MARCEL DUCHAMP Morceaux choisis d'après Ingres, I.
Etching and aquatint on Japon nacré, 1967. 347x235 mm; 13 3/4x9 1/4 inches, full margins. Schwarz's state a (of c). The deluxe edition of 30 on Japon nacré, aside from the edition of 150. Signed and numbered 23/30 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Giorgio Upiglio, Milan. Published by Arturo Schwarz, Milan. From The Large Glass and Related Works. A very good impression.
According to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, where there is a copy of the complete The Large Glass and Related Works, "Following on from the replicas of the readymades, Duchamp [1887-1968] and gallerist Arturo Schwarz came up with the idea of making Duchamp's key work Le Grand Verre, 1915-23 (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) accessible to a wider public, too, by repeating a series of etchings in a limited edition. In 1964 and 1965, Duchamp made etchings of seven separate passages from Le Grand Verre and an etching of the work as a whole. There is also one etching, The Large Glass Completed, in which the passages in red were added from the notes that were not included in 1923, when Duchamp signed the work as unfinished. In addition to the nine etchings, 144 notes were included in facsimile, which referred to the planning and production of the work, together with an English translation. These notes were previously published in La boîte verte and La boîte blanche. The whole was published in 1967 as loose-leaf illustrations in Schwarz's book titled The Large Glass and Related Works (Vol. I) in an edition of 150. The book and the etchings are contained in an acrylic glass slip-case with a colour reproduction of Le Grand Verre . . . A second volume appeared a year later, likewise in an edition of 150, in which Schwarz examined the formal and psychological starting points of Duchamp's early work. Duchamp illustrated this publication with nine etchings, The Lovers, in which love and eroticism were key--a returning theme in his oeuvre. The linen slip-cover is signed three times by Rose Sélavy [Duchamp's feminine alter-ego, a pun on the French phrase, 'Eros, c'est la vie']. Most of the prints consist of references to key works from art history that Duchamp satirized mischievously. In Auguste Rodin's The Kiss,1889, for example, he moved the man's hand from the woman's thigh and stuck it between her legs. He also combined two works, [in the current etching] as in the case of Oedipus and the Sphinx,1808, and the Turkish Bath, 1862, both paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, in which Oedipus's pointing hand encircles a breast of a woman from the Turkish Bath. For the etching after the painting Adam and Eve, 1533, by Lucas Cranach he used a Man Ray photograph of Ciné Sketch, the performance on December 31, 1924 in which Duchamp adopted the pose of Adam alongside the likewise nude model Bronja Perlmutter during the interval of Francis Picabia's Surrealist ballet Relâche." Schwarz 649.
