Dada Mama on Sale

January 28, 2010 A significant collection of work from Duchamp associate, collaborator and "dada mama" Beatrice Wood (1893-1998) is being sold off on Sunday in a California auction house near the town of Ojai, where she spent the last half-century of her life. Wood met Duchamp in New York during World War I and features in several episodes from his first residence in the city; she was a member of the "Arensberg Circle" and co-edited The Blind Man. Films derived from her adventures include Jul.. read more...

Few Words, Many Pictures

January 27, 2010 While millions of words have been written about Marcel Duchamp, some of the most compelling demonstrations of admiration for his work are wordless or nearly so, letting the images speak for themselves in their own language. An Australian graphic artist recently put together just such a tribute with illustrations from the fairly rare 1991 Kyoto exhibition catalog Marcel Duchamp Graphics. Those who don't read Japanese would have trouble following the word but all can respond to.. read more...

The Man Behind the Female Joker, or Where He Gets His Ideas

January 26, 2010 Critical and popular prurience surrounding the career of Leonardo da Vinci has reached the point where art historians have asked permission to exhume the artist's earthly remains and compare the parameters of his skull to the features of his famous Mona Lisa, a somewhat literal-minded attempt to ground the "sources" of a work of art in biography and ultimately genetics. At stake is the supposition that Mona Lisa's famously enigmatic allure derives from the figure's origin as .. read more...

Influencing Jasper Johns

January 25, 2010 The intellectual influence of Marcel Duchamp over Jasper Johns and other painters who came of age in the 1950s is generally known, but decoding the heritage of various Flags, Targets and other "readymade" images on canvas -- not to mention the monumental According To What -- can still provoke surprise and generate insight into Johns' career. An ongoing exhibit at Washington's National Gallery of Art does exactly that. (Through April 4 at the National Gallery of Art.).. read more...

Muybridge, Marey, Marcel & the Matrix

January 22, 2010

The pioneering motion photography of 19th century researchers like Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge (both 1830-1904) had an explicit influence on the epochal Nude Descending a Staircase and its painterly representation of motion through time. A human lifetime later, the stroboscopic universe had evolved into the bullet-time aesthetic made famous in films like The Matrix.

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Dali’s Chess: Pushing Fingers

January 21, 2010 Enthusiasm for chess ran deep in Duchamp's circles, who spent thousands of hours playing the game and, in some cases, constructing their own unique sets. Salvador Dali engaged the game in 1964 by designing a set for the American Chess Federation that alludes to the function of the chess player -- omniscient and eternal from the perspective of the gameboard, meting life and death in pursuit of an abstract agenda -- as surrogate for the divine.Naturally, Dali developed this the.. read more...

Matta in Miami

January 20, 2010 A major -- not to mention rare -- retrospective of the work of Roberto Matta sheds new light on the Chilean-born painter's oneiric and somewhat obscure eight-decade career. Miami dealer Gary Nader has assembled 50 canvases that span the 1930s to the 1990s to chart Matta's early Surrealist associations, encounters with Marcel Duchamp, apocalyptic "inscape" period, pre-Columbian and political influences and beyond.(Through February 22 at Gary Nader Fine Art.).. read more...

Chess & The Origin of the World

January 19, 2010 On the trail of Marcel Duchamp, art dealer Francis Naumann has diverted his professional attention from chess -- having curated the groundbreaking "Art of Chess" show last year -- to works that, like Etant Donnes, express the character of the vagina. "They are at opposite ends of the spectrum and, as it turns out, opposite ends of the body," he recently told ARTNEWS. "But I see a connection, through Duchamp.""The Visible Vagina" will be on display at both Naumann's uptown gal.. read more...

Christie’s Presents “Art of the Surreal”

January 14, 2010 On February 2, Christie's will hold its 10th annual Art of the Surreal sale dedicated to the work of artists associated with Andre Breton and his circle. Works up for auction include two paintings by Marcel Duchamp's lifelong friend Francis Picabia -- one, Nerii, Duchamp characterized as pointing the way into a third dimension, and is expected to bring $800,000 or more. Multiple canvasses by Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico are also represented, as are single w.. read more...