SMUGGLING DUCHAMP OUT OF SPAIN

Smuggling Duchamp out of Spain was never going to be easy under the stony gaze of the Guardia Civil and one can only assume that the 20^th century’s most enigmatic artist would have enjoyed the ride.

Tudor Davies from Christie’s unfolds the Boîte-en-valise.

Marcel Duchamp died on 2 October 1968, briefly after an exhibition of his work at Galería Cadaqués in Spain. The show was not to sell his work, so much as to present it in the Costa Brava village where he had spent summers for the last twenty years of his life. The art was then due to be returned to France before being shipped to different museums around the world.

In Cadaqués, Duchamp elaborated his ideas while staring out to sea from his small terrace above a boat store connected to the floor above – coincidentally – by a spiral staircase. He would smoke a cigar and wander at sunset to the Bar Melitón to play chess with the likes of Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Richard Hamilton, John Cage. 

When Duchamp died, returning his collection to his wife, Teeny, in Villiers-sous-Grez, near Paris, was complicated because there’s nothing bureaucracy likes more than needless complications. Galarista Franco Bombelli decided that the best way was to pack everything in his car and drive to France. He called on the assistance of Eduardo Arranz-Bravo – a young dynamic painter brimming with self-confidence and built like a conquistador.  

The artwork consisted of some original sketches, obscure drawings of coffee mills and an example of the ‘La Boîte-en-valise,’ a mixed media assembly of replicas and reproductions of Duchamp’s most famous works including a miniature ‘Fountain,’ the porcelain urinal signed R Mutt, the mystical sculpture, ‘The Large Glass,’ and the Cubist masterpiece ‘Nude Descending a Staircase No 2.’ The 79 scaled down pieces were arranged inside a box that in turn fit into a leather valise. ‘The box is wonderfully evocative of Duchamp’s conceptual practice and takes on the nature and comparative value of art,’ Tudor Davies commented on the website of Christie’s, the auction house. ‘It’s full of ambiguity, which blurs the line between original and reproduction, and handmade versus Readymade.’

This concept had occupied Duchamp between 1935 and 1941 and reflected his continued deliberation over what constitutes an original idea and what is essentially derivative. With ‘La Boîte-en-valise,’ he ingeniously curated a retrospective of his best-known pieces in a new work of art. 

In order to source the materials necessary to make each box in the first series, Duchamp posed as a cheese merchant and travelled through Nazi-occupied France with a German laisser-passer permit. He carried a salesman’s display case with cheese samples hiding secret compartments for his mini-artworks. It is hard to imagine how the Germans might have reacted had the artifice been discovered and, in his own quiet way, his journey about the country disguised in a beret and white apron was, in itself, a defiant act of conceptual art.  

‘Boîte-en-valise,’ was first shown in 1936 and reproduced in seven editions with a total of 300 boxes. The first 20 of the first series were given by Duchamp as gifts to friends and patrons. Each subsequent series  was produced commercially.

Duchamp in the Street

Arranz-Bravo secured the work in Bombelli’s car and they set off over the winding road from Cadaqués. They were stopped at the border at La Jonquera by the Guardia Civil, two men with heavy moustaches, black leather tricornios, red eyes and sceptical expressions. Bombelli, born in Italy, was educated in Switzerland and had a Swiss eye for detail and precision. He showed a list of the artworks to the Guardia Civil, but they insisted on removing all the objects from the car.

Eduardo flexed his muscles and laid everything out in the street. The Guardia with the reddest eyes and heaviest moustache picked up a drawing. He didn’t seem particularly impressed.

‘Who is the artist?’ he asked.

‘Marcel Duchamp,’ Bombelli replied and Arranz-Bravo was aware that the officer had no idea who the iconoclastic Frenchman was.

‘So, what is this worth?’ the guard added and Arranz-Bravo stepped forward.

‘If it had a pretty frame it would have some value,’ he explained. ‘As it is,’ he shrugged, ‘it is worthless.’

‘And this?’

He pointed at the celebrated ‘La Boîte-en-valise.’

Arranz-Bravo threw up his big shoulders. ‘It is like a child’s toy. It’s not worth anything.’

The Guardia Civil waved them through and Teeny was waiting for them in the other side of the frontier. She loved the story of smuggling Duchamp out of Spain. It was so Duchampian. 

An example of ‘La Boîte-en-valise,’ signed by Rrose Sélavy – the playful female pseudonym used by Duchamp – is valued today, according to Christie’s, at more than $2 million.

Some of the details from Smuggling Duchamp out of Spain are courtesy of ‘El radar americano,’ by Vicenç Altaió, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2024.