ISSN 1753-9854 SPRING 2006
Military Avoidance: Marcel Duchamp and the 'Jura-Paris Road'
KIERAN LYONS
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Fig.1 Répartition et emplacement des troupes de l’armée française (Troop Distribution and Positions of the French Army), 1905 Detail of Paris. National Archive, Kew TNA (PRO) WO 33/363 |
So far as numbers go, France has reached the zenith of her power as a military State, both absolutely and relatively; every man who reaches military age is now swept into the net of conscription, and practically all means of recruiting are used up. The Military Resources of France, 19051
In 1905, the year of this War Office Report on French military resources, Marcel Duchamp was drawn into the ‘net’ of military conscription that was intended to incorporate every able-bodied twenty-one year old Frenchman into the national effort. Duchamp complied somewhat unwillingly but nevertheless managed to reduce his period of service by volunteering early and thus exploiting a law that allowed a reduction of time spent in the army.2 Consequently, Duchamp served only one year out of the possible three that he might have been eligible for, and from 1909 onwards he was occupied with an appeal to terminate his period of duty. It is clear that the authorities were reluctant to release trained soldiers: so Duchamp’s appeal was reviewed in several stages and was not necessarily resolved when the fighting finally ended in 1918. During this period of military uncertainty, military themes began to prevail in Duchamp’s work. Three years after his predicted second tour of duty, and when his appeal was underway, he made a journey to the Jura Mountains in the east of France. He subsequently reported on this journey in a series of four notes that he called the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ (fig.2).3 These were written as if preparing orders for a reconnaissance trip and have thematic echoes with communiqués initiating first moves in an occupation of territory. In this way, his notes can be considered as a military text in the context of a group of works by Duchamp that reflect on military subject matter.
Fig.2
Répartition et emplacement des troupes de l’armée française
(Troop Distribution and Positions of the French Army), 1905
The route of the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ has been schematically added in green.
National Archive, Kew
TNA (PRO) WO 33/363
This
is an interpretation that changes the predominant view of Duchamp as
disengaged from the events and responsibilities of his day. He becomes, instead,
an anxious observer of the French military escalation leading to the war in
August 1914. In the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ we begin to detect some of his
concerns with the military ethos and infrastructure that followed from his
conscription into the 39th Regiment of the Line in 1905. This essay
looks at the effects on Duchamp of his military service as well as the
conditions that influenced it and the actions that followed. Perhaps this study
will help to shed light on the obscure references in the four notes that
comprise the ‘Jura-Paris Road’, which, in turn, point to a nexus of
concerns that continued to preoccupy him for many years.
Duchamp’s
commentators have regularly cited the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ notes and
the motor journey that preceded it, as being a catalyst for his imagination,
although its importance within his work has, in spite of many insights, remained
mysteriously obscure.4
Its appearance in bibliographies dealing with Duchamp’s critical year of 1912
has become a familiar aspect of the literature; and yet the notes continue to
resist interpretation. 1912 was, of course, the year that Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase No.2, 1912 was rejected from the Salon des
Indépendants. It was also the year of his developing friendship with
Francis Picabia with whom he attended Raymond Roussel’s Impressions
d’Afrique, a play dealing with themes of scientific improbability and
exotic colonial encounter. Following this, Duchamp travelled to Munich, where in
isolation he completed his erotic series of ‘Virgin’ and
‘Bride’ paintings and from where, lonely, isolated and sexually
supercharged, he revealed his helpless infatuation for Gabrielle Buffet, Francis
Picabia’s charismatic wife. Returning to Paris in October, he joined
Picabia and the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire on the automobile journey
to the Jura to collect Gabrielle Buffet and return with her to Paris where, in
the following weeks, he wrote his series of notes. Scholars have connected the
‘Jura-Paris Road’ notes with themes of eroticism, mechanization and
dimensional speculation and they all play an important part in any decoding of
these notes.
However, it seems that such connections can be made more compelling
by a closer examination of the journey itself, which was inflected with
particular discomforts and tensions. Although the title, ‘Jura-Paris
Road’, defines the journey, the notes seem to deal with more than the
descriptive possibilities and features of a route between the Jura and Paris.
They describe a hierarchy of shifting interpersonal relationships in an
unsettled environment of dimensional change.
Behind these uncertainties lie more
specific and topical preoccupations with territorial advantage that are
encrypted into the language of deployment, colonial conquest, Christian
mythology and hierarchical control. Beyond these are, perhaps, comments about
the journey itself although these are by now more difficult to interpret.
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Fig.3 Marcel Duchamp Coffee Mill 1911 Tate. Purchased 1981 © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London  View in Tate Collection |
The
‘Jura-Paris Road’ notes appear within the body of
Duchamp’s work at the point where he had exhausted the practical
applications of cubism and, indeed, the patience of its influential
practitioners and theorists with whom he had been professionally connected. By
the time of the ‘Jura-Paris Road’, his concerns with modulations of
gender, epitomised in his Munich paintings, were no longer sustainable within
the remit of orthodox cubism. After the journey to the Jura, Duchamp would
re-address himself to a theme he had begun, provisionally, in 1911 with his
small painting Coffee Mill (Tate T03250), where the ineluctable working
of mechanical apparatus was subjectively considered (fig.3). He developed this
interest with a series of mass-produced objects that eventually found their
place within the automated logic of The Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23
(fig.4).5
Thus his ‘toy-cannon’, ‘bayonet’ and ‘cuirassier’ as
well as the other conscripted members of the ‘cemetery of uniforms’
that form the lower section of the Large Glass, are all conditional on
Duchamp’s examination of military relationships. These began to emerge as
a defining aspect of his inquiry after the commencement of his appeal in 1909.
These ‘military’ works are drawn-up for inspection, with the passing
light of the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ enhancing their visibility.
The
‘Jura-Paris Road’, or at least the journey that inspired Duchamp’s
narrative, is significant because it consolidated Duchamp’s friendship
with Picabia
and Gabrielle Buffet who, impatient with the constraining orthodoxies of cubism,
and perhaps suspicious of its particular association with forms of nationalism
were in the process of defining a creative process that would lead to less
affiliated, less officially ‘French’ affinities.6
Picabia’s Spanish origins and his egotistical disposition made him impatient
with the national and communitarian aspirations of the Puteaux cubists. Duchamp
also felt the constraints of Puteaux sociability and looked elsewhere, probably
towards Gabrielle Buffet, for inspiration. Both had developed working affiliations
with Germany: Gabrielle Buffet had studied music in Berlin, and Duchamp, probably
on her prompting, had spent the summer in Munich from where he had so recently
returned. In a delicate distancing process of non-alignment with French painting
he had circumvented some of its traditions by resorting to German oil paints,
which he had been using for the past two years.
Although
Duchamp, Apollinaire and Picabia were professionally connected and
formed a common alliance in the world of Parisian art and no doubt had common
projects to discuss, the journey would carry them away from the familiarity of
these refinements and into an environment of exceptional physical discomfort
where the realities of long-distance driving would eclipse their current
enthusiasms for the human-machine metaphor. It was all very well for Apollinaire
and Duchamp and subsequently Picabia to speculate on these convergences in their
work but any notion that these thoughts would prevail in the course of a very
cold and wet night-drive in an open car need to be viewed accordingly. Before
the end of the journey both the car and its passengers would have lost much of
the gleam of their metropolitan veneer. The disparity in outlook that would have
been revealed in this testing period might well be exemplified by looking at
their military service records. These show a considerable variance in attitudes,
which would have made an increasingly obvious counterpoint to the military
landscape that they were passing through.
Of
the three men, Apollinaire, alone wanted to join up and had trouble in
getting into the army at the outbreak of war. The two other men invested
considerable time and energy in getting out of it. Apollinaire was registered as
an alien and therefore had not been included in the general mobilization in
1914. In fact, he had his application for the army refused. He was grudgingly
conscripted into the artillery, and went into action in 1915, at which point he
volunteered for the infantry where he was severely wounded, evacuated from the
trenches in 1917, and then returned to Paris as a heroic non-combatant. Picabia,
by comparison, stretched his influence to become a driver on the general staff.
When this failed, his contacts secured him an overseas mission from where he
absconded, spending the remainder of the war in New York, Spain and a Swiss
sanatorium. Duchamp, as we have seen, was involved in a military appeal against
his conscription, was then allowed to go to New York in 1915 and remained under
military scrutiny until 1918. During the long trajectory of the drive between
Paris, the Jura and then back to Paris again in October 1912, through the
consecrated military landscape that north-eastern France had become, it would be
surprising if these conflicting commitments were not exposed. By October 1912 it
was clear that France and Germany were on a war footing and the appearance along
the 380 mile journey of troop columns returning to barracks from their autumn
exercises will have pointed up their distinctions and differences even further.
Duchamp’s mood would soon be exemplified in this extract from a letter
sent once the war had begun, to his friend Walter Pach, where he wrote:
There is talk of the ‘great spring attack’ supposed to be decisive. There’s a lot of confidence in the air with the first buds of spring. I remember only too well the same confidence in the month of August and it just seems to me that civilians are getting carried away.7
Duchamp then registered his doubts about the situation by secretly arranging his passage to America, despite the danger of submarines in the waters of the North Atlantic.8 In another letter to Walter Pach, six weeks later, he is even more explicit about his reasons for going: ‘I’m not going to New York’, he says, ‘I’m leaving France. That’s quite different.’9
Marcel Duchamp’s military models
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Fig.5 Marcel Duchamp Parade: Seven People in Profile with Hats 1892 Private collection © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London |
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Fig.6 Marcel Duchamp Soldier on a Horse 1894 Private collection © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London |
As a boy, Marcel Duchamp made drawings and paintings of French soldiers, which are no doubt similar to the generic productions of other children whose imagination is caught by the appeal of the army and its paraphernalia (figs.5,6). The little paintings show a good eye for detail but one or two of these reveal puzzling anomalies that are perhaps genuine mistakes or perhaps show a more mischievous side. In one of them, the French colours are painted incorrectly so that they resemble an upside-down Dutch flag and another shows a cavalry officer in the absurd position of chasing his runaway horse (figs.7,8). Duchamp does not say if these paintings were motivated by the example of his two older brothers, Raymond and Gaston, who upon reaching twenty had been conscripted into the army while preparing for their artistic careers.10
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| Fig.7 Marcel Duchamp French Flag, French Soldier 1894 Private collection © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London |
Fig.8 Marcel Duchamp Cavalry 1895 Private collection © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London |
From his brothers, the young Duchamp would have absorbed the mystique enjoyed by the French army in the years before the Dreyfus scandal in 1894. Two years later, in spite of the Dreyfus affair and the consequent decline in the popularity of the army, Duchamp was photographed in a uniform where his martial appearance was augmented by a military képi and a campaign service medal (fig.9). These may have come from the wardrobes of either Gaston in the 21st Infantry, or Raymond who was serving in the 68th Artillery; it could have also come from their father who had been an officer in the war of 1870. Notwithstanding the provenance of the uniform, it is clear that Marcel Duchamp had direct connections with people of pronounced military ideals and opinions. Whether the costume was derived from his school uniform, or from the remnants of the children’s bataillons scolaires, or whether it was merely fancy dress, remain as questions to be answered, but so also does the question regarding Duchamp’s choice in wearing the costume.11 As a little boy Duchamp had been used to being dressed-up by grown-ups and so it is possible that the family custom prevailed here,12 although as Jacques Villon’s sketch of his younger brother shows, Duchamp himself was not averse to posing as a soldier in the makeshift materials that came to hand (fig.10). Nevertheless, by being photographed in this way, Duchamp was sustaining a family commitment and endorsing the army at a time when it was coming under increasing public pressure.
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| Fig.9 Unknown photographer Marcel Duchamp in uniform 1895 Association Marcel Duchamp Photograph courtesy Association Marcel Duchamp |
Fig.10 Jacques Villon Marcel in Soldier’s Disguise c.1894-95 Private collection Photograph courtesy Association Marcel Duchamp |
Although
the képi in the photograph appears too big for him it
does not diminish his air of confidence. He relaxes, one hand casually in his
pocket the other resting lightly on the handle of, what looks like a short
sword. He conveys the easy command of an eight-year-old, interpreting the manner
of older men. Raymond’s artillery sword would have been too awkward for
him to wear, and so Marcel’s weapon was in all probability part of
Gaston’s infantry
equipment.13
The Lebel (1886)
rifle supplied to infantry units came with its own
épée-baïonette and this menacing, but actually rather
impractical weapon was the one used here to bolster his military appearance.
Almost twenty years later the standard épée-baïonette
would appear in a second arrangement by Marcel Duchamp, when the distinctive
blade appears as the locating spline for the revolving ‘Chocolate
Grinder’, the central mechanism in the Large Glass (figs.11,12).
The truncated blade is shorter than it should be, perhaps it has broken off, and
so this rudimentary bricolage owes more to the soldier’s ability in
adapting defective military hardware than it did to the memory of the martial
aspirations of a play-acting boy at the time of Dreyfus.
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| Fig.11 Epée-baïonette (Sword-bayonet) Illustration from Charles Lavauzelle, Manuel d’Infanterie à l’usage des sous-officiers, caporaux, et élèves caporaux (Infantry Manual for non-commissioned officers, corporals and lance corporals), 1912, Paris/Limoges 1915. Photography: K.Lyons |
Fig.12 Marcel Duchamp Chocolate Grinder No.1 1913 Philadelphia Museum of Art © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London |
It
is clear that by the time of Duchamp’s own conscription in 1905,
this enthusiasm for the army had disappeared. The Dreyfus scandal had
compromised the army’s reputation so badly that in spite of his upbringing
and his early enthusiasm he went to exceptional lengths to avoid military service.
Later, he would be celebrated for the detachment that would inform his
methodology of indifference, but at seventeen, he brought a committed urgency to
the task of evading conscription in the face of family expectation. The gulf
that existed between Duchamp and the army is emphasized by the fact that, unlike
his brothers, who were often photographed in uniform, no photographs survive of
Marcel Duchamp in the infantry; the photographs that do exist show him in
civilian clothes only (figs.13,14).14
In light of this distance from the army, it is perhaps unsurprising that a youthful drawing of a
soldier with a studiously incorrect French flag should survive whereas
photographs of the artist in uniform do not.
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| Fig.13
Unknown photographer Jacques Villon in uniform 1906 Association Marcel Duchamp Photograph courtesy Association Marcel Duchamp |
Fig.14 Unknown photographer Marcel Duchamp (front row) photographed with, from l. to r., Raymond Duchamp-Villon (in uniform), Yvonne Duchamp-Villon, Raymond’s mother-in-law and Gaby Villon, on the steps at Puteaux, Autumn 1914 or Spring 1915. © Musée des Beaux-Arts Rouen Photograph courtesy J. Matisse Monnier |
Cubism and military tensions
The Dreyfus affair conditioned the military convictions of the two older brothers, but for Marcel Duchamp, a spell was broken here and a gradual separation occurred between them. This was not only evident in the relation to military service but in artistic matters as well. Their differences were underpinned by a diverging political vision. In the case of the brothers, this was epitomized in their commitment to cubism, which they were helping to promote into the main stream of Parisian culture: Cubism had an international reputation, which was exported like many colonial enterprises of the day. Although tolerating foreign artists, the cubists kept the door firmly closed against foreign trends and its practice became an extension of a larger patriotic commitment.15 This caused problems between Duchamp and his brothers, which surfaced in 1912 when they were instrumental in rejecting his painting Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 from the Salon des Indépendants. The exhibition committee, for which the two brothers functioned as ideological enforcers, considered that the descending nude came too close to the contamination of influence from futurism. The references they detected compromised Duchamp’s cubist credentials, although he later protested that the distance between Italy and Paris was too great for tenable influences to occur.16
The law requiring Frenchmen to serve in the army created another sector of
tension between them. Military service was generally accepted, particularly in
nationalist circles, where it was held that the threat of German intervention
made it incumbent on all French citizens to be ready for active service. Due to
the national disgrace over the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, war was inevitable
and the election of Raymond Poincaré, a native of Lorraine to the
Presidency in 1912, brought this closer. Duchamp’s reluctance to perform
his military service and his general lack of enthusiasm for serving with the
colours, either as a cubist painter in Paris or in the territorial defence of
France has to be seen accordingly.
The extent to which this patriotic atmosphere prevailed in Duchamp’s
family can be determined by the way that they volunteered for war duties. Later,
in 1919 Duchamp’s American friend, Katherine Drier, recognized the fixed
views of his father, Émile Duchamp, during the Versailles
negotiations.17
He had been
captured in 1870 and imprisoned in Stettin until the final
capitulation.18
It is clear to see
how his political sensibilities would have hardened against a military
defaulter, and how patriotic duty and anti-German sentiments were a natural part
of the family ethos. Duchamp’s exemption from the army in 1909 was
nevertheless mysterious and as puzzling then as it is to today. His military
papers contain neither the evidence about his medical condition, nor the terms
of his medical exemption. A ‘heart murmur’ or
‘insufficences cardiaque’ is occasionally referred to in the
Duchamp literature. Nevertheless, Duchamp’s ready appropriation of the
‘heart’ as a metaphor for larger interconnecting systems suggests
that the distress caused by this ‘heart murmur’ was perhaps not
physiological.19
The problem lay
elsewhere: ‘ given that ... ; if I suppose that I am suffering a
lot’,20
he reminds
himself in one of the notes in his ‘Box of 1914’ and armed,
accordingly, with this unexplained ‘supposition’ he set himself
against his family’s desires and expectations.
Nevertheless, Duchamp demonstrated in his ‘Jura-Paris Road’, that
even if his attitude to public policy was out of sympathy with the national
mood, military concerns preoccupied him. Following the 1870 defeat, successive
Republican governments had aimed to deflect volatile nationalist attention away
from its territorial losses in the east of France by engaging in a vigorous
policy of colonial expansionism. The outlandish objects that appeared in Paris
museums as trophies of French colonialism were testament to this progress and
the seminal position of African figuration within the cubist achievement is now
thoroughly understood. Duchamp, in his search to find ways beyond the
prohibitive restrictions of cubism, looked towards the procedural effects rather
than the material affects of French colonialism. Unlike the cubists who drew
formal solutions from plundered artefacts, Duchamp considered foreign
interventionism at the level of territorial expansion and military occupation,
and these can be seen in the preoccupations that concern him in the
‘Jura-Paris Road’. Increasingly, however, Germany was beginning to
contest French pre-eminence overseas, most notably in North Africa, where, at
the Algerian port of Agadir in 1911, the two forces came dangerously close to
conflict. French colonialism, triggered surely by this developing crisis,
appeared among Duchamp’s preoccupations slightly more than one year later
in October 1912 when he outlined the problem in the constellation of notes that
he wrote after the journey. In one of these he elides themes of colonialism
along with its other problematic themes of territorial expansion: ‘the
chief of the 5 nudes manages little by little the annexation / of the Jura-Paris
road. The chief of the 5 nudes annexes to his estates, a battle / (idea of
colony).’21
Military preoccupations
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Fig.15 Marcel Duchamp Cover for ‘View’ Magazine 1945 Tate Library © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London |
As the evidence of the 1912 ‘Jura-Paris Road’ makes clear, Duchamp’s conscription was by no means the end of his fixation with military culture and this can be seen in a range of works that he produced throughout his life. Several of his published cartoons depict soldiers, and one of them titled Éxpérience, 1909, comments unfavourably on an army regulation affecting the bridal arrangements of officers. The intractable nature of the situation is a premonition of the disappointing transactions between the Bride and her unlucky Bachelors in the Large Glass . Although the dates for the Large Glass are listed as 1915-1923, these do not properly account for the preparatory notes and preliminary sketches from 1912 and so the Glass actually sits astride the war years of 1914-1918, developing its thematic urgency in the build-up of military tension while gradually losing momentum in its aftermath. The demise of the Glass and its reconstruction provides a further parallel with the military situation in Europe. Military themes appeared again with his design for the title page of View a magazine that devoted its March 1945 issue to Duchamp (fig.15). On the cover he arranged a photomontage of a wine bottle displaying the redundant Certificat de bonne conduit, his military service record of forty years earlier. The evidence from these military papers resurrects his struggle with the conscription boards and show that military interest in Duchamp lasted until 1930.22
Duchamp’s decision to use his army papers emphasises how the military
and the personal aspect of the work were elided. The military aspect is
emphasised by the horizontal alignment of the wine bottle with a vertical
discharge of smoke escaping as if from the muzzle of a cannon. The bottle
menaces a backdrop made up of points of light on a blue ground and so the
composition invokes familiar themes of technological determination and
dimensional uncertainty, previously seen in the toy cannon and Milky Way of his
wartime masterwork The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
(fig.4).
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| Fig.16 Marcel Duchamp Exhibition Poster for Editions de et Sur Marcel Duchamp 1967 © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London |
Fig.17 French Atomic Explosion 1960 Television footage 27 December 1960 Archived at news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday |
Finally
and at the end of his life, Duchamp produced a poster for
the Galerie Givaudan (fig.16). The print shows his outstretched palm, pressing
against the picture plane with a cigar provocatively inserted between his
fingers. An ejaculatory plume of smoke, emanating from this cigar, mushrooms
upwards in a voluptuous parody of an atomic cloud
(fig.17).23
The image resembles
the television footage of France’s third nuclear test, conducted in French
North Africa on 27 December
1960.24
Here the contaminated
debris drifts upwards with the same insouciant grace as the smoke in
Duchamp’s poster. The image in Duchamp is disarmingly sexual but if the
salacious intention is forgotten for a moment it will be noted that
Duchamp’s creative career, from his juvenile drawings to this final
poster, was bracketed at either end by images that reflected on military
technology, equipment and power, not to mention, the additional liberties with
good taste that his mischievous imagination was capable of developing in
relation to the sobering realities of military culture.
Military misalignments
To examine the origins of this flair for subversive humour, Duchamp’s cigar must point back sixty years to the infantry barracks where, as an under-age teenager from a privileged background, he became an army conscript. Within the ranks he would encounter the specialized ability of soldiers to develop facetious slang out of official language. Falling just short of actual insubordination, this expression remains the only critical response soldiers can voice without fear of reprisal.25 Although not immediately evident in his work, the development within Duchamp’s later oeuvres of facetious and punning language can be profitably examined from the perspective of this period of conscription. His exposure to the inspired vulgarity of soldiers in 1905-6, might then be traced to a range of his later works that probed into language to find its destabilizing and often prurient second meaning. The military references that followed in Duchamp’s career derive from the misappropriation of official language evidenced in military slang. In the course of his practice he would systematically misinterpret themes of military culture with a persistence that is peculiar among the artists of his generation.
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Fig.3 Marcel Duchamp Coffee Mill 1911 Tate. Purchased 1981 © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London View in Tate Collection |
Fig.18 Raoul Trémolières Mitrailleuse de la Manufacture de Saint Étienne (St Étienne Machine Gun) 1915 Courtesy Louis Trémolières Reproduced at perso.wanadoo.fr/donjondecoucy/tremolieres /Carnets/carnet5/page24.htm |
A
different example is to be found in Duchamp’s contribution to a
project for the decoration of his brother’s kitchen in Puteaux. He chose
to paint a coffee grinder, known in French as un moulin à
café (fig.3). The painting that he made dismantles the mechanism,
displaying it as an exploded diagram; this was a prosaic and severely functional
choice for an ornamental kitchen object, but a very different association might
explain Duchamp’s selection of it, revealed in the fact that les
moulins à café had become the term for the cumbersome, heavy
machine-guns that were issued but largely unused by the French infantry
(fig.18). An immediate contextual resonance was provided by the fact that these
denigrated and ineffective weapons were made in the local arsenal at Puteaux.
Thus the title of Duchamp’s sombre little painting reverberates with the
low esteem accorded to the infantry machine-guns while disparaging, by
association, the place where his brothers lead their creative
lives.26
Infantrymen also carried
real coffee grinders in their regulation batterie de cuisine, and so,
aside from the purely domestic association of le moulin à
café, the meaning of Duchamp’s painting incorporates the social
tensions of the Puteaux kitchen, the cooking accoutrements that formed part of
the infantryman’s burden and finally the frustrations associated with the
discredited infantry weapon.
From
1911 onwards, Duchamp moved beyond domestic references towards
situations that indicate newer themes of automation, measurement, mapping, and
the incremental division of territory that lay beyond the dimensional remit and
comfortable enclosures of Puteaux. These works also develop ideas about the
occupation of space that turn into a sustained preoccupation with territory and
territorial advantage. One overt cause of this was the military escalation along
the eastern diagonal of France that was expressed in a series of strongholds
that went from the Belgian border in the north, along the limits of the
contested provinces of Lorraine and Alsace to the Swiss border in the east. This
disquiet is accurately revealed in the 1912 ‘Jura-Paris Road’,
Duchamp’s road journey, starting at Étival in the east of France
and ending at Neuilly, west of Paris, followed a parallel just below this
militarized diagonal and so the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ became the most
inclusive, if obliquely stated of Duchamp’s documents that define his
preoccupation with this critical, slanting ‘military space’.
The notes
The ‘Jura-Paris Road’ developed in tandem with Duchamp’s more visible works such as the studies and notes for the Chocolate Grinder and the Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries. This cursory and secretive mode of address gives an indication of his disengagement from the laborious formalism of the studio-centred, object-based art of his brothers. Instead, his practice became subordinated to his changing situation whereby the ideas were recorded and accumulated gradually, as they occurred to him on whatever scraps of paper were available. The notes that he wrote to himself with their occasional reference to location are evidence of the fact that for Duchamp the site of work was beginning to change from his fixed studio to an undefined network of incidental cafés and kitchen tables. His four notes provide a deliberation on the theme of mobility as if written metaphorically to exemplify his own restless, wandering position. However, the imperative, driving the narrative in the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ is an aggressive one concerning the occupation of space, which is achieved through practice and coordination in unfamiliar dimensions. The rigour of this method contrasts strangely with the haphazard approach that he developed in writing and storing his notes. Nevertheless, the notes provide the most coherent metaphor for his resistance to the controlling authorities who were there to limit him from compromising the tenets of cubism in the first instance, and beyond these constraining influences were the military protocols that aimed to keep him in the army for longer than he wanted.
Éloignement
In the shadow of war, Marcel Duchamp assembled a number of key ideas, which he reproduced five times into boxes and distributed among friends. The project is now called the ‘Box of 1914’ and one of the notes in it stands out from the others because of its relevance to the international crisis. It is called Éloignement and it defined Duchamp’s preoccupations with the military and political agendas of the time.27 It begins with Duchamp’s announcement of his opposition to compulsory military service and it was probably provoked by the re-instatement of the three-year law extending the period of compulsory military service. This was one of President Poincaré’s early political initiatives and in making this statement Duchamp revealed his opposition to the troisaniste agenda, which viewed with alarm France’s inability to meet on equal terms the much larger German army, now stationed on France’s side of the Rhine in Alsace and Lorraine. The three-year law aimed to bolster the French army with more troops by providing reserve regiments that could be rapidly deployed once the war had begun. Even so, this law did not produce the required numbers and the problem of matching the much larger German force was partially achieved by interspersing the colonial divisions from North Africa among the metropolitan soldiers along the line of France’s Eastern approaches.
Éloignement begins outspokenly with the statement:
‘Against compulsory military
service’,28
followed by a
range of oblique observations in a list of contentious military subjects.
References in this list include the inappropriate uniform in light of
fragmentation sustained from injuries in modern warfare and the consequences of
this warfare are then described in terms of human dismemberment. Duchamp
caustically suggests that dismembered organs might be revitalised
‘téléphoniquement’, via a technology that, so far, the
army did not possess.29
Telephonically, the scattered human remains might be reconnected and used again
– if only for a limited period. This note, reveals Duchamp’s
pessimistic concerns about the lack of provision for an interconnected
conception of military space, he demonstrates an interest in remote
communication, or ‘communication at a
distance’,30
and so the
‘Box of 1914’ and within it, Éloignement, offers a
checklist of Duchamp’s preoccupations at the start of the war and before
his departure for America in June 1915. The inclusion of
Éloignement within this collection testifies to the personal
interest he attached to the issue of conscription in advance of his own
provisional release from service. More generally, it describes a lack of fit
between the army command and its aspirations to sustain a war across
battlefronts where new forms of communication would be needed (fig.19).
Fig.19
Planche 2. Infanterie de ligne (Plate 2: Infantry of the Line)
Illustration from Jean Augé, L'Armée française d'Août 1914, Paris 1935
Photography: K. Lyons
The ‘Jura-Paris Road’
The four notes that make up the ‘Jura-Paris Road’, although more ambiguously stated are in fact an anxious expression of similar preoccupations. They contain allusions to dimensional space and to ‘communication at a distance’ similar to those found in Éloignement . However, more prosaic information about the route, the weather, the duration of the journey, and Duchamp’s travelling companions, are all missing from the notes. The impression given in the existing literature is that, as a catalyst for Duchamp’s ideas on language and art, the journey generated a positive atmosphere of bonhomie and this motor excursion permitted an exhilarating insight into the links between eroticism, electro-mechanical engineering and dimensional speculation.31 This research suggests that, rather than the convivial outing that history and past scholarship describes, tensions existed, both social and political, that were evoked by the density of military installations along the road they were travelling on and that these induced, in Duchamp, a sense of pessimistic foreboding that was only partially resolved in his flight to America. The military installations that they passed en route provided the backdrop for their conflicting attitudes to patriotism, nationalism and ultimately conscription. The journey was broken at Avallon32 and this fixes it at its mid-point, which then restricts the more elastic possibilities of the itinerary to the garrison towns along Route Nationale Six. Their journey would have taken them through: Lons-le-Saunier, Chalons-sur-Saone, Autun, Auxerre, Joigny, Sens, Fontainebleau, Melun, Vincennes and finally the regimental showcase of Paris itself (fig.1).33 These were towns with predominantly infantry barracks, but the route included the regimental headquarters of other regiments: Chasseurs, Dragons, Zouaves, Genies, Train . Once they had got to Vincennes, the increasing prevalence of artillerie with their new canons de 75 would have been evident.
Duchamp’s
description of an aggressive occupation of linear terrain by
a co-ordinated detachment of individuals, suggests that they were participants
in an extended manoeuvre that can be interpreted as a military operation between
points along this road. The objective, according to the title authorizes an
advance from the Swiss border towards Paris. Military exercises such as this had
recently taken place across a broad sweep of north-east France as part of the
annual military Manoeuvres d’Automne . Large sections of the army
were involved in these combined operations that were intended to test equipment
and tactics and to give the previous year’s recruits an idea of combat
experience. Troops would still have been on the roads, doggedly marching back to
their regional barracks.
The military road
Where the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ leaves behind any resemblance to the operations of the French army of October 1912 lay in Duchamp’s emphasis on a process that synthesized human potential and mechanical systems into one networking whole. Duchamp’s strategies would succeed by absorbing the terrain, the road, the vehicle and the human affiliates into one timeless, flowing, combinatory system. In contrast to this, the French army in 1912, recognized as a supremely effective marching army with remarkable powers of endurance, could be expected to complete the same operation along the road between Étival (Jura) and Neuilly (Paris) in approximately twenty-one days.34 Being ignorant of Duchamp’s notional conception of a mobile and evolving force, the army relied instead on the endurance of its boots and the feet inside them to overcome the terrain. Although Duchamp proposed a timeless synthesis of men and machines in a balance of vital organs and reciprocating parts, in actuality this brought his travellers to their Paris destination in one sustained, if rain-soaked and probably disorientated, twelve-hour period.35
Fanciful
as this may seem, Duchamp was making a point about the army’s
resistance to strategies that proposed an alternative to the élan
of the infantry assault at the heart of French military thinking. It had
developed a theory of war that diminished the importance of defensive equipment
so that, for instance, the under-regarded machine guns, considered as defensive
weapons, were left undeveloped. However, unstoppable momentum depended on both
the head and the heart of the army operating as one and this is where
Duchamp’s point is made. The army lacked a communications system that
could function across the fluctuating terrain of total warfare. Duchamp’s
phenomenal descriptions in the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ and in
Éloignement both described communication systems where the
dispersed units (methodically dispersed in the case of the ‘5 nudes’
of the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ and catastrophically dispersed in the case
of the limbs and hearts of Éloignement ) operate in a communicating
synthesis. The ‘Jura-Paris Road’ advances towards its objective
through an agency called the ‘machine of 5 hearts’. Whereas this is
done in a sequence of complex spatial manoeuvres, switching between amplitude
and the simple reduction of a straight line, there is no such progress in
Éloignement. In contrast Duchamp imagines there the exhausted
aftermath of an operation and the cynical manipulation of terminally injured
soldiers. Whereas the 1912 ‘Jura-Paris Road’ projected a
metaphysical speculation, first invoked in the technological and visionary
language of de l’Isle-Adam and Alfred Jarry, the bleak positivism of
Éloignement, by comparison, is conveyed in the language of
perverse army guignol and anticipates the gallows humour of
1914.36
L’Enfant phare
Duchamp’s ‘Jura-Paris Road’ also focused on institutional aspects of military behaviour, and specifically on the army’s connection with the Catholic Church. This connection provided the moral justification for foreign adventurism as well as a binding identity that linked it to a nationalist/monarchist constituency at home. Prior to 1912, Catholic military identity focused on the Society of the Sacred Heart and found its actual form in the basilica of the Sacré Coeur, approaching completion above Montmartre.37 This was situated towards the end of Duchamp’s 1912 journey. The mysterious ‘machine with 5 hearts’ of these notes, was epitomized also in the living organism of the basilica, already a place of vigil and prayer, where the artist Luc Olivier Merson installed a ceiling mosaic illustrating, beneath the images of the Trinity and the saints of France, a frieze that included two French generals who, in 1870, went into action at the Battle of Loigny with the Sacred Heart emblazoned on their Regimental Colours (fig.20). On the opposite side this frieze shows the gratitude of the colonized races, euphemistically referred to in the guidebooks as the ‘homage of the continents’. Associated themes also register within the sweep of Duchamp’s ‘Jura-Paris Road’.
 |
Fig.20 Luc Olivier Merson Ceiling Mosaic 1912 Basilique du Sacré Coeur, Paris Photography: Laurent Thion Reproduced at www.panoramas.dk /fullscreen/fullscreen24.html |
In
what appears to be an early version of the same note, Duchamp began to
develop his conception of its chief protagonist, the
‘headlight-child’, and although not yet fully developed, he
described him simply as: ‘this headlight being the child-God,
rather like the Jesus of the
primitives’38
This unexpected citation of the central figure in Christian mythology, references
again the Church and its role in giving a moral justification that eased the
conscience of French colonial expansion. This close relationship between the
Catholic Church and the officer cadres, who in their turn disguised and then
masked and then denied their racism, resulting in the anti-Semitic persecution
of Dreyfus, divided France politically and provoked the decline of the army
between 1894 and 1912.39
This period of divisive military unpopularity coincided with Duchamp’s
formative years, when although photographed as a young military cadet in 1895,
his own developing éloignement from the aspirations and obligation
towards the military ambitions of his country were beginning to emerge.
![Planche 7: Chasseurs à pied (la fanfare) (Plate 7: Light Infantry) [composition of the regimental fanfare]. Illustration from Jean Augé, <em>L'Armée française d'Août 1914, Paris 1935](images/lyons_fig21.jpg)
Fig.21
Planche 7: Chasseurs à pied (la fanfare) (Plate 7: Light Infantry)
[composition of the regimental fanfare]
Illustration from Jean Augé, L'Armée française d'Août 1914, Paris 1935
Photography: K. Lyons
Drawing
on his language experiences as a conscript, Duchamp developed his
conceptions of the enfant-phare, an illuminated child, which in the
original French is also phonically caught in a military-mystical aura. The
rhythms and regular repetitions of the phrase ‘enfant-phare’
in the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ echoes the military term le fanfare
that alludes to the position and the function of the infantry band
(fig.21).40
Marching infantry columns were headed by formations of buglers or fanfaristes who,
when attached to regimental drummers, formed a unit known as la clique going
ahead of the main marching columns, their music fanning out ahead of them like
the tail of a reversing comet:
This headlight child could graphically, / be a comet, which would have its / tail in front, this tail being an / appendage of the headlight child.41
The
phonic slippage between ‘enfant-phare’ and the French
‘fanfare’ does not easily work in an English translation but
nevertheless, suggests a reference to the mystical aura that arises from the
combinatory form of the two nouns ‘enfant’ and
‘phare’. ‘Enfant-phare’ has been mechanistically
translated into English as the ‘headlight-child’, taking its lead
from the automotive experience of the journey from where the term arose. This
technical reading seems to deny a more illusive implication that invests the
term with an ethereal glow that goes closer to the idea of ‘phare’
in its original meaning of a glowing object or beacon – perhaps
transmitted from a lighthouse as André Breton suggests in the title of
his seminal essay in 1934 on Duchamp’s Large Glass and then
published in View in 1945 before the English translation had established
the term as a ‘headlight’.42
The material road
The Jura to Paris excursion did not necessarily begin as a theoretical speculation into military culture and terminology. It began, prosaically enough, when Marcel Duchamp in the company of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire travelled with Francis Picabia in his car to the Jura. Their reasons for travelling may simply have been sociable. If so, they had time to regret their decision on the long journey. The seasonally short days meant that much of the journey passed by in darkness and by the time they reached their destination in the early hours of the morning they had travelled slightly more than four hundred and eighty kilometres and rain followed them throughout. Gabrielle Buffet, who was waiting for them, recalled her husband’s arrival with his two friends in the small hours of the morning, in conditions that she described in terms of ‘une pluie diluvienne’ (torrential rain).43
This
research into the motoring conditions of the period allows no more than
an informed guess at the conditions on the stages of the journey as they
travelled past the military installations en route. They would be tired and the
supply of fuel and acetylene for the headlights would be depleted. They would
have had difficulty in seeing through the driving rain and the muddy spray
thrown up by the wheels of the car. In a detail of Duchamp’s note that
says more about the motoring rather than the military aspects of the journey, he
uses the term ‘powdered silex’. Silex is of course flint and
contemporary travel guides produced by manufacturers such as Michelin and
Continental advertised various solutions that were designed to withstand
laceration from silex road surfaces. In wet conditions when the Jura mountain
roads turned into torrents of water, the flinty substrate had a tendency of
working through to the surface, which brought the sharp stones into troublesome
contact with the tyres of the car. When driving after dark – an activity
that the guide books cautioned drivers
against44
– road-side
repairs, necessitated by the effects of silex on tyres, would have to be carried
out under the emergency lighting from the vehicle’s own acetylene
head-lights.45
Over
the course of a night ride, two years later, in August 1914, on the eve
of enlisting into the army, Apollinaire described an episode where three
punctures unexpectedly prolonged the duration of the 200-kilometre journey back
to Paris. This was on a hot summer’s night, which unavoidably lengthened
into the early hours of the following morning. On this occasion, the acetylene
supply for the headlights ran out as they were doing their repairs and the
journey eventually finished off in sunshine just as the general mobilization
notices were being posted up. Apollinaire remembered the night journey with
satisfaction and the roadside repairs provided a sense of purpose, which he
described in awed terms as if it had been a preliminary rite of passage to the
ultimate military test of going to war.
We realized my comrade and I
That the little car had driven us to a new epoch
And although we were full-grown men already
We’d just been born.46
 |
 |
|
| Fig.22 Marcel Duchamp Cemetery of Uniforms and Livries No.2 1914 Yale University Art Gallery © Succession Marcel Duchamp 2006, ADAGP/ Paris, DACS, London |
Fig.23 Albert Larteau Tambours et clairons (Drums and Bugles) 1905 Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts |
During
the course of Duchamp’s journey from the Jura to Paris in
October 1912, the car tyres will have suffered comparably except the journey was
more than twice the length and the roads in the mountains more unpredictable and
so the punctures would have multiplied into the wet night. Duchamp’s
‘Jura-Paris Road’ allows none of the awed satisfaction of
Apollinaire’s summer journey. Duchamp’s description is preoccupied
with encountering change through discipline and training and behind these
requirements we can detect his presentiments about military preparations,
colonialism and the problematic religious underpinning of the French army.
Whereas Apollinaire approached the conflict in his writing with patriotic
enthusiasm, Duchamp exhibits something close to morbid fatalism in the face of
the overwhelming military escalation that would abruptly turn peace into war in
1914 (fig.22). In this series of tensely coded notes that have come down to us
as the ‘Jura-Paris Road’, Marcel Duchamp momentarily illuminated his
concerns and premonitions of the gathering military situation in France (fig.23).
Appendix 1
Marcel Duchamp, Green Box, 1934 from M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson eds., Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du sel), New York 1973, reprinted as The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York 1989, pp.26-7.
The machine with 5 hearts, the pure / child of nickel and platinum must / dominate the Jura-Paris road. On the one hand, the chief of the 5 nudes will be / ahead of the 4 other nudes towards this Jura-Paris road. On the other hand, the headlight / child will be the instrument conquering this Jura-Paris road
This headlight child could graphically, / be a comet, which would have its / tail in front, this tail being an / appendage of the headlight child / appendage which absorbs by / crushing (gold dust, graphically) / this Jura-Paris road.
Appendix 2
Paul Matisse ed., Marcel Duchamp, Notes, trans. Matisse, Boston 1983, unpaginated.
- Pictorial Translation - / The 5 nudes, one the chief, will have to lose, / in the picture, the character of multiplicity. / They must be a machine of 5 / hearts, an immobile machine of 5 hearts / The chief, in this machine, could / be indicated in the centre and at the top, without appearing to be anything other than a / more important gear train (graphically).
The machine of 5 hearts will have to / give birth to the headlight. / This headlight will be the child-God, rather / like the primitives’ Jesus. / He will be the divine blossoming of / this machine mother.
In graphic form, I see / him as pure machine compared to the / more human machine-mother. He will have to be radiant with glory. And the graphic means / to obtain this machine child, / will find their expression in the use / of an endless screw. / (accessories of this endless screw, serving to unite / this headlight child God, to his machine-mother . 5 nudes
- The chief of the 5 nudes manages little by little the annexation / of the Jura-Paris road.
The chief of the 5 nudes annexes to his estates, / a battle / (idea of colony)
- Title. / The chief of 5 nudes extends little by little his / power over the Jura-Paris road.
There is little ambivalence: after having conquered / the 5 nudes, this chief seems to enlarge / his possessions, which gives a false / meaning to the title. (He and the 5 nudes form a tribe / for the conquest by speed of / this Jura-Paris road)
The chief of the 5 nudes increases little by little / his power over the Jura-Paris road.
The Jura-Paris road, on one side, the 5 nudes one / the chief, on another side, are the two / terms of the collision. This collision / is the raison d’être of the picture. To paint / 5 nudes statically seems to me without / interest, no more for that matter than to paint / the Jura-Paris road even by raising / the pictorial interpretation of this entity / to a state entirely devoid of impressionism. / Thus the interest in the picture / results from the collision of these 2 / extremes, the 5 nudes one the chief and the / Jura-Paris road. The result of this battle / will be the victory obtained little by little by the 5 nudes / over the Jura-Paris road.
Appendix 3
Marcel Duchamp, ‘Box of 1914’: Éloignement (Dispersal), trans. Kieran Lyons, 2005.
‘Against compulsory military service: a “dispersal” of limbs, of hearts and other anatomical parts; each soldier is unable to get back into uniform, the heart will provide a telephonic supply to dispersed limbs etc.
Then no further supply; each “dispersed” limb is isolated. Finally a regulation of regrets from one “detachment” to another.’
Notes
1. War Office, The Military
Resources of France, 1905, p.52 (National Archive, Kew: TNA (PRO) WO 33/363)
2. ‘No longer will it be
possible for the sons of rich parents to escape with one year’s service by
going through the farce of taking up the “carrière liberale”
of a lawyer, doctor, or artist which he has not the slightest intention of
pursuing.’ Ibid., p.54.
3. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson
eds., Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du sel), New York 1973, reprinted as The Writings of Marcel Duchamp,
New York 1989, pp.26-7. Paul Matisse ed.; Marcel Duchamp, Notes,
trans. Matisse, Boston 1983, unpaginated. The notes are classified
pp.109-111. See also Appendix 1 & 2 of this paper.
4.The most compelling of these is
to be found in Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s extraordinarily detailed
Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the ‘Large Glass’
and Related Works, New Jersey 1998, pp.37-9. In this work Linda Henderson
offers the most sustained insight into the physical and metaphysical aspects of
the ‘Jura-Paris Road’ and where, in fact the theme of a
‘military conquest’ was first expressed. For further reading on the
‘Jura-Paris Road’ see: Katia Samaltanos, Apollinaire, Catalyst
for Primitivism, Picabia, and Duchamp, Ann Arbor, Michigan 1984,
pp.77-9.
5. Duchamp’s major work, the
‘Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even’, will be referred to as
the ‘Large Glass’.
6. For the political affiliations
and aspirations of the cubist painters see: Mark Antliff. Inventing Bergson:
Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. New Jersey 1992.
7. Francis Naumann and Hector
Obalk eds., Affectt.
Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel
Duchamp, London 2000, p.32.
8. The RMS Lusitania was sunk just
one month previously on 7 May
1915.
9. Naumann & Obalk eds.,
2000, p.36.
10. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp:
A Biography, London 1997,
p.22.
11. The bataillon
scolaire movement, in which boys were taught military skills was still an
active force in Nationalist politics at the time. However, the uniform of the
bataillon was different to the one that Marcel Duchamp wears in this
photograph.
12. Tomkins 1997, p.19.
13. The two older brothers will
be referred to by their professional names from now on. Gaston, the older
brother, became Jacques Villon and the younger brother took on the name Raymond
Duchamp-Villon.
14. Jacques Caumont and Gillian
Gough-Cooper, Ephemirides: On and About MD and Rrose Selavy, 1887-1968.
Cambridge, Mass. 1993, passim.
15. In 1912, after the Salon
d’Automne, cubist painters came under attack from Nationalist politicians
in the Assembly. The influential cubist painter and theoretician Albert Gleizes
mounted a defence in terms of their straightforward patriotism. For further
material on the patriotic intentions of the cubist avant garde see: Kenneth
Silver, Esprit de Corps, Princeton 1989; David Cottington,
Cubism in the Shadow of War: the Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris
1905-1914, New Haven 1998; Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against
the Twentieth Century, New Haven
2001.
16. Pierre Cabanne,
Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, London 1971, p.28.
17. Caumont and Gough-Cooper
1993, unpaginated (16 November 1919).
18. Alice Goldfarb Marquis,
Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare, Boston 2002, p.17.
19. I am grateful to Jennifer
Gough-Cooper for the term ‘insufficences
cardiaque’.
20. Sanouillet
and Peterson eds., 1973, p.23.
21. Matisse ed., 1983,
unpaginated. The note is classified as note 110.
22. Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Alexina and Marcel Duchamp Papers, box 1, folder 6, 1905-6.
23. I am grateful for Jacqueline
Matisse Monnier’s insight here.
24. For the French Nuclear
testing, please see:
news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/27/newsid_2985000/2985200.stm
25.
Michael Duffy, ‘Magical Slang: Ritual, Language and Trench Slang of the
Western Front’, 2001, published at www.firstworldwar.com/features/slang.htm
26. In fact, the Puteaux weapon
was superseded in 1907 by the similarly ineffective St. Etienne machine gun,
which was withdrawn from service soon after the beginning of the war. In its
turn, the St Etienne took its place in the list of hardware that continued to
link with Duchamp’s preoccupation over military failure. He described the
‘Green Box’ of 1934, as serving in the manner of a ‘St.
Etienne Catalogue’ for the ‘Large Glass’ which, is
pessimistically predicated on failure. For the St. Etienne Catalogue see Cabanne
1971, p.42
27. See Appendix 3.
28. Sanouillet and Peterson
eds., 1973, p.23.
29. At the
time of this note, the army was without field telephones. The money was only
voted for them in July 1914. For the French army in the initial stages of
Duchamp’s period of military preoccupation see Douglas Porch, The March
to the Marne: The French Army 1871-1914, Cambridge, 1981,
p.235.
30. Linda Henderson
develops this in relation to the dimensional speculations of the Puteaux cubists
in 1912 in Henderson 1999, p.98-9.
31. As well as Henderson and
Samaltanos who have already been cited, the journey is referred to in all of the
monographs on Duchamp dealing with the pre-war period. Alice Goldfarb Marquis
most recently described the journey in the following way: ‘During October
1912, Duchamp enjoyed a concentrated week of aesthetic speculations along with
verbal fun and games.’ (Marquis 2002 p.86.) The suggestion, here,
of a light-hearted outing is consistent with the prevailing literature on the
subject.
32. Caumont and
Gough-Cooper 1993, unpaginated, (26 October 1912).
33. Repartition et Emplacement
des Troupes de l’Armée Française (Troop Distribution and
Positions of the French Army), 1905. National Archive, Kew: TNA (PRO) WO33/363.
| Lons-le-Saunier | 25th, 44th Infantry, 53rd Territorial Infantry. |
| Chalons sur Saone | 56th, 59th Infantry. |
| Autun | 29th Infantry, 63rd, Territorial Infantry, Cavalry Training School |
| Auxerre | 4th, 17th Infantry, 37th Territorial Infantry. |
| Joigny | 1st Dragoons (2nd & 3rd Brigades). |
| Sens | 33rd Infantry, 89th Territorial Infantry. |
| Fontainebleau | 1st Dragoons (1st Brigade), 5th Transport, 34th Territorial Infantry, Engineers Training School. |
| Melun | 31st Infantry, 35th Territorial Infantry. 18th Dragoons. |
| Chateau de Vincennes | 1st, 2nd, 13th Artillery, 6th Territorial Artillery 5th Territorial Infantry, 23rd Chasseurs, Administrative Training School |
| Paris | 5th, 7th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 19th, 20th, 24th, 28th, 31st, 46th, 76th, 89th, 101st, 102nd, 103rd, 104th, 119th Infantry. 1st Cavalry Division, 1st, 2nd Cuirassiers, 1st, 4th Zouaves, 19th Transport. |
34. War Office, Report on
Foreign Manoeuvres, 1912, pp.24-32. National Archive, Kew: WO
33/618.
35. Harriet Janis and
Carroll Janis, Interview with Marcel Duchamp, 1953, unpublished
and unpaginated. I am grateful to Linda Henderson for making available this
text.
36. In a curious twist in the
reassessment of the moulin à café as one of the feared
weapons of the war, the machine gun’s staccato sound was appropriated by
the French poilus into the title of their front-line magazine,
onomatopoeically called ‘taca-taca-teuf-teuf ’.
37. Alfred Cobban, A History
of Modern France. Volume 3: 1871 – 1962, London 1965,
p.16.
38. Matisse ed., 1983,
unpaginated. The note is classified as note 109. My emphasis. The fuller text
reads: ‘This machine of 5 hearts will have to give birth to the headlight.
This headlight will be the child-God, rather like the primitives’
Jesus.’
39. Duchamp’s 1909 cartoon
illustration ‘Éxpérience ’ cited above needs to
be seen in this light. Before Duchamp had arrived at his alter ego Rrose
Sélavy, he considered adopting a Jewish name. ‘and the first
idea that came to me was to take a Jewish name. I was a Catholic, and it was a
change to go from one religion to another! ’, Cabanne 1971, p.64.
40. Although the play between
‘enfant-phare’ and ‘le fanfare’ is frequently cited, the
important link with military marching orders has never been made. The earliest
citation that I have encountered is in John Golding, Marcel Duchamp: The
Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, London 1973, p.47.
41. Sanouillet and Peterson eds.
1973, p. 26.
42. André Breton,
Phare de la Mariée (Lighthouse of the Bride), 1934.
43. Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia,
Rencontres Avec Picabia, Apollinaire, Cravan, Duchamp, Arp, Calder, Paris
1977.
44. Gordon Home, The Motor
Routes of France, Part 1, London 1918.
45. Linda Henderson discusses an
article on the pleasures of driving at night, with the more powerful electric
headlights. However, this research suggests that electric headlamps, although
available, were left largely undeveloped for civilian vehicles in France until
1919. I am grateful to Christian Monnier of the Musée de l’Aventure
Peugeot for this information.
Christian Monnier is also the author of:
Catalogue Général des Moulins Peugeot &Cie,
Besançon, 1995, a work that details the manufacture of coffee mills by
the Peugeot company, from the 1840s. In 1912 Peugeot also manufactured the
standard infantry bayonet and of course bicycles and bicycle wheels;
Picabia’s car on the journey to the Jura, was almost certainly the
Peugeot 150, a race winning vehicle, capable of speeds up 129 kph and the
victor of numerous Grand Prix in 1912, as well as the Indianapolis 500 in 1913.
Picabia was photographed, the previous year in a Peugeot 141 sport model,
but this would have been too small to accommodate the passengers of the
‘Jura-Paris Road’.
46. Guillaume Apollinaire,
‘La Petite Auto’ in Calligrammes, Poèmes de la Paix et de
la Guerre 1913-16, (1918), Paris 1966, p.68. Francis Steegmuller,
Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters, London 1963, p.233.
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was delivered at the Society for Literature and Science 3rd European Conference: Conversation Entre les Arts et les Sciences: Nouvelles Synergies, at the Cité Internationale Universitaire, Paris in June 2004. It will inform one of the chapters in the author’s PhD on the conflicting interpretations of the ‘Jura-Paris Road’(Univerity of Wales, Newport). Many people need to be thanked for their encouragement while researching and writing this paper: Jacqueline Matisse Monnier and Linda Dalrymple Henderson first and foremost, but also friends and colleagues Bryony Dalefield, Robert Pepperell, Michael Punt and Steve Thompson.
Kieran Lyons is Programme Leader for the BA Fine Art Contemporary Media at University of Wales, Newport.
Tate Papers Spring 2006 © Kieran Lyons
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