I have a unique relationship with The Large Glass – Marcel Duchamp’s eccentric masterpiece officially known as ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.’
Marcel Duchamp with The Large Glass.
‘La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même’ – The Large Glass, for short, consists of two panels of glass with added materials such as lead foil, fuse wire and dust. It is a little over 9 feet tall, almost 6 feet wide and combines abstract perspectives, random procedures and unsparing craftsmanship.
The notes Duchamp began writing for the work in 1912 – some on menus and hotel stationery – combine strict rules of physics with the creation of a mythology that would give the concept a spiritual as well as a scientific foundation. He began work on the piece in New York in 1915. It wasn’t complete until 1923 – laziness or precision? No one knows for sure.
The Large Glass was first exhibited in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum. When the panels cracked being transferred into storage, Duchamp rather liked the pattern of splintered glass and glued the pieces back together. It is in this state that ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,’ remains in the permanent collection of Duchamp’s art and Found Objects housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Duchamp’s glass sculpture was accompanied from 1935 by ‘The Green Box,’ a collection of ninety-four copies of loose, handwritten ‘notes’ designed to prevent viewers having a purely visual responses to the work. The notes, diagrams and sketches contain reflections and meditations directly or indirectly related to the randomness of chance.
In an interview with art historian Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp described The Large Glass as a ‘hilarious picture’ depicting ‘the erotic encounter between the ‘Bride’, in the upper panel, and her nine ‘Bachelors’ gathered below among an assortment of mechanical apparatus, including a chocolate grinder, a glider, sieves and moulds. Each of the ‘witnesses’ is, in his own way, trying to seduce the Bride, while she remains aloof in the upper panel. Cabanne in 1971 published his book ‘Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp.’
Hamilton’s The Large Glass
Duchamp sanctioned three replicas of The Large Glass, in 1961 for an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, another in 1966 for the Tate Gallery in London, the third for Komaba Museum at the University of Tokyo, on display since 1980.
Hamilton’s The Large Glass
Richard Hamilton and Marcel Duchamp had long been collaborators and friends in Cadaqués, the pretty Catalan village close to Spain’s most easterly point at Cap de Creus. It was Duchamp who suggested Richard acquire what is probably the oldest house in the village, the former dwelling of the clergy directly behind the church. The house is a solid structure with bare unplastered walls, a surprising amount of natural light and a hidden garden filled with pepper trees.
While playing chess at the Bar Melitón in the early sixties, the two artists decided it would be a good move for Hamilton to reproduce The Large Glass, which he did, following the processes and documentation in The Green Box. Writer Bryony Bery pointed out in the Tate Papers that, by recreating the work, Hamilton would link his history as an artist with Duchamp’s legacy. ‘It has even been suggested that he felt himself to be the rightful heir to Duchamp.’ And why not?
I never met Duchamp, but I did meet Richard on several occasions at the Galeria Cadaqués and once he came for drinks at my house in Cadaqués with his wife Rita Donagh. Which brings me to my own relationship with The Large Glass.
Channelling
In 1998, I began writing ‘Sex, Surrealism, Dalí and Me: The Memoirs of Carlos Lozano,’ the galerista, muse, companion and friend of Salvador Dalí. One of my neighbours had got permission to take down his house, dig out a basement to add two more rooms before rebuilding the house again. With everyone precious about their view, you can dig down, but you cannot build up. The result was a giant piling drill pounding into the volcanic rock eight hours a day.
When I shared my dilemma with my amiable Swiss friend Catherine Skira Sagnier, who lived close to the church, she called Richard Hamilton to ask him if I could use his house as an office. He kindly obliged and I set off each morning with my tape recorder and an electric typewriter; it would be the last book I wrote without a computer. I sat looking out at the pepper trees in the garden, the clean light washing the walls and tried to tune into the energy of Salvador Dalí and the intellect of Marcel Duchamp.
One day during a break, I climbed the stone stairs to Richard’s studio on the top floor and there on the bench, undergoing a minor repair, was ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even,’ with the note: 1915–23, by Richard Hamilton 1965–6, lower panel remade 1985.
It was like seeing a ghost, or a newborn baby, or the burning bush, or a vision, something sacred. Four such objects, each unique in its own way, existed in the world and I was alone with one of them. I went every day to see the Glass – to make sure it was still there – and felt as the book progressed that I wasn’t writing but channelling from the universe the words that became ‘Sex, Surrealism, Dalí and Me.’
oOo
While you are here, Sex, Surrealism, Dalí and Me, the Memoirs of Carlos Lozano, is FREE on Amazon Prime UK, US, Spain, etc.
Print and audible versions are also available.
Cliff.I have a Friend in New York who was a curator at MOMA One time when visiting her, I had to wait in the middle of a gallery whilst they prepared for a Picasso show and there ,on a white trestle table was “the fur cup” .Having learned in art history lessons at Leeds that it was made of ridiculous material to drink out of, I picked it up. To my horror it was a crockery cup and saucer with fur stuck onto it. So much for art history!!
Well, obviously, you didn’t “learn” anything! Méret Oppenheim’s piece was exactly as described in its title:
Le Déjeuner en fourrure. You need to ask for your money back.
One of the most poetic self promotions I have ever read. Bravo!
Fascinating tale Cliff – I am jealous! I loved Russell Harty’s film “Hello Dali”. (The sequel profile was “Thoroughly Modern Melly” the final film “Mahler he’s making eyes at me” was tragically never made. We visited the Dali house last year but missed you somehow. I too often visit the National gallery to check that my favourites have survived the night. Sorry to have missed the CAC gatherings – will do better in the summer. If you are ever driving to Cadaques do call and see us in the Lot. I suppose the artists I would most like to have met is pianist Glenn Gould, who seemed charmingly eccentric and slightly alarming – as I am sure Dali was.
‘A copy remains a copy’.- so said Duchamp in 1957 about later versions of The Large Glass – that copies were not meant to replace originals, they existed in their own right. Indeed, Hamilton acknowledged that he himself preferred the term reconstruction as opposed to copy. In fact, when Hamilton was working on his own Large Glass he realised how interested Duchamp was in the very idea of replication, revealing that when the artist came to London to sign his own reconstruction, he thought it would be nice to have three versions. By the 1990s there were at least 5 known copies around the world by other artists.
This is art imitating art because as we have come to realise, art breeds new ideas, artists are inspired by each other’s work, borrow use and bastardise, it’s all part of the process. As Picasso said, “good artists copy, great artists steal” – in Hamilton’s case, the idea of the Large Glass was an all consuming act of both – bringing into mind the very act of creating art in the first place – an individual’s interpretation of what they see and feel and how they express it. Art is nothing but the channelling of thought and energy, and if the artwork encapsulates that very idea, then the act of reconstructing that notion is a novel one – especially in the 20th century when mass consumer culture has become a grand testament to that – how many different tubes of toothpaste do you need to choose from, or types of cars – the list is endless.
If you think back to the original work, what is Duchamp asking the viewer to look at? It’s like the sort of window you’d see in an office block only its been vandalised. What is through that window? A bride and her would-be suitor’s – are you looking into your own soul or maybe wondering what you are seeing isn’t just an elaborate joke – someone having fun at your expense – for it brings to mind the very question of art. I mean, it’s a not exactly a meticulously beautiful picture hanging on a wall! Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass” springs to mind, so does the Biblical quote from the Corinthians’ “‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Think what you may…
For you Clifford, to open the door onto this world must have come as a rude awakening if not a somewhat surreal moment where time stood still – but rather than quickly shut it out, you let the discovery unfold in your consciousness that fortunately you were able to channel into your own art – writing. On the journey of life, defining moments and “glimpses of the sacred” are rare and important to share. I for one, was not familiar with the relationship between the two artists. You’re lucky to have Cadaqués as such an artistic playground to be a part of.
Often, I find that the story behind an artwork more interesting than the actual art- in this case, the myth becomes part of the legend – or maybe I’m thinking of the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ‘When legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
What I find most interesting amongst so many very vivid and very interesting elements to this piece is when the Large Glass panels glass cracked, Duchamp preferred the chaos of the random breaks over the precision of his planning and execution. A writer’s medium is the structure of words and their literal, symbolic, and interpretive meanings. A writer can write as simply or with as much complexity as he/she/them/their/they cares to write their story. Yet more often than not, the best way is the simplest. I would sum up the moral of the cracks in the panels of the Large Glass in just two words. ‘Shit Happens.’ And so it does, doesn’t it?