive facture and politicking by Duchamp of museum trustees to get the work accepted by the PMA, then and now home to the largest collection of Marcel Duchamp’s works.

Page from Marcel Duchamp's book of instructions for assembling Etant Donnes; checkerboard linoleum pictured on right.

Then-Curatorial Assistant Anne d’Harnoncourt was all of 25 when she installed the piece in the museum shortly after Duchamp’s death. She was aided by Duchamp’s widow and his step-son, Paul Matisse. The installation took a full year. D’Harnoncourt painstakingly followed instructions Duchamp left at his death in a fat black binder full of written, photographic, and schematic instructions. He even spelled out the coordinates for placing the body parts on a bit of checkerboard linoleum on which the installation rests. Taylor noted how the checkerboard linoleum was the perfect choice for an avid chess player. The instructions are precise and Duchamp left only one scintilla of discretion to the curator:

“‘You can adjust the cotton wool [clouds] in the background,’” thereby allowing a change in the weather, added Taylor. Not that the cotton wool has been readjusted since the original installation. It’s always sunny in Etant Donnes!

Marcel Duchamp, Polaroid photograph of Étant donnés in Fourteenth Street studio, 1965. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Archives, Anne d’Harnoncourt Records.© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp.

In keeping with Etant Donnes peephole-i-ness, the piece was created in such secret that for 20 years the author of a Duchamp catalog raisonne had no idea it existed. The catalog was at the printer in Milan when the author got the news. “Stop the presses, Milan,” Taylor quipped.

Duchamp ordered the bricks for the installation, here surrounding the doors with peepholes, shortly before his death.

Duchamp’s secretiveness about his art began in Duchamp’s 14th Street studio, where he moved in the fall of 1943. There he welcomed visitors to a bare front room that contained only a chessboard and chairs, projecting an image of the artist as too fine and too intellectual for material practice. Unbeknownst to his guests, though, through the bathroom behind a locked door, was “a Santa’s workshop filled with all these body parts and mannequins.”

Marcel Duchamp, Untitled (Erotic Object), 1959. Copper-electroplated plaster, 7 9/16 x 2 7/8 in. PMA. Gift of Mme Marcel Duchamp. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp.

Many of the body parts, experiments with materials and castings, and “erotic objects” never before displayed, are part of the exhibit now at the PMA, where they exude a weird and fascinating sexiness.

Taylor attributed Duchamp’s motives for secrecy to a rebellion against galleries. “In 1940, he wanted to give up art–its commercial aspect. The point of Etant Donnes is it’s a secret and not a part of the gallery system.”

Unidentified photographer, Maria Martins, 1941.

That was not Duchamp’s only secret of the time. He was carrying on a seven-year affair with the main model for Etant Donnes, Maria Martins, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador. “She rocked [Duchamp's] world. …He was besotted by her.” (Access to Duchamp’s and Martins’ correspondence–provided by their estates–was critical in providing new scholarship used to create the exhibit and catalog–which includes the correspondence in translation.) But in the end, Martins refused to leave the ambassador and her busy social life for Duchamp.

The talk was full of crunchy details. Here are a few:

–Taylor and PMA Contemporary Art Curator Carlos Basualdo made a pilgrimage to find and photograph the backdrop’s waterfall, which overlooks Lake Geneva. Much to their dismay, they discovered the small building barely visible in the backdrop was a shooting range–still in use by Hell’s Angels. The two briefly clambered atop the roof for a quick picture or two and then fled.

Marcel Duchamp, collage on plywood (study for backdrop, Étant donnés), 1959. Gelatin silver photographs with paint, graphite, crayon, ballpoint-pen ink, 26 3/8 x 39 1/8 in. PMA. Gift of Mme Marcel Duchamp © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp.

–Duchamp’s own black-and-white collaged photographs of the scene defied his attempts to paint them over. A year later, he met Dali in Spain and enlisted his help with the background. Dali made a series of collotype prints of the image that were more paint friendly and became part of the installation.

Marcel Duchamp, Untitled (Erotic Object), 1959. Copper-electroplated plaster, 7 9/16 x 2 7/8 in. PMA. Gift of Mme Marcel Duchamp. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp.

–When damage occurred to one of the arms during a move, Duchamp cast a new one from his wife Alexina, aka Teeny, whom he married a few years after the break-up with Martins. This explains why the arm holding the light is a little out of proportion to the rest of the figure. Teeny was less teeny. Martins and Teeny actively contributed ideas and opinions to Etant Donnes. ”All three important women in Duchamp’s life are in there!” I asked Taylor who were the three. His answer–Teeny, Martins, and Mary Reynolds, another of his romantic involvements “off and on, with Duchamp from the 1920s until her death in 1950,” he wrote. She “probably supplied Duchamp with the parchment for the mannequin’s skin.”

–Dali was not the only artist on whom Duchamp relied for help. Joseph Cornell had helped Duchamp make the Boites-en-valises. In fact they had helped each other–Cornell and was known to go through Duchamp’s trash, looking for materials for his own work.

Photo by Denise Brown Hare of Étant donnés in the Eleventh Street Studio, 1968. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Archives, Anne d’Harnoncourt Records.

Taylor, discussing the phallic form of the lamp in the figure’s hand, said, “In many ways, Etant Donnes is the 3-D equivalent of The Large Glass, that great allegory of frustrated desire…Duchamp always loved contradiction. You can’t look at a painting of a nude again without thinking of [Etant Donnes].”

After the talk, during a brief Q&A, someone asked about the deformation of the figure’s genitals. “They are strange,” Taylor said. “Having never cast my genitals, I can imagine it’s a difficult area to cast. Is she a woman?” Taylor then mentions Duchamp’s interest in transgender roles and Rrose Selavy. “My own gut feeling is the deformations happened in the casting process and Duchamp kept them because they were in line with his notions about gender. What I don’t want to do is look at Maria Martins down there.

“Next? [a pause while no one asks another question]

“Well, that’s a very good way to end it.”

On Sept. 11-12 the Philadelphia Museum of Art is holding The First Annual Anne d’Harnoncourt Memorial Symposium in conjunction with the exhibition, including a talk by artist Jeff Wall on the influence of Etant Donnes. The exhibit, which celebrates the installation of Etant Donnes at the PMA 40 years earlier, and the catalog are also dedicated to the memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt, the beloved director and CEO of the museum, who died last year.

Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés (1946-66) detail of exterior

Exhibitions devoted to a single work of 20th century art are extremely rare, and Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), on view  through November 29, 2009 is exemplary.
Such focused exhibitions require two things: enough preparatory studies and works leading up to the magnum opus to create an interesting display and enough prior interest in the masterwork to attract an audience. Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (1946-66, designated ED in the rest of this article) passes on both counts.  The PMA holds the bulk of Duchamp’s production and has been a proud as well as conscientious caretaker of his legacy; the Duchamp collection insures that Philadelphia is a pilgrimage site for students of 20th century art.

Marcel Duchamp untitled (Left Leg) c.1949, painted plaster

The exhibition will be of great interest to viewers who care about how an artist develops a work that is complex and challenging to execute; it is certainly required viewing for all Duchampians, as it contains a significant amount of unpublished photographic and written documentation and work.  Duchamp spent twenty years on ED, working in secret, yet it incorporates imagery that dates to his very earliest sketches.  The exhibition includes photographic documentation of ED taken by Duchamp as it progressed and posthumous photographs of the finished work in Duchamp’s second New York studio.  Duchamp’s notes and studies for ED are assembled, as are various test studies for the nude figure and landscape, much prior work which anticipates all or part of ED’s subject matter and his manual of instructions for assembling the work at the PMA (which the museum published in facsimile in 1987, and has re-published, with English translation).  It also includes a group of Duchamp’s Erotic Objects which were artifacts of the process of constructing the nude figure.

A small, separate section at the PMA exhibits work by a hand full of later artists who directly responded to ED (one could easily mount another exhibition on the subject) and two works by Maria Martins.  The most provocative is Hanna Wilke’s film, Philly (1977) in which Wilke plays the part of the nude who takes control; she overturns Duchamp’s situation so that the viewer of his peep-show is toyed with by the nude.

Marcel Duchamp Torture-Morte 1959 mixed media

Michael Taylor, the exhibition’s curator, pays the old jokester Duchamp the respect of taking him completely seriously.  He researched ED for 10 years, talking with Duchamp’s surviving family, colleagues and friends from the period of ED, retracied the artist’s steps through the Swiss landscape that inspired ED’s background and read everything possible about it, published or not. The exhibition follows Duchamp’s laborious process of realizing a work that he had long imagined, his experiments with casting the nude figure and with creating a realistic-looking model after it (achieved with parchment stretched and dried over the plaster life cast, then colored and supported with an armature), designing and producing the landscape background and lighting the installation. Taylor’s lovingly-researched and clearly-written catalog tracks Duchamp’s process in much more detail than the exhibition and is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the full implications of the works on exhibit.

ED and its related Erotic Objects mark the only time that Duchamp was directly involved with the process of casting and he clearly relished its appropriateness to the subject of sex. Casting involves a series of interlocking positive and negative forms that perfectly match one another in obvious analogy to sexual congress.  The Erotic Ojects, while anatomically undefined (until their origins were revealed by research), are clearly related to the body and function as sexual fetishes through the implication that their forms match bodily contours. They also fit in the hand and to hold or caress one is a vicarious sexual caress.

Marcel Duchamp untitled (Erotic Object) c.1950 copper electroplated plaster

The superb, scholarly catalog includes Taylor’s account of ED’s genesis, construction, installation and legacy, all beautifully illustrated.  It also includes translations of Duchamp’s correspondence with Maria Martins, the Brazilian sculptor whose sexuality inspired the artist. She was his lover when he began the work and was the model for the cast figure of ED’s nude; the correspondence reveals that Martins was his adviser throughout the process of creating the figure.  The only thing Taylor neglects is a discussion of the peep shows Duchamp might have seen around Times Square (and perhaps in Paris), although he does discuss and illustrate precedents such as a 19th century pornographic stereoscopic image of a woman’s pudenda as well as higher-class porn such as Courbet’s The Origin of the World, which Duchamp likely saw when it was owned by Jacques Lacan.  Three catalog articles by museum conservators are the first ever to analyze the materials and production of the Erotic Objects, the figure in ED and the evolution of the landscape in which she lies.

Duchamp’s work has generated an extraordinary amount of critical and academic attention, perhaps because it offers such an open field for interpretation and footnoted and cross-referenced research.  Monographs already exist (in some cases more than one) on Fountain, the Large Glass and ED, not to mention endless articles, PhD dissertations and at least two journals devoted entirely to Duchamp.  Taylor’s catalog is grounded in the physical reality of the work in ways that are rare in the scholarly writings.  This combined with his extensive archival work will put some of the wilder interpretations of ED to rest. His attitude, however, is modest to the point of withdrawal.  He will not give his own interpretation of ED, preferring to leave it open-ended and let other scholars build on his groundwork.

Marcel Duchamp Wedge of Chastity 1963 replica of 1954 original

Taylor does concede that Duchamp, who early in his career rejected the purely optical basis of painting and sculpture, proposes in ED an erotic opticality.  I see it somewhat differently, perhaps as a woman inevitably so.  ED clearly grew from Duchamp’s sexual interests, combining furtiveness (the peepholes, referencing adolescent sexual initiation), enlightenment (the lamp of his mature sexual experience), the constancy of masculine desire (the eternally ejaculatory flow of the waterfall) and female receptiveness (he spoke of the nude as Our Lady of Desires to his lover, Martins).  Yet whatever charge ED carries, for me at least, it is not a sexual one.  While Duchamp played openly with cross-dressing, the objects of his sexual interest were always women; so it is surprising to find that the open crotch of his nude corresponds so poorly to actual female anatomy.  I don’t buy Taylor’s suggestion that the distortion is an artifact of the casting process; Duchamp manipulated the parchment that he formed over the plaster cast of Martin’s body in various ways, adding hair and color as he wished.  He could easily have reworked anatomical details at that stage.  His results are strangely disturbing and sexually off-putting.  I would suggest that with ED, Duchamp established a conceptual eroticism, in that any sexual response the viewer has to the work is not to what he sees but to the product of his own imagination.

On Sept. 11-12 the Philadelphia Museum of Art is holding a Symposium in conjunction with the exhibition, in memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt who, as a young curator, was responsible for installing Étant donnés. For further information call (215)235-7469.

unidentified artist “Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp” (1917), photo postcard, private collection courtesy Francis M. Naumann Fine Art

More than a hundred works include photographic portraits and self-portraits (as his everyday self and in the guise of various alter-egos) as well as abstract portraits and self-portraits representing the artist through his work and/or attributes; the later include Duchamp’s Boîte-Series D of 1961, a variation on his earlier Boîte-en-valise ( a miniature retrospective of his own work assembled for travel, in a suitcase), Mel Bochner’s alphabetic re-arrangement of a citation from Duchamp’s description of The Large Glass, Brian O’Dougherty’s portrait based on an electrocardiogram of the artist and Joseph Cornell’s account of a dream about Duchamp.

Man Ray “Rrose Sélavy” (1921), gelatin silver print 13.8 x 9.9 cm, private collection © Man Ray Trust

The exhibition’s curators, Anne Collins Goodyear of the Portrait Gallery and James W. McManus, professor emeritus of art history at Cal State, Chico, suggest that Duchamp’s various personae as well as the self  he presented to his portraitists should be considered part of his oeuvre.  They cite the critic Henry McBride (a contemporary of Duchamp’s): Marcel in real life is pure fantasy.  If you were to study his paintings, and particularly his art constructions, and were to try to conjure up his physical appearance, you could not fail to guess him, for he is his own best creation,….  Goodyear writes that Duchamp deployed self-portraiture as a means to construct his future reputation, and that his most significant legacy is to demonstrate that one thing, one person, can be many things at once … identity, then … is ultimately unstable and multiple.

Jasper Johns “M.D.” (1964) collage and graphite pencil on board, 21 3/4 x 17 3/4 in, collection of the artist, © Jasper Johns

Duchamp was certainly not the first artist to attempt to construct his own reputation; Michaelangelo edited his biographers, Salvator Rosa was famously self-publicising, and Courbet created a series of youthful self-portraits in multiple guises that drew on Romantic ideas of self-presentation as role-playing; his image was so well-known that he became the most caricatured artist of his day.  But Duchamp is certainly  twentieth-century art’s most well-known self-fashioner and he captured the imagination of many successors.  In addition to those already mentioned, the exhibition includes work by Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, Florine Stettheimer, Irving Penn, Frederick Kiesler, Richard Avedon, Richard Pettibone, Sturtevant, Richard Hamilton, Red Grooms, Mark Tansey, David Hammons, and Douglas Gordon, among others.

Ray Johnson “Untitled (Duchamp with ‘Blue Eyes’)” (1987) collage on board, 17 x 15in., collection of Tony and Gail Ganz

As would be expected when Duchamp is the subject, loans from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and contributions from its curators are central to the exhibition; but if you want to explore the range of portraits of Philadelphia’s local art hero you’ll have to go to D.C. by August 2, since the exhibition isn’t traveling.

Andy Warhol “Screen Test: Marcel Duchamp” (1966), 16mm film, film still courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum, © The Andy Warhol Museum

A symposium held in connection with the exhibition’s opening explored Duchamp as subject and the larger question of what constituted a portrait in the early Twentieth Century.  Wendy Reaves, curator at the Portrait Gallery, discussed the first two decades of the 20th century as a time when many took a theatrical attitude to self-presentation; she reviewed various abstract portraits including Virgil Thompson’s musical portraits, Marius de Zayas’ cartoons, Picabia’s abstract portraits and puppets and dolls by numerous artists.  Louis Katchur, professor at Kean University, discussed the tradition of avant garde artists’ gatherings and their painted group portraits by Fantin-Latour and Maurice Denis, as well as photographs of the Futurists and others.

David Hopkins, professor at the University of Glasgow, discussed Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding in a manner exemplary of the hermeneutics beloved by Duchamp scholars.  He managed to link the photographic detail of dust on The Large Glass with aerial photography from WWI, hence death, and Duchamp’s male and female personae with the procreation of the photograph’s title.  Finally Brian O’Dougherty gave a restrained but masterly performance documenting the execution of his portrait of Duchamp.  Spurred by Duchamp’s comment that art died in museums, O’Dougherty was determined to create a portrait that would somehow extend the life of its subject.  O’Dougherty, who had trained as a doctor, took an electrocardiogram of Duchamp which he used to generate a portrait with a heartbeat that would function perpetually.

Accompanying the exhibition is an extremely handsome and fully-illustrated catalog, Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture (MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-01300-0) with articles by Janine A. Metcalf, Francis M. Naumann and Michael R. Taylor, in addition to the curators.  Unusually for catalogs of contemporary art, it has very useful individual entries for each of the exhibited works.  The book is stylishly designed and benefits from footnotes, rather than end-notes, in the catalog section.  The designer, however, had the counterproductive idea to set the actual catalog entries perpendicular to the explanatory text.  This makes for beautiful page layoutsbut gives the reader a literal pain in the neck.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is filled with wonderful and entertaining exhibitions at the moment, and what’s more they are shows that will appeal to family and friends who may be wary of art. They’re all thoroughly respectable academically as well as funny – and I feel strongly that humor is to be taken seriously and valued in art. The Perelman Building is a treasure house; the most prominent exhibition there being Calder Jewelry (through Nov. 2, 2008).

Alexander Calder’s jewelry is an endless testimony to the imagination. He didn’t make jewelry in any conventional sense – he made body art, with the emphasis on art. Some pieces could easily be worn, others were certainly more conceptual. Calder occasionally used gold, more often silver or copper wire and the only baubles he set in them were bits of broken glass bottles and mirrors, pebbles or the shards of broken ceramics. His technique is all on view – a sort of home-made, folks-y handling, equivalent to Hemingway’s stripped-down prose, that becomes drawing with wire and belies his superb technical skill. When he sets one of those shards or pieces of glass he wraps wire around it and tethers it to the body of the necklace or pin with every twist of the attachment on display; the hammer-marks, grommets and fasteners are always visible. Despite his overt modesty he was truly an alchemist, turning dross into gold!

Alexander Calder Earrings (c. 1949), silver wire, 4 x 4 in. each, Calder Foundation, N. Y. and Display Head for Jewelry (1940), sheet metal, wood and paint, 13 x 7 x 4 in., collection Miani Johnson, N.Y., photo © Maria Robledo

Some of my favorites: a wickedly funny neck-piece titled The Jealous Husband (c. 1940) which uses beaten brass wire to create swirls across the wearer’s bosom and has sharp, protective claws protruding from both shoulders (or are those cuckold’s horns?); a thoroughly useless pair of steel wire spectacles (1932) that bear a strong resemblance to a Saul Steinberg drawing; a Chainmail necklace (c. 1940) formed from hoops of fine silver wire that calls attention to the chest rather than protecting it; and a Crown of Leaves (c. 1940) made of brass wire that is as far from a formal tiara as possible – looking instead like a party costume for Daphne in the process of becoming a tree.

The work is inspiring and joyful but I have problems with the exhibition. The first is the concept; Twentieth-century artists fought hard to break down hierarchies of the arts, and major artists including Calder exhibited small, useful objects, ceramics, furniture, clothing etc. along with their paintings and sculpture. In one of his earliest exhibitions, in 1929, Calder included paintings, wood sculpture, toys, wire sculpture, jewelry and textiles, and listed them all in the exhibition title. I’m sure he never said to himself today I’m a jeweler, tomorrow I’ll be a sculptor. These distinctions reflect the bureaucracy of the museum and the exigencies of the auction house imposing themselves on the artwork. Besides, the jewelry is much more interesting within the continuum of Calder’s endless playfulness and unconventional sensitivity to materials, his formal concerns, technical skills and anti-authoritarian stance. The Whitney Museum happily exhibits Calder’s Circus – a group of toy-sized models made of wire that Calder manipulated for performances, without worrying about categories. The last time I saw a significant group of Calder’s jewelry was at the Cooper-Hewitt in 1989, The Intimate World of Alexander Calder, a marvelous exhibition which included toys, useful household and cooking objects and hardware, such as a toilet-paper holder, that Calder made for family and friends.

Alexander Calder, on wall: Necklace, (c. 1943), silver wire, loop 34 in, pendant 5 1/4 x 3 3/4 in.; on surface: Bracelet (c.1947), gold wire, 2 3/16 x 2 7/8 x 2 9/16 in., Cufflinks (c. 1940), silver wire, 1 ½ x ½ x 3/4 in. each, Tiara (c. 1938), silver wire, 4 ½ x 7 x 6 1/8 in. all Calder Foundation, N.Y., photo © Maria Robledo

Not only does the current exhibition strip the work of its context within Calder’s oeuvre, it rarely hints at its art historical context other than the fact that some pieces were gifts to family and fellow artists, nor does it acknowledge Calder’s serious study of other body adornment; the label for one fish pin doesn’t mention that the motif comes from Max Ernst and labels for a number of necklaces make no mention of their references to African, Celtic or pre-Colombian jewelry, although the absolutely stunning catalog does fill in those blanks. The exhibition opens with a touching group of the endless gifts he made for his wife (whose unlabeled photograph hangs nearby), but the only other bit of context on view, large photographs of several of the pieces being worn, isn’t labeled at all; I may recognize Peggy Guggenheim (who commissioned his jewelry) and Brooke Shields (who certainly didn’t; I suspect it’s a fashion shot), but other visitors may not know who they are. But my major complaint is with the staid display, which I understand was dictated by the Calder Foundation, and indicates a discomfort with the fact that this work is fun and sometimes funny. The tasteful, generic installation could have been intended for Pre-Colombian Gold or Chinese ceramics.

But go, laugh and enjoy yourself! This is significant and inspiring work by one of the great figures of Twentieth-century American art, and laughter is allowed.

Further Gems Upstairs: Archive Acquisitions in the Library

Marcel Duchamp, Chess scorecard made with stamps designed by the artist
(1919), Arensberg Archives, gift of the Francis Bacon Foundation, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art. One of several pieces of Duchamp’s from the PMA’s archive on current view in the Perelman Building library.

If you haven’t been to the beautiful, new library now is the time, for two display cases are filled with gifts to the museum’s archives that indicate just how rich and diverse that collection is. There’s Benjamin Franklin’s edition of Cicero’s essay on old age (an astute interest in the field prior to the greying of the baby boomers), an early American book on carpentry techniques that uses pop-up illustrations and my favorite, Marcel Duchamp’s passport, with official photos looking much like portraits of Duchamp by fellow artists.

Fashions of Fancy: Kansai Yamamoto

Kansai Yamamoto, (Japanese, b. 1944), Cape, Bodysuit, Chaps, and Clogs (1971), synthetic satin, wool knit. Philadelphia Museumof Art, gift of Hess’s Department Store, Allentown.

Also upstairs is a tiny gem of an exhibition drawn from the PMA’s collections: Hello! Fashion; Kansai Yamamoto (1971-1973). It includes just nine of Yamamoto’s outfits (all gifts of Hess’s stores of Allentown, his first American outlet), six pieces by other Japanese designers (Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake), looking rather sedate in comparison, and two wonderful, short films. But that’s enough to change your idea of what clothing might be. The film of London and Tokyo fashion shows is full of outfits that might have been intended for a modern Gypsy Rose Lee for they come apart with a snap, revealing scantier outfits beneath; the other film records a literally spectacular event filled with effects of lighting, fireworks, smoke, rigging and a cast of thousands, a similar aesthetic to the recent opening of the Beijing Olympic games.

Kansai Yamamoto, Evening Cape, Top, and Pants (1971)synthetic satin, Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Hess’s Department Store, Allentown.

Yamamoto creates costumes more than clothing in the conventional sense, and draws his inspiration from a broad range of traditional Japanese forms: Kabuki theater as depicted in woodblock prints, kites (see first image, above), samurai archer’s targets and tattoos. One pair of trousers has legs which look like flamenco dancers’ skirts: each is a full circle; an ensemble of shorts and a top is accompanied by leggings inspired by firefighters’ protective clothing and worn with a red hood (David Bowie was photographed in a similar outfit in 1971); a cape inspired by hippie macrame (above) consists of thick, floor-length coils of satin, knotted at the yoke and hanging freely from the shoulders, a perfect dance costume and fortunately shown in motion in one of the films. The exhibition is an eye-opener; why don’t I know this work? Many thanks to the PMA’s costume and textiles department!

The Afterlife of Ephemera

The Big Eiffel Tower Game, souvenir of the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, Allard et Laval, French, active c. 1889, published by Courmont Frères, Paris, France, 1889, chromolithograph, 30 1/16 x 19 1/2 inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Alice Newton Osborn, 1961.

If you cross the street to the museum’s main building there’s yet another exhibition that rewards getting out of the heat: Curious and Commonplace; European Popular Prints of the 1800′s. Don’t worry about the lengthy title; the exhibition is filled with the sorts of printed materials that were originally too ordinary for anyone to save; one wonders how these examples, mostly printed in Metz and Epinal, survived. Prints were the means for circulating visual material before photography; the exhibition includes prints of sensational crimes (before tabloids), Napoleonic propaganda as well as an anti-Napoleonic illustration of his defeat at Waterloo, fashion plates, greeting cards, advertisements, caricatures and satirical prints, playing cards and all sorts of children’s toys and games including stage sets, jumping-jacks and board games which would have been pasted onto cardboard and cut out.

The Miraculous Distillery for Ridding Husbands of Their Bad Habits, Francois Georgin, French, 1801-1863, published by Pellerin, Épinal, France, 1839, stencil-colored relief print, 11 15/16 x 21 3/8 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Alice Newton Osborn, 1958.

My favorites? Well, who can resist an illustration of The Miraculous Distillery for Ridding Husbands of their Bad Habits (late 1830s) – my husband has no bad habits, of course, but the contraption would certainly be useful for other relatives and neighbors. I also love the Big Eiffel Tower Game which, was a souvenir of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and authorized by the tower’s architect. The tower itself was meant to be a temporary structure so this was ephemera about ephemera. Then there’s the New Goose Game: a board game shaped as a goose, whose origin can be traced to Francisco di Medici in the Sixteenth-century. Now that’s a provenance for a bit of fun!

David Ambrose The Conflicting Plans of Spain and England, 11 x 8 inches, watercolor, gouache on pierced paper, courtesy Pentimenti Gallery

David Ambrose‘s work at Pentimenti, a series called The Braille Landscape, is clearly labor-intensive. He first creates patterns by pricking thick paper from behind then applies tiny, multi-colored cells over the entire image. This produces an effect akin to the glassmaking technique called millefiori; Ambrose has both the fine hand and eye (as well as the patience) of a medieval illuminator. In the most successful pieces the results remain abstract (although they occasionally resemble maps); I am less taken with the works where the cells coalesce into either repeating geometric forms, as in oriental carpets, or become recognizable figures. Still, they are all fascinating works, intended to be seen up close (and given the series title perhaps they are also meant to be touched) and would re-pay repeated viewing.

Judith Schaechter Agnus Dei (2008) pigment print, courtesy of Silicon Gallery

Silicon Gallery is exhibiting a recently completed portfolio of ten pigment prints by Judith Schaechter. Silicon manages to achieve astonishingly saturated and glowing colors which are the perfect medium for Schaechter, as they capture the luminosity that she usually achieves in her glass “paintings”. Some of the digitally-generated imagery is taken from the glass works (although the images are re-created for the prints, not scanned); others are original to the prints. The majority of them continue her subject of girls lost in hallucinatory environments that may be dreams of their imagining or of Schaechter’s own alternate reality.

Dove Bradshaw Quick Construction with Yellow and Blue (2008) Meproof yellow, silver, liver of sulfur, tape, varnish and beeswax on paper, 25.8″ x19.2″, courtesy Larry Becker Contemporary Art

Larry Becker Contemporary Art is extending the exhibition of Dove Bradshaw‘s drawings, collages on paper, “drawings” on silver and three constructions which use crystals to capture radio waves. Bradshaw has long been associated with Merce Cunningham (for whom she designs sets and costumes) and John Cage, and has been notably influenced by Cage’s use of chance. I’m most intrigued by the works on paper, a series ironically called Quick Constructions. In fact they employ a laborious technique, but their beginnings with pieces assembled at random recalls not only Cage but Duchamp, in works such as Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14) which was generated by dropping three one-meter lengths of thread from a height of one meter.

John Joyce from a series on Ani, mixed photographic media, courtesy Gallery 51

Gallery 51, which usually shows extraordinary exhibitions of middle-Eastern textiles has a group of John Joyce’s photographs of the deserted ruins of the ancient Armenian capital of Ani (at the edge of modern Turkey). In keeping with the ruinous state of the buildings he’s used a combination of archaic photographic media, one of which is platinum palladium printing (my notes on his other technique are incomplete); I do remember that each image is printed three times. I’m not sure what I make of the conceit, but he has produced images of real beauty (with a subtle glow when seen at close range) of a historic site that may not survive.