Duchamp's Pipe by Celia Rabinovitch

Author:Celia Rabinovitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623173579
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2019-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

You forget

I’m from the tropics (…)4

André Breton was fascinated by the indigenous Brazilian myth and culture Martins bound into her art, which inspired him to delve into archaic or traditional mythologies for his Surrealist themes in the 1940s. Although at the time Breton acknowledged Martins’s influence, that influence was ultimately subsumed into Surrealism’s history, leaving her oeuvre obscured by neglect,5 possibly in part because she returned to her homeland of Brazil in 1951. Known as “Maria” there, she was only recently rediscovered as an icon of Surrealism and feminism; previously her art was considered too figurative and not abstract enough to be deemed “modern.”

Much has been made of Duchamp’s intense desire for Maria. With her, the otherwise noncommittal Marcel experienced the Latinate tradition of courtly love, where the troubadour longs for a beautiful, elusive woman who is tied to another. Though they had a fiery affair, she also maintained her freedom, financially secure within an open marriage. This afforded Duchamp the liberty to pursue his art untrammeled by the necessities of married life, where familiarity might reduce its passion. As she became his romantic focus, she always kept enough distance to have her own freedom and keep him longing for her. As Barbara Probst Solomon observes:

Maria excited Duchamp, and since she was the one in perpetual flight, she was TAKEN. She was tantalizingly out of reach, always either returning to her husband and daughter in Washington, or involved with a frenetic social life, and palling around with Surrealists [who] had been her friends before she met Duchamp. This time the tables were turned. What for Martins had been an interlude, which was the way Duchamp had treated his previous affairs with women, became for Duchamp his first profound experience with love and rejection.6

During this period Mary Reynolds was still a large part of Duchamp’s life. Mary had arrived in New York on January 6, 1943—ill from an injury sustained during her long-postponed attempts to escape Nazi-occupied France—not long before Duchamp first met Maria Martins. Marcel and Mary lived together intermittently in New York, but Mary returned to Paris in the fall of 1945, only six weeks after the end of the War. And though Marcel joined her in Paris in 1946, he later returned to New York. Marcel visited Mary in Paris one last time in 1950, when Mary was ill with cancer; she died at the end of September, with Marcel at her side. Afterward, Marcel worked devotedly with her brother until 1956, to archive her work for the Art Institute of Chicago, where it resides today as the Mary Reynolds Collection. Duchamp designed the bookplate for that collection, a minimalist line drawing of Mary’s profile.7

The departures continued. In 1951, Maria returned to Brazil to be with her recently retired husband and family—a move that left Duchamp devastated. A few lines from a letter to her in November of that year are particularly telling: “And what about us? What is to become of us, far apart, forever far apart. I can’t help constantly thinking of the stupid nonsense that keeps us separated.

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