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拍品專文
Jacqueline Matisse Monnier has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.
La boîte, Duchamp's "Portable Museum", was a portable compendium "of approximately all the things I produced" that preoccupied Duchamp for much of the 1930s and which he continued to reproduce in a series of differing versions until his death in 1968. Consisting of sixty-eight miniature replicas of his most important works, all painstakingly reproduced and carefully assembled into a briefcase-sized box, La boîte expresses a typically whimsical and Duchampian take on the nature and comparative value of the work of art, the museum and the multiple all rolled into one.
Duchamp's methods in the reproduction of his artworks for the box were painstakingly slow and old fashioned. For example, in the case of the painted works, rather than use the speedy reproduction techniques that were available, he deliberately opted for an elaborate and obsolescent method; collotype printing, with colouring applied by hand through stencils (pochoirs). By deliberately using highly time-consuming techniques Duchamp was intentionally blurring the boundaries between the unique art object and the multiple.
The construction of the case, its folding components and the precise nature of the reproduction of each of the sixty-nine elements (of the original series) took him over five years. The first edition was prepared in 1938 but was not yet complete when war broke out. Duchamp continued to work on it under the Occupation and then took it to the United States with him after having smuggled it out in various sections during the course of several trips in and out of occupied France in the guise of a cheese merchant. It was not until his arrival in New York in 1941 that he was able to complete the first edition known as "La boîte en valise". Subsequent editions (containing sixty-eight items), such as this version which belongs to series D and assembled in 1961, were referred to by Duchamp as simply "La boîte" and titled "De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (La boîte)". It surely did not escape Duchamp that the word "Valise" is also an anagram of "Selavi".
La boîte, Duchamp's "Portable Museum", was a portable compendium "of approximately all the things I produced" that preoccupied Duchamp for much of the 1930s and which he continued to reproduce in a series of differing versions until his death in 1968. Consisting of sixty-eight miniature replicas of his most important works, all painstakingly reproduced and carefully assembled into a briefcase-sized box, La boîte expresses a typically whimsical and Duchampian take on the nature and comparative value of the work of art, the museum and the multiple all rolled into one.
Duchamp's methods in the reproduction of his artworks for the box were painstakingly slow and old fashioned. For example, in the case of the painted works, rather than use the speedy reproduction techniques that were available, he deliberately opted for an elaborate and obsolescent method; collotype printing, with colouring applied by hand through stencils (pochoirs). By deliberately using highly time-consuming techniques Duchamp was intentionally blurring the boundaries between the unique art object and the multiple.
The construction of the case, its folding components and the precise nature of the reproduction of each of the sixty-nine elements (of the original series) took him over five years. The first edition was prepared in 1938 but was not yet complete when war broke out. Duchamp continued to work on it under the Occupation and then took it to the United States with him after having smuggled it out in various sections during the course of several trips in and out of occupied France in the guise of a cheese merchant. It was not until his arrival in New York in 1941 that he was able to complete the first edition known as "La boîte en valise". Subsequent editions (containing sixty-eight items), such as this version which belongs to series D and assembled in 1961, were referred to by Duchamp as simply "La boîte" and titled "De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (La boîte)". It surely did not escape Duchamp that the word "Valise" is also an anagram of "Selavi".