Born into an artistic family in northern France in 1889, Suzanne Duchamp was exposed early in life to key movements of the early 20th-century avant-garde, including Cubism and Dada. But she also developed her own highly individual painterly practice. A new exhibition gives Duchamp, often caught in the shadow of her brothers Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon, her own story. “Suzanne Duchamp: Retrospective,” recently on view at Kunsthaus Zurich and headed to Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, continues a stellar trend of monographic shows dedicated to underrepresented female artists.
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Duchamp’s Dada work will be the main draw for most visitors. The absurdist movement began in Zurich but spread rapidly in a Europe rocked by the horrors of WWI, where reason and order seemed no longer to apply. Duchamp participated in the Paris iteration, and her contributions lean in to the freedoms the movement afforded artists. Dada artists led the charge away from the pretensions of fine art and embraced collage, photomontage, bricolage, and other techniques that draw on the materials of everyday life. For Duchamp, these materials were especially blingy: gold paint, silver tinfoil, brass clock gears, and glass beads lend a proto-Art Deco quality to her machinic diagrams. Radiation of Two Solitary Separates Apart (1916–20) takes the hard-edged form of a gilded grid as a field on which to map relationships between geometric shapes. The two shapes of the title, rendered three dimensional with beads and bits of plastic, are both linked and separated by looped thread, creating a push-pull effect that is subtly alleviated by a thin, wavering purple line floating off to the right.
Suzanne Duchamp: Radiation de deux seuls éloignés, 1916–1920.
©Suzanne Duchamp/ProLitteris, Zurich
For a new commission appearing in the exhibition’s catalog, painter Amy Sillman took inspiration from such dynamics of form to generate her own digital drawings, combining gestural shapes with textual overlays to emphasize how Duchamp’s abstract mark-making was bound to deeply human sentiments including love, joy, and glory. Such sentiments were far from evident in the postwar period in which Duchamp was working, and in other work she asks pointed questions about humanity’s place in an industrial world, including drawings titled Factory of My Thoughts (1920) and Workshop of Joy (1920). Making ample use of the blank space of the page, Duchamp floats stereotypically modernist architectural forms against the titular textual allusions to thought and feeling. While these might read as ironic, pointing to the loss of self in the face of modern industry, Duchamp specifically called her Dada period her turn to “subjective” painting, suggesting she found a way of inserting herself into this burgeoning artistic language.
Despite Dada’s emphasis on mixed media, painting held particular sway for Duchamp as an endlessly malleable mode of representation. We see this most clearly in Marcel’s Unhappy Readymade (1920). When Duchamp married fellow artist Jean Crotti, her brother Marcel gifted the newlyweds a “readymade.” He provided instructions to purchase a geometry textbook and hang it by string on their balcony, leaving the wind to rifle through its pages. Although the wind eventually destroyed the work, a photograph survives, and Duchamp transformed this picture into an oil painting. A crumple of ice-blue paper sits delicately against the rigid metal bars of the balcony. Painted bits of string remind the viewer of the precarity of the original gesture, the representation more enduring than the object itself. What does it mean to paint a readymade, a work of art that deliberately turns against the artisanal labor of painting? If nothing else, it shows Duchamp was unwilling to live in her brother’s shadow, reappropriating his work for her own ends.
A number of Duchamp’s Dada works, including Radiation of Two Solitary Separates Apart, evoke solitude. Despite a lively circle of artist friends and collaborators including Crotti and Francis Picabia, in 1922 she returned to a more solitary practice of representational painting. In a style that could be described as “naive” for its directness, distorted perspective, and play with scale, she repopulated her artistic world with musicians, brides, wanderers, children, and even a lush garden of Eden in which Eve takes center stage, Adam posed bashfully behind her. Executed in bold colors and simple strokes, the paintings perpetuate the playfulness of Dada without its wry and often cold affect. Critique—including the Dadaists’ lampooning of the old guard—can take you only so far. Duchamp’s later oeuvre suggests that once you’ve finished tearing something down, you need to make something for yourself. The show ends with a sketch onto which Duchamp inscribed a maxim: “Work and… smile!”
