Marcel Duchamp- the Afternoon Interviews by Calvin Tomkins

Author:Calvin Tomkins [Tomkins, Calvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936440399
Publisher: Badlands Unlimited
Published: 2013-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

III

CT: Motion is an important element in your work. How did you first get hold of the idea? Did it come from the Futurists?

MD: Well, it came at the same time, sure, but you see I never was aware of the existence of the Futurists in Paris at that time. They were in Italy. I was very young, and even with the French painters of my generation, I hardly knew them. In 1910, I was twenty-three, and I had done some drawings for the illustrated papers Le Rire and Le Courrier français , to make a few pennies, because I did not know what I wanted to do at that time. You do not know at twenty what you are going to do at forty. Of course at the age of fifteen I did some landscapes at the country place where I was with my father and mother. But the idea of movement, I don’t know how it came. Somehow it arrived in 1911, when I did that portrait of a woman—it’s five figures of the same woman, repeated like a bouquet.

CT: I know that work.

MD: Three are the same woman dressed, with a hat, and the two others are naked. I never saw the woman closer than ten meters, but I met her on the Avenue de Neuilly, I was interested in her walking her dog or something, and I began that portrait. That was the first picture of the expression of the idea of motion. But it was probably subconscious more than actually a program.

[ silence ]

After that I did some chess players also. It was more or less the repetition of the profile of my two brothers, who were chess players. It was more a technical study, in the sense that I painted by gaslight, which was an experiment for me. Instead of painting by daylight or sunlight, I wanted to do it by gaslight. It is a greenish light, meaning that when you look at the same painting by daylight the next morning, you see a difference in grayish tones, the whole thing is subdued, it’s no more the violence of the Fauve. And it was my first contribution, more or less, to Cubism, in 1911.

CT: Then came the Sad Young Man on a Train?

MD: Yes. That was October 1911 or November ’11. It was on the occasion of a train trip from Paris to my family in Rouen. And of course the sad young man on the train was myself. There isn’t much of the young man, there isn’t much of sadness, and there isn’t much of anything in that painting, except a Cubist-influenced painting. My interpretation of Cubism was sort of a repetition of parallelism of some kind, of schematic lines without any regard for anatomy or perspective in a way. A parallelism of lines describes movement in a way, by repetition of the different positions of the person. That was the first, and after that came the first studies for the Nude Descending a Stair at the end of 1911.

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