Marcel Duchamp and by Takiguchi
Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp) in Wilson-Lincoln System (Schwarz, 344), 1967
Lenticular print on thin white board. Hand signed by Marcel Duchamp. Date, title and number on label verso.
12 7/10 × 10 1/10 inches
Edition 8/60
Hand-signed by artist, Hand signed by Marcel Duchamp in blue ink recto. Sticker label verso bears printed title, edition number, year and description.
Printed by Shuzo Takiguchi, published in Tokyo.
Catalogue Raisonne Reference: "The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp" by Arturo Schwarz, Plate 344
Provenance: This was part of the Deluxe Artist portfolio, "To and From Rrose Sélavy"; this will be the first time the work has been separated from the portfolio
Please refer to the attached video to see this 3-D piece in person
Eager to share Marcel Duchamp with Japanese audiences, Shuzo Takiguchi - a Japanese-born poet, critic, and artist with ties to Surrealist circles, assembled an international portfolio of graphic works by various artists with strong ties to Duchamp, to accompany the deluxe version of his monograph, "To and From Rrose Sélavy (aka Marcel Duchamp)." The present work - Takiguchi's own piece, a lenticular double portrait - combines Rrose Sélavy's signature with Man Ray's 1930 profile of Duchamp. Its subject, Marcel Duchamp, then signed this work in pencil. Its title, "Rrose Sélavy in the Wilson-Lincoln System", refers to Duchamp's Green Box note describing a two-way, changeable portrait of presidents Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. Rrose Selavy is, famously, Marcel Duchamp's pseudonym and alter ego. Duchamp died before Takiguchi's book was completed, so this print is one of the very last graphic works that has been hand signed by Marcel Duchamp. It was published in Japan, and is a very elusive work stateside. Another edition of this work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The National Portrait Gallery and other major institutional collections. This work is fully referenced in the catalogue raisonne "The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp" by Arturo Schwarz, Plate 344, describing the work as follows: "Rrose Selavy in the Wilson Lincoln System (a double image plastic plate with, on the background, Man Ray's portrait of Duchamp, and superimposed,, Rrose Selavy's autograph signature repeated four times, signed lower right in blue ink: Marcel Duchamp, an original embossed print...."
More about Marcel Duchamp:
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born July 28, 1887, near Blainville, France. In 1904, he joined his artist brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, in Paris, where he studied painting at the Académie Julian until 1905. Duchamp’s early works were Post-Impressionist in style. He exhibited for the first time in 1909 at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in Paris. His paintings of 1911 were directly related to Cubism but emphasized successive images of a single body in motion. In 1912, he painted the definitive version of Nude Descending a Staircase; this was shown at the Salon de la Section d’Or of that same year and subsequently created great controversy at the Armory Show in New York in 1913.
Duchamp’s radical and iconoclastic ideas predated the founding of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1916. By 1913, he had abandoned traditional painting and drawing for various experimental forms, including mechanical drawings, studies, and notations that would be incorporated in a major work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23; also known as The Large Glass). In 1914, Duchamp introduced his readymades—common objects, sometimes altered, presented as works of art—which had a revolutionary impact upon many painters and sculptors. In 1915, Duchamp traveled to New York, where his circle included Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, with whom he founded the Société Anonyme in 1920, as well as Louise and Walter Arensberg, Francis Picabia, and other avant-garde figures.
After playing chess avidly for nine months in Buenos Aires, Duchamp returned to France in the summer of 1919 and associated with the Dada group in Paris. In New York in 1920, he made his first motor-driven constructions and invented Rrose Sélavy, his feminine alter ego. Duchamp moved back to Paris in 1923 and seemed to have abandoned art for chess but in fact continued his artistic experiments. From the mid-1930s, he collaborated with the Surrealists and participated in their exhibitions. Duchamp settled permanently in New York in 1942 and became a United States citizen in 1955. During the 1940s, he associated and exhibited with the Surrealist émigrés in New York, and in 1946 began Etant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau 2. le gaz d’éclairage, a major assemblage on which he worked secretly for the next 20 years. He died October 2, 1968, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
-Courtesy Guggenheim Museum
