Part II. The Transition from Painter to Artist as Engineer-Scientist, Fall 1912–1914

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple

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Part II. The Transition from Painter to Artist as Engineer-Scientist, Fall 1912–1914

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works

Part II

Author

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22458

Part II. The Transition from Painter to Artist as Engineer-Scientist, Fall 1912–1914

3. From Painter to Engineer, I: Depersonalization of Drawing Style and Adoption of Human-Machine Analogies, Fall 1912–1913

4 .The Lure of Science: Imaginative Scientists (Crookes, Tesla) and Scientific Imaginations (Jarry, Roussel)

5. From Painter to Engineer, II: A Rousselian Dialogue with the Equipment of Science and Technology Begins, 1913–1914

Book details

BOOKDuchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00306

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22450

Between 1915 and 1923, Marcel Duchamp created one of the most mystifying art works of the early twentieth century: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass). The work is over nine feet tall, and on its glass surface Duchamp used such unorthodox materials as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, and dust, in addition to more conventional oil paint and varnish. Duchamp's declared subject is the relation between the sexes, but his protagonists are biomechanical creatures: a "Bride" in the upper panel hovers over a "Bachelor Apparatus" in the panel below, stimulating the "Bachelors" with "love gasoline" for an "electrical stripping."

In preparation for the Large Glass, Duchamp wrote hundreds of notes, which he considered just as important as the work itself. He published 178 during his lifetime, but over 100 more notes relating to the Glass were discovered and published following his death. In this landmark book, Linda Henderson provides the first systematic study of the Large Glass in relation to the entire corpus of Duchamp's notes for the project. Since Duchamp declared his interest in creating a "Playful Physics," she focuses on the scientific and technological themes that pervade the notes and the imagery of the Large Glass. In doing so, Henderson provides an unprecedented history of science as popularly known at the turn of the century, centered on late Victorian physics. In addition to electromagnetic waves, including X-rays and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy, the areas of science to which Duchamp responded so creatively ranged from chemistry and classical mechanics to thermodynamics, Brownian movement, radioactivity, and atomic theory. Restored to its context and amplified by the information in the posthumously published notes, the Large Glass appears far richer and more multifaceted and witty than had ever been suspected.

Henderson also includes a close examination of Duchamp's literary and artistic models for creative invention based on science, including Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Frantisek Kupka, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The book will not only redefine scholarship on Duchamp and the Large Glass, but will be a crucial resource for historians of literature, science, and modernism.

Author

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Print publication date September 2005 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780691123868

EISBN 9780300267822

Illustrations 197

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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