Pompidou, www.centrepompidou.fr
With a hundred-odd works, the Centre Pompidou is devoting an exceptional monographic exhibition to the pictorialwork of Marcel Duchamp, centred on the paintingand drawings that led to the celebrated Le Grand Verre,”La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même“ (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Suitors, Even (The Large Glass))between 1910 and 1923.Through an unusual and deliberately paradoxical approach,the exhibition shows the pictures of the man who,in the common modernist opinion, killed painting. Marcel Duchamp, though an iconoclastic ”anartist“ from the Twenties onwards, conscientiously gathered his previous paintings together in the hands of a small circle of collectors,and replicated them in his Boîte-en-Valise (Box in a Suitcase)for posterity (the viewers), in order to show his great work- Le Grand Verre - as part of a long, consistent and complex creative process. Little known in Europe, these paintings,now mostly in the Philadelphia Museum, will be brought together for the occasion, surrounded by the pictorial,scientific and technical sources, as well those acquired from books, that Duchamp drew on during these crucial and fertile years. From humorous drawings to the Nu descendant l’escalier,from mechanics to the theme of the ”Bride“, from works on perspective to the films of Marey and Méliès,from Impressionism to Cubism, and Cranach the Elder to Manet, taking in Francis Picabia and Kupka alongthe way, the circuit takes the public step by step through the construction of one of the most enigmatic bodies of works in modern art. It puts the spotlight on Duchamp's pictorial studies, his Fauve period, the influence of Symbolism,his Cubist and mathematical explorations, the nonsense and humour he imbued his work with, and his keen interest in language and the optical, physical and mechanical sciences. Providing a rich environment for a meticulously thought out creative process, the exhibition thus provides keys to interpreting Duchamp's programmatic work La mariéemise à nu par ses célibataires, même.