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MARCEL DUCHAMP
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1 923)
Reconstruction Richard Hamilton (1965-1966)
Oil, varnish, lead wire, lead foil and dust on two glass panels
277.5cm X 175.8cm / l09 1/4 in X 69 1/4 in

Marcel Duchamp began planning The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass for short, in the summer of 1912, and made numerous notes, and drawings concern-ing its iconography and its execution. The notes, which are even more complicated than the physical work, were considered by Duchamp to be an equal work of art. A facsi-mile edition of these notes from 1912 to 1923 were published as The Green Box in 1934.

Marcel Duchamp was born near Blainville in 1887. At school he showed intellectual promise in a number of fields, including mathematics. His grandfather was a painter; two brothers and a sister were artists. When he was 15 he showed precocious accomplish-ment as a painter with the oil on canvas, Landscape at Blainville (1902). Duchamp studied painting at the Academic Julian from 1904 to 1905 where he worked in the manner of the Neo-Impressionists, Fauvists and Cezanne.

In 1911 he began to absorb and experiment with some of the very recent developments of Cubism and Futurism, producing the paint-ing Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), which was the first successful attempt in painting to depict movement and the passing of time on a static flat canvas. In 1913 he turned his back on conventional painting in order to concentrate on the conceptual aspects of art. He wanted to recognize and initiate art that was a product of the mind rather than a formal sensual manipulation and even wastage of standard artistic materials.

The scenario for The Large Glass, although complicated, can be condensed. The Bachelors in the guise of nine Malic (Duchamp's own word) molds or uniforms emit a gas which passes along tubes and through the cone-like Sieves, becoming a liquid which must then be imagined to be directed upwards into the Bride's domain. The horizontal dividing line between the two panels is the area which Duchamp designated as the Bride's garments and the gilled cooler. This area cools the ardor of the Bachelors and they fail in their attempt to win the Bride. The Bride - the stick insect-like configuration at the left of the top panel -has meanwhile issued her commands, three-fold, in the form of a 'blossoming' semaphore at the very top of her panel. The purpose of the large Chocolate Grinder, to the right of the center of the Bachelors panel, is to occupy the Bachelors grinding their own chocolate and thus temper their disappointment.

He used glass as a support and, with its ut-ter receptive transparency, would provide its own background ready-made from its im-mediate environment. The Large Glass was to have a back and a front however. Because Duchamp worried about the impermanence of the oil medium, he conceived the notion of trapping oil pigment between the glass sup-port and a sealing layer of lead foil pressed on to the wet paint, to prevent oxidization. But, of course, an observer looking at The Large Glass from the side on which the paint and its cover of lead foil was applied would be unable to see the oil pigment. Also this process did not arrest deterioration since the lead of the foil reacted with the lead in the white paint, and the color of the Malic molds, for example, has darkened considerably.

To paint the glass, Duchamp fixed a full-scale working drawing to one side of it. Lead wire (in fact contemporary fuse wire) was then bent on the other side to mark the contours of the areas to be filled. The lead wire was stuck to the surface of the glass with mastic varnish.

The only shapes to look the same color from both sides are the seven Sieves, which de-scribe an arc in the center of the Bachelors panel. Since a sieve is permeable in real life, Duchamp decided that they should be perme-able in his artistic system too. But with the logic that was his art, the Sieves are repre-sented by a non-porous material. He chose dust. He mapped out the contours of the Sieves with lead wire, let the dust of three months settle within the area (the glass was lying flat to allow him to work on it), and then fixed the dust with varnish.

As the working notes reveal, Duchamp wanted to use different techniques in the Bride panel. He tried to fix the image of the Bride upon the glass by projecting a negative of a previous oil painting of the Bride onto an area prepared with photographic emulsion, but the result was unsatisfactory. He had to re-turn to the lead wire and foil process, but he introduced shading by tone and by hue in-stead of laying the paint on as a flat color field, which was the method of the Bachelor panel. The painting of the Bride and her 'blossoming' is quite sensual in its handling.

The three Oculist Witnesses, situated to the right of the Bachelor panel, were the last forms to be completed. This was an area of the work which was meant to dazzle the efforts of the Bachelors and to encourage the close inspec-tion by the viewer. Duchamp used technical and optical means to achieve this. The three shapes were copied from charts used by French opticians and Duchamp prepared care-ful perspectival drawings which were then traced on to a silvered area of the glass. The silver was then scraped away.

Finally the nine holes or Shots, at the ex-treme right of the Bride panel, were achieved by firing matches dipped in paint from a toy cannon aimed at the glass. Where the matches struck, a hole was then bored through. The Shots are the only attempt by the Bachelors to impose their mark upon the panel of the Bride.

Duchamp's Large Glass is a work of vital importance in twentieth-century art, with its immense technical, philosophical and iconographical implications.

After the initial shock of the complete transparency of the glass support, which in this situation allows a Max Ernst painting to be viewed at the same time, The Large Glass settles into some kind of solidity and normality with the forms dispersed over its bipartite structure. Although the support is transparent the work does have a front and a back because of Duchamp's unique technical procedures which only allow the pigment to show through on one side, the front. Renaissance artists who developed the system of one-point perspective thought of the picture planes as a transparent window and Duchamp here ironically takes this notion to its logical but unexpected conclusion. The lower section, the realm of the Bachelors, contains all sorts of illusory perspective constructions, whereas the upper section, The Bride, appears much flatter.

Seen from the back, The Large Glass appears to have an almost ghostly presence. This is due to the uneven silvery finish of the lead foil with which Richard Hamilton, following Duchamp's method, covered the oil paint in the hope of keeping it in a permanently stable state. The lead foil, when seen in conjunction with the aluminium frame, gives the work the air of being a strange machine, with a hermetic, slightly sinister purpose. In the Bachelor section, on the shape known as the necktie, Duchamp autographed and authenticated tilis version of The Large Glass, adding Richard Hamilton's name along with his own.

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