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Lot Essay
Jacqueline Matisse Monnier and the Association Marcel Duchamp have confirmed the authenticity of this work.
‘All of the functions of the museum, the social institution that transforms the primary language of art into the secondary language of culture, are minutely contained in Duchamp’s case: the valorisation of the object, the extraction from context and function, the preservation from decay and the dissemination of its abstracted meaning…[With it, Duchamp] also changes the role of the artist as creator to that of the collector and conserver, who is concerned with the placement and transport, the evaluation and institutionalisation, the display and maintenance of a work of art.’
Benjamin Buchloh
(B. Buchloh, 'The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers', in Museums by Artists, Toronto, 1983, p. 45).
La boîte en valise, Marcel Duchamp's infamous ‘Portable Museum’, is a compendium of miniature versions of his own oeuvre. The idea of creating La boîte preoccupied Duchamp for much of the 1930s – at the time when discussions surrounding institutionalisation of modern art as well as its role in the age of mechanical reproduction first came into focus. Functioning as an independent, original work of art, La boîte encapsulates the artist’s take on the value of a work of art, the concept of an art museum, as well as the nature of creating multiples. Originally consisting of sixty-eight miniature replicas of his most important works, each painstakingly reproduced and assembled into a briefcase-sized box, Duchamp continued to reproduce and remake La boîte in a series of differing versions until his death in 1968.
The quality and methodology behind creating the reproductions of La boîte was of utmost importance to Duchamp. The facsimiles of painted works for the box were created by the old-fashioned method of collotype printing, with color applied by hand through pochoirs. Before each work was reproduced, Duchamp made extensive notes on their precise colouring to ensure each reproduction was as close to the original as possible. This time-consuming, antiquated method of reproduction blurred the precarious boundaries between a ‘unique’ or ‘original’ work of art, the ‘multiple’, and the ‘reproduction’. Indeed, to add further ambiguity to what is to be considered as an ‘original’ work of art by Duchamp, the artist managed to certify some of his ‘reproductions’ as originals.
The first edition of La boîte en valise was already underway in 1938, however the outbreak of the Second World War delayed its completion. Duchamp continued to work on La boîte during the German Occupation, travelling across France to collect reproductions for the manufacture of the multiple editions of his portable museum. The idea of La boîte also functioning as a travelling exhibition of Duchamp’s oeuvre, self-contained in a suitcase of a travelling salesman, therefore was prompted by circumstances created by the war. The present edition, assembled for Mr. and Mrs. Albert Lewin in 1952, features the same type of rectangular, brown leather suitcase. For later editions of seventy-five reproductions, Duchamp abandoned the leather suitcase in favor of either linen or leather boxes.
La boîte en valise is a brilliant embodiment of Duchamp’s prolific career as an artist; however, much more than a mere collection of reproductions of the lifetime oeuvre of a single artist, it is a work whose importance as well as resonance extends far beyond of the lifetime of the artist himself. As Walter Conrad Arensberg commented when we first saw a finalised edition of La boîte in 1943: ‘It has been difficult to know exactly what to say of such an epitome of a life work … You have invented a new kind of biography. It is a kind of autobiography in a performance of marionettes. You have become the puppeteer of your past’ (W. C. Arensberg, quoted in C. Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, New York, 1996, p. 316).
‘All of the functions of the museum, the social institution that transforms the primary language of art into the secondary language of culture, are minutely contained in Duchamp’s case: the valorisation of the object, the extraction from context and function, the preservation from decay and the dissemination of its abstracted meaning…[With it, Duchamp] also changes the role of the artist as creator to that of the collector and conserver, who is concerned with the placement and transport, the evaluation and institutionalisation, the display and maintenance of a work of art.’
Benjamin Buchloh
(B. Buchloh, 'The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers', in Museums by Artists, Toronto, 1983, p. 45).
La boîte en valise, Marcel Duchamp's infamous ‘Portable Museum’, is a compendium of miniature versions of his own oeuvre. The idea of creating La boîte preoccupied Duchamp for much of the 1930s – at the time when discussions surrounding institutionalisation of modern art as well as its role in the age of mechanical reproduction first came into focus. Functioning as an independent, original work of art, La boîte encapsulates the artist’s take on the value of a work of art, the concept of an art museum, as well as the nature of creating multiples. Originally consisting of sixty-eight miniature replicas of his most important works, each painstakingly reproduced and assembled into a briefcase-sized box, Duchamp continued to reproduce and remake La boîte in a series of differing versions until his death in 1968.
The quality and methodology behind creating the reproductions of La boîte was of utmost importance to Duchamp. The facsimiles of painted works for the box were created by the old-fashioned method of collotype printing, with color applied by hand through pochoirs. Before each work was reproduced, Duchamp made extensive notes on their precise colouring to ensure each reproduction was as close to the original as possible. This time-consuming, antiquated method of reproduction blurred the precarious boundaries between a ‘unique’ or ‘original’ work of art, the ‘multiple’, and the ‘reproduction’. Indeed, to add further ambiguity to what is to be considered as an ‘original’ work of art by Duchamp, the artist managed to certify some of his ‘reproductions’ as originals.
The first edition of La boîte en valise was already underway in 1938, however the outbreak of the Second World War delayed its completion. Duchamp continued to work on La boîte during the German Occupation, travelling across France to collect reproductions for the manufacture of the multiple editions of his portable museum. The idea of La boîte also functioning as a travelling exhibition of Duchamp’s oeuvre, self-contained in a suitcase of a travelling salesman, therefore was prompted by circumstances created by the war. The present edition, assembled for Mr. and Mrs. Albert Lewin in 1952, features the same type of rectangular, brown leather suitcase. For later editions of seventy-five reproductions, Duchamp abandoned the leather suitcase in favor of either linen or leather boxes.
La boîte en valise is a brilliant embodiment of Duchamp’s prolific career as an artist; however, much more than a mere collection of reproductions of the lifetime oeuvre of a single artist, it is a work whose importance as well as resonance extends far beyond of the lifetime of the artist himself. As Walter Conrad Arensberg commented when we first saw a finalised edition of La boîte in 1943: ‘It has been difficult to know exactly what to say of such an epitome of a life work … You have invented a new kind of biography. It is a kind of autobiography in a performance of marionettes. You have become the puppeteer of your past’ (W. C. Arensberg, quoted in C. Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, New York, 1996, p. 316).