| Artist: | Duchamp, Marcel |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes | |
| Date of Work: | 1912 | |
| Nationality: | French-American | |
| Context: | Pre WWI | |
| Movement: | references both cubism and futurism, foreshadows dada | |
| Medium: | oil paint on canvas | |
| Subject: the king and queen are references to the game of chess, but they also reference man and woman, male and female. Duchamp alludes here to a passage or movement between them when he adds to the title, "Traversed by Swift Nudes." This cluster of ideas--man and woman traversed or crossed by swift nudes--is the first foreshadowing of "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even," the large work he will begin three years later in 1915. At this point, what we see are cubist forms that suggest the human figure crossed or traversed by the machine: these are either humans acting mechanically, or machines acting all too human. By mentioning "nudes" in the title, Duchamp was deliberately trying to provoke the Italian Futurists, who had forbid anyone to paint the nude for 10 years. By suggesting movement through the traversal of swift nudes, he was at the same time provoking the French Cubists, who wanted to keep their work distanced from the Futurists, especially in terms of the representation of movement. Duchamp, who will become a Dadaist when war breaks out, is already questioning the assumptions of the bourgeoisie by doing a parody of their cherished, sentimental idea of humanity, showing it as a species devolving into the mechanical; he is also challenging the assumptions and limits of the avant-garde by revealing the turf wars between competing "isms." In these respects, this image compares to his scandalous "Nude Descending the Staircase" from the same year. Style: Duchamp is absorbing cubism for his own purposes. Though he uses faceted planes recalling Cezanne's passage, it is a different, more conceptual form of passage that he has in mind: the passage through space and time, and from one state to another. His cubism takes on a mechanical "edge" here as Duchamp already begins to remove the notion of the artist's personal touch by adopting a nonpersonal, more mechanical style. "A mechanical drawing has no taste in it." He is not after a machine-like beauty, thus; his machine "aesthetic" is more an ironic take on art of personal expression or retinal focus (imitating only what the eye sees). Through the de-personalized, mechanical style he adopts, Duchamp begins to map the human onto the machine, a theme that will develop more fully in Dada's protest of the war-machine. Context: pre-WWI and pre-Dada, but Duchamp's sense of irony and provocation are already apparent in his shift away from personal expression and retinal painting to an art that is more conceptually-driven and challenging of pre-conceived assumptions about what art is and should be. | ||
