Act, descending a flight of stairs No. 2

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Act, descending a flight of stairs No. 2
Marcel Duchamp , 1912
Oil on canvas
147 x 89.2 cm
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Template: Infobox painting / maintenance / museum

Nude, descending a flight of stairs no. 2 ( French Nu descendant un escalier no. 2 ) is the title of a painting by Marcel Duchamp from 1912. The picture is considered a key work of classical modernism and is one of the most famous works of art of the 20th century . When it was presented at the Paris Salon des Indépendants , it was rejected by the Salon Cubists and, during its exhibition at the Armory Show in New York in 1913, in the wake of a scandal that attracted the attention of the press, it was showered with abuse. It is now in the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art ,Philadelphia .

description

The oil painting on canvas with the dimensions 147 × 89.2 cm shows in portrait format an apparently abstract nude in ocher and brown tones, whereby the movement of the figure is shown as single images merging into one another . The “body parts” are abstracted as nested, conical and cylindrical elements that reveal a rhythm. Darker outline lines limit the contours and at the same time serve as lines of movement that underline the dynamism of the figure. Circular arcs accentuated with dotted lines indicate a kind of "hip swing". The act seems to move counter-clockwise from the upper left to the lower right edge of the picture, whereby the color gradient, reversed according to the apparently frozen sequence, becomes darker or more transparent from bottom right to top left in order to fade the apparently temporal " to simulate older “sections. At the edges of the picture stairs are indicated in darker colors; the steps are shown decreasing towards the background, but - like the entire work - do not follow any particular perspective principle. The middle part of the picture is lighter and darkens towards the edges. The overall warm, monochrome color palette ranges from light yellow to ocher to dark, almost black tones. The colors are applied glazed . At the bottom left of the picture, Duchamp placed the title of the work in block letters NU DESCENDANT UN ESCALIER, which does not seem to have any connection with the illustration, because whether this act is actually a human body remains open.

background

Étienne-Jules Marey : Walking person , 1890/91
Eadweard Muybridge : Woman Walking Downstairs from The Human Figure in Motion , around 1887

The painting combines elements of Cubism and Futurism and is influenced by the still young medium of film , by photographic movement studies and by chronophotography , with which Thomas Eakins , Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge , among others , experimented. The work of the French researcher Marey, such as the representation of fencing people or a galloping horse, served as inspiration. Also worth mentioning are Muybridge's series photography Woman Walking Downstairs from his series The Human Figure in Motion , published in 1887, and the movement study of a naked man, sketched after a chronophotograph by Albert Londe . In contrast to Futurism, which dealt with the pure mapping of motion sequences, the “static movement”, Duchamp wanted to reproduce “the visual impression of the idea of ​​movement”; it was not important to him “whether it was a real person who descends a real staircase, acts or not. ”In his treatise The Creative Act of 1957 he stated:

"Cette version définitive du Nu descendant un escalier , peinte en janvier 1912, fut la convergence dans mon esprit de divers intérêts, dont le cinéma, encore en enfance, et la séparation des positions statiques dans les chronophotographies de Marey en France, d'Eakins et Muybridge en America. Peint, comme il l'est, en sévères couleurs bois, le nu anatomique n'existe pas, ou du moins, ne peut pas être vu, car je renonçai complètement à l'apparence naturaliste d'un nu, ne conservant que ces quelques vingt différentes positions statiques dans l'acte successif de la descente. »

“This final version of the act, descending a flight of stairs , painted in January 1912, resulted from the convergence of various interests in my mind, including the still in its infancy film and the separation of the static positions in the chronophotographs of Marey in France, from Eakins and Muybridge in America. Painted in strict wood colors, it does not exist as an anatomical act or at least cannot be seen as such, because I completely renounced the naturalistic appearance of a naked body and only kept these twenty different static positions in the successive act of descent. "

story

After Duchamp had initially dealt with Impressionist forms of expression, he turned to Cubism in 1911, from which he derived his own style, which he called "elementary parallelism". Well-known works from that year are Jeune homme et jeune fille dans le printemps (Young Man and Girl in Spring)  , Portrait de joueurs d'échecs (The Chess Players)  , Dulcinée (Dulcinea) , the painting Nu (esquisse), jeune from December 1911 homme triste dans un train (act (study), sad youth on the train)  , which Duchamp defined as a self-portrait and which already dictates the manner of the work discussed here, as well as the act, descending stairs No. 1  , as the first, rather figurative Version.

Rejection by the Cubists

In the following month, in January 1912, the act, descending stairs No. 2 , was created, which Duchamp submitted to the Paris Salon des Indépendants for the exhibition from March 20 to May 16, 1912. The artists of the cubist Puteaux group , above all Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger , took Duchamp's work as a mockery of their style, already assessed the title as an affront and came to the “conclusion that the image of the youngest Duchamp brother was the concern of the sensible Cubism would be detrimental. ”On the day the exhibition opened, Duchamp was informed by his brothers Jacques and Raymond that the jury found the work“ a bit off ”and therefore rejected it, and asked whether he“ would not at least change the title of the picture could". When the two conveyed the message to their brother in his studio in Neuilly , they wore mourning clothes. Marcel Duchamp, on the other hand, reacted relatively calmly: He got into a taxi, drove to the exhibition, picked up his picture and then kept his distance from the Cubists: "I saw that afterwards I would never be too interested in groups." a month later he exhibited the nude at a Cubist exhibition in Barcelona , where the picture hardly attracted any attention, and in the autumn of that year he showed it again at a show by the Section d'Or in the Paris Autumn Salon , where it also received little attention.

The Armory Show

Armory Show Showroom, New York City, 1913
JF Griswold's cartoon The Rude Descending the Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway) appeared on the front cover of the Evening Sun on March 20, 1913

The work first came into the focus of public interest in 1913, when Duchamp took part in the Armory Show , the first comprehensive international exhibition of modern art in New York . The exhibition, from 17 February to 15 March 1913 in a disused armory of the National Guard took place, turned into a public scandal, and especially Duchamp's painting was considered by art critics and audiences with abuse. While the exhibition visitors stood in line in front of the unusual work and puzzled over what could be shown there, the newspapers outdid each other with derogatory superlatives. Julian Street, an essayist and art critic for the New York Times , spoke of an "explosion in a brick factory"; his colleague Peyton Boswell of the New York Herald turned it into a "cyclone in a shingle factory"; a cartoon by Evening Sun cartoonist JF Griswold, "who saw New York through the eyes of a cubist," caused a commotion on the subway as The Rude Descending the Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway) . A prize puzzle to decipher the work has been announced. Mocking poems were written and US President Theodore Roosevelt , who visited the exhibition and who had expressed his general rejection of Cubism in an article, finally compared the work "with the Navajo carpet in his bathroom", preferring the carpet. The public discussion about the European avant-garde sparked by the exhibition was finally summed up by John Nilsen Laurvik in his polemical essay Is it Art? together.

Even the avant-garde present , consisting predominantly of cubists and futurists, felt themselves snubbed by this “act of distorted forms”. For Marcel Duchamp and his brothers, who were also participating, the exhibition was a great artistic success, although the works did not achieve any special prices: Whether the polemics, the act of descending a staircase No. 2 soon became one of the most famous paintings of modern times, however, it sold for just $ 324.

Similar compositions

In the year the nude was created, Duchamp experimented with similar compositions, for example the painting The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes from 1912, which already cites the previous work in the title, also shows a dynamic arrangement. In the square painting, however, two statically appearing figures made of cylindrical stacks are interrupted by a “flow” of merging geometric shapes. Again, a chronological sequence seems to be recorded, but not so clearly "photographically" as before in the act. Duchamp also showed The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes on the Armory Show. In the painting Dulcinée (Dulcinea) , which was created in September 1911, Duchamp for the first time demonstrably dealt with the problem of representation of movement as a central pictorial theme.

"Tired of 'retinal art'"

Soon afterwards, however, Duchamp felt “tired of 'retinal art'” and began the programmatic production of object art , such as the bottle dryer ( Egouttoir / Portes-bouteilles ) from 1914 bought in a Paris department store, painted over with white paint and finally signed . his first “ ready-made ”.

In 1916 in New York Duchamp made   another version of the nude, descending stairs No. 3 , which consists of a photograph edited with pencil, chalk, black ink, pastel and opaque watercolors. Like its two predecessors, this work is also in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1918 Duchamp finally painted his last painting on canvas, with the programmatic and enigmatic title Tu m ' , Tu m'embetes or Tu m' emmerdes (“You bored me” or “You can do me”), as it were a summary of his previous artistic activity.

Provenance

While act, descending a staircase No. 2 as part of the Armory Show in 1913, was also shown in Boston and Chicago , the lawyer and art dealer Frederic C. Torrey from San Francisco was able to prevail against Walter Arensberg's bid and purchase the painting. Torrey had the painting hanging in his private home in Berkeley , California. After having had a full-size color copy of the work made, he sold it in 1919 to the art collectors Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, who were friends with Duchamp . In 1954, the painting was transferred to the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from their estate, along with a true-to-photo copy that Duchamp himself had made for the Arensbergs. There it is shown in a permanent exhibition together with the copy and the preliminary studies by Duchamp, as well as Act No. 1 and the later Act No. 3 .

aftermath

In 1960 Duchamp designed a shop window for the Bamberger department store in Newark , New Jersey , which he equipped with five armless, bare mannequins , which, placed on steps next to one another, gave the impression that they were descending a flight of stairs. A version of the painting Nude, descending a staircase, hung next to the top doll. Duchamp quoted himself here and at the same time alluded to the interrelationship between abstract and representational art. In his reflections on the Creative Act of 1957, Duchamp attributed the same importance to the viewer as to the artist and transferred this relationship to the buyer and the window designer.

The Catalan artist Joan Miró created a charcoal drawing in 1937 with the title Naked Woman, going up a flight of stairs   , thereby reversing the walking direction of the figure.

The painter Gerhard Richter rezipierte Duchamp's masterpiece several times: for example, in the 1965 incurred, photorealistic -scale oil paintings woman walking down the stairs (Woman Descending the Staircase)   and the following year with Ema (Nude on a Staircase) . Allegedly, Richter turned in the works “against Duchamp's icon of art history” because he had declared painting to be dead. Instead of a cubist nesting, Richter worked with blurring . Richter's nude model from 1966 is his first wife Marianne Eufinger, called Ema, who was pregnant at the time. The painting is in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne .

The artist Michael Somoroff reflected on Richter's work and produced   various interpretations of Duchamp's nudes with the mixed-media screen printing series Query from 2004.

In 1983 the artist Wolf Vostell created a cycle of paintings entitled Nude, crawling down and up the stairs .

Mathias Spahlinger , a representative of musique concrète , composed an act in 1997 , descending a staircase for bass clarinet , trombone and orchestra . Spahlinger transferred Duchamp's concept of the sequence of moments, speed and dynamics to the music in order to make the processes of time acoustically "visible". He said: "pitches in continuous motion, glissandos . So, and their representation in stages is the real subject of the piece [...] my main interest is the simultaneity (whatever that may be here)" The play was during the Donaueschingen Festival 1998 listed.

literature

  • Marcel Duchamp: The creative act. Duchampagne brut. 2nd Edition. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-89401-198-X . (= Small library for hand and head; Volume 32) (German translation from French by Serge Stauffer ; French original edition: 1957)
  • Octavio Paz : naked apparition. The work of Marcel Duchamp. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-38333-7 . (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch; No. 1833) (German translation from Spanish by Rudolf Wittkopf ; original title: Apariencia desnuda )
  • Calvin Tomkins : Marcel Duchamp. A biography . Hanser, Munich et al. 1999, ISBN 3-446-19669-2 . (German translation from the American by Jörg Trobitius; original title: Duchamp )
  • Marcel Duchamp: Entretiens avec Pierre Cabanne. 4th edition. Éditions Sables / Allias, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-84485-894-8 ( online )

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ^ Uli Schuster: Marcel Duchamp: Nu descendant un escalier - image analysis. 2008, accessed March 1, 2009 .
  2. ↑ Sherin Hamed: The Invisible Color - The use and function of titles in the early work of Marcel Duchamp. (PDF; 830 kB) p. 24 , accessed on March 1, 2009 .
  3. ^ Marcel Duchamp: Entretiens avec Pierre Cabanne . 4th edition. Éditions Sables / Allias, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-84485-894-8 , pp. 34 .
  4. ^ Cécile Debray (ed.): Marcel Duchamp. La peinture, même . Center national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-84426-656-9 , p. 170 .
  5. ^ Eadweard Muybridge, Robert Taft: The Human Figure in Motion ; published by Courier Dover Publications, New York 1955, ISBN 0-486-20204-6 Google Book
  6. ↑ Michel Frizot: Speed ​​in Photography. In: New History of Photography. Könemann, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-8290-1327-2 , p. 251.
  7. ↑ Nu descendant un escalier. In: Michel Sanouillet: Duchamp du signe - Écrits de Marcel Duchamp réunis et présentés par Michel Sanouillet, p. 151. zumbazone - Marcel Duchamp en français sur le web, accessed on April 21, 2009 (French).
  8. ↑ A different translation of the quote can be found in Hermann Korte: “This final version of the act, descending a flight of stairs , painted in January 1912, was the summary of various interests in my head, including the film, which was still in its infancy at the time, and the division of static positions in the chronophotographs of a Marey in France and an Eakins and Muybridge in America. The anatomical nude, as it is painted in the strict wood colors, does not exist or at least cannot be seen because I completely rejected the naturalistic appearance of a nude and only accepted the abstract lines of about twenty different static positions during the descent. "( Hermann Korte: Die Dadaisten . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, 5th edition 2007, ISBN 978-3-499-50536-2 , p. 110. Quoted from: Marcel Duchamp: The creative act . Translated from the French by Serge Stauffer, Hamburg 1992 , P. 47 f)
  9. ↑ a b c Marcel Duchamp - biography, life and work. In: Calvin Tomkins: A Life Between Eros, Chess and Art. Retrieved February 28, 2009 .
  10. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Dulcinea (Dulcinée) , 1911, oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art
  11. ↑ Marcel Duchamp. (No longer available online.) G26.ch, archived from the original on March 27, 2004 ; Retrieved October 17, 2012 .
  12. ↑ Calvin Tomkins: Marcel Duchamp. P. 101.
  13. ↑ Julian Street published the often-quoted sentence in March 1913 in a satirical résumé of the Armory Show under the title Why I Became a Cubist in Everybody's Magazine .
  14. ^ Art criticism in the 20th century - Avant-garde art comes to America. Britannica Online Encyclopedia, accessed April 20, 2009 .
  15. ^ Welcome to the 1913 Armory Show. University of Virginia , accessed March 29, 2009 .
  16. ↑ Wolf Lepenies: How the beautiful French conquered America. Retrieved February 28, 2009 .
  17. ↑ John Nilsen Laurvik: Is it Art? Post-impressionism, Futurism, Cubism . The International Press, New York 1913 ( archive.org ).
  18. ^ A b John Sheridan: A visit to the Torrey House, Berkeley, California. 2002, accessed April 20, 2009 .
  19. ^ Herbert Molderings: Film, photography and their influence on painting in Paris around 1910. Marcel Duchamp - Jacques Villons - Franz Kupka . In: Friends of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and the Museum Ludwig eV (ed.): Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch . No. 37 . Cologne 1975, p. 250-251 .
  20. ^ Alfred Nemeczek: The image of art . DuMont, Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-7701-5079-1 , pp. 36-37.
  21. ^ Pontus Hultén (ed.): Paris - New York . Center National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris 1977, ISBN 2-85850-040-1 , p. 280 .
  22. ↑ The Philadelphia Museum of Art dates the purchase of the work by the Arensbergs to the year 1927.
  23. ^ Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2). Philadelphia Museum of Art, accessed February 28, 2009 .
  24. ↑ Nina Schleif: The question of shop windows - Marcel Duchamp's work in shop windows , toutfait.com, accessed on March 2, 2009.
  25. ↑ Sandra Danicke: When the avant-garde became blurred . In: art - the art magazine . September 2010, p. 70-75 ( When the avant-garde became blurred ( January 1, 2011 memento on the Internet Archive ) [accessed December 16, 2012]).
  26. ↑ Donald Kuspit: The Matrix of Sensations . In: Euroart Magazine . No. 08 , 2008 ( artnet.com [accessed March 1, 2009] Autumn Edition 2008).
  27. ↑ Wolf Vostell: The Naked and the Dead. Edition Ars Viva! and Galerie Wewerka, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-924306-11-7 .
  28. ↑ Mathias Spahlinger: Nude, descending a flight of stairs. SWR.de, 1998, accessed on March 29, 2009 .

Illustrations

  1. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Young Girl and Man in Spring (Jeune homme et jeune fille dans le printemps) , oil on canvas, 65.7 × 50.2 cm, 1911, private collection
  2. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'échecs) , oil on canvas, 101 × 101 cm, 1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art
  3. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train (Nu (esquisse), jeune homme triste dans un train) , oil on cardboard, 101 × 73 cm, 1911/12, Peggy Guggenheim Collection
  4. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 1) , oil on cardboard on wood, 95.9 × 60.3 cm, 1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art
  5. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes . Oil on canvas, 114.6 × 128.9 cm, 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art
  6. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Bottle dryer (Egouttoir / Portes-bouteilles) ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), 59 × 37 cm, 1914 (original lost, replica from 1964), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
  7. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 3) , pencil, chalk, black ink and opaque watercolors on gelatin silver print, 148.1 × 91.8 cm, 1916, Philadelphia Museum of Art
  8. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Tu m ' / Tu m'emmerdes ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), oil on canvas, bottle brush, three safety pins and a bolt, 69.8 × 303 cm, 1918, Katherine Sophie Dreier estate , Yale University Art Gallery , New Haven (Connecticut)
  9. ^ The painting in the stairwell by Frederick C. Torey
  10. ↑ Joan Mirò: Naked woman climbing a staircase , charcoal on cardboard, 78 × 55.8 cm, 1937, Fundació Joan Miró , Barcelona
  11. ↑ Gerhard Richter: Woman Descending the Staircase , oil on canvas, 198 × 128 cm, 1965, Art Institute of Chicago
  12. ↑ Gerhard Richter: Ema (act on a staircase). Oil on canvas, 200 × 130 cm, 1966, Museum Ludwig, Cologne
  13. ↑ Michael Somoroff: Query IV , digital print on acrylic, 243.8 × 124.5 cm, 2004, Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston