The Influencers of Their Day

The word “salon,” for a starry convocation of creative types, intelligentsia, and patrons, has never firmly penetrated English. It retains a pair of transatlantic wet feet from the phenomenon’s storied annals, chiefly in France, since the eighteenth century. So it was that the all-time most glamorous and consequential American instance, thriving in New York between 1915 and 1920, centered on Europeans in temporary flight from the miseries of the First World War. Their hosts were Walter Arensberg, a Pittsburgh steel heir, and his wife, Louise Stevens, an even wealthier Massachusetts textile-industry legatee. The couple had been thunderstruck by the 1913 Armory Show of international contemporary art, which exposed Americans to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and, in particular, Marcel Duchamp. Made the previous year, his painting “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” a cunning mashup of Cubism and Futurism, with its title hand-lettered along the bottom, was the event’s prime sensation: at once insinuating indecency and making it hard to perceive, what with the image’s scalloped planes, which a Times critic jovially likened to “an explosion in a shingle factory.”

The Arensbergs’ salon, which convened nightly at their spacious apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street, was supercharged in June, 1915, by the twenty-seven-year-old Duchamp’s arrival in New York, where, to his astonishment, he was greeted at the dock by a horde of journalists alert to his notoriety and to the public’s appetite for news of exotic foreigners. His charisma concentrated and accelerated a ferment in sophisticated American knowledge, creativity, and taste. How would the modernizing New York art world have evolved had the Arensbergs not existed—or if Duchamp hadn’t made his way to their door? Differently, for sure, and with considerably less social synergy. One participant, the rich and flamboyant mondaine Louise Norton (who was soon to be a sometime lover of Duchamp’s), proposed a collective credo as “Beauty for the eye, satire for the mind, depravity for the senses!” Attendance was nonexclusive; friends of friends were welcomed.

The Arensbergs nourished local modernist talents (not least with free food and drink) like Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, Charles Sheeler, John Covert, and, fatefully, Man Ray, who became a boon friend and lifelong ally of Duchamp’s on both sides of the Atlantic. Other frequenters included the writer, photographer, and promoter of the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten; the poets William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens; and a remarkable roster of such formidable women as the dance artist Isadora Duncan; the ardent promoter of modern art Katherine S. Dreier; the multitalented British-born radical Mina Loy; the wealthy faux-naïf painter and intentional spinster Florine Stettheimer, along with her two likewise chaste and endearing sisters; the all-around outrageous German proto-performance artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven; and the rebellious daughter of straitlaced New York socialites named Beatrice Wood.

Wood, while by any canonical measure a lesser figure on the scene, is effectively the protagonist and certainly the most appealing subject of “Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love, and Art,” a gossipy account of the period by the cultural historian and novelist Ruth Brandon. What is left for a writer to explore about the Arensberg group, which has been anatomized by critics, curators, biographers, and memoirists, especially during recent decades in which Duchamp rose to touchstone status in the legacy of modern art, rivalling Picasso? His cachet has ebbed a bit lately, as new artists, critics, and the art market go big for resurgent painting and sculpture, but there’s no shaking off his inception of what amounted to a Copernican revolution in art, from a secure set of disciplines to an unmoored category of anything an artist might say it is.

Brandon’s recourse is sex, substantiated by relatively unmined archives of diaries, journals, and letters linking mostly French males to mostly American women. The emphasis may add little to art history, but it contributes a fair amount to what the milieu was like for a shifting cast of characters who, as a self-aware constituency of what we now call influencers, focussed and intensified a transformative Zeitgeist. Glimpses into their romantic entanglements provide a flickering, you-are-there perspective that is more entertaining, at least, than academic analyses of their artistic bents and ramifications.

Wood met Duchamp by chance in 1916, in New York, while on a visit to the hospital room of the French avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse, who was recuperating from a broken foot. (Varèse later married Louise Norton.) Wood had been invited along by a journalist, Alissa Franc, whom, naïvely as it would turn out, she regarded as a loyal friend. Wood was twenty-three and, after two years of studying acting and art in prewar Paris, desperate for a life in the arts, or perhaps for any life not reliant on her hovering parents. Her élan is legendary. James Cameron has said that he based Rose, the heroine of his movie “Titanic,” partly on her. Wood’s age, social class, and attitude all fitted the character, although she travelled on more fortunate liners. When I imagine her in a peopled room, she is in Technicolor, and the others, Duchamp included, run to tones of gray.

There is something allegorical as well as touching about Wood’s self-willed activities as regards certain haps and mishaps of an American élite that strove to become cosmopolitan by welcoming foreign avant-garde sensibilities to these arguably benighted shores. But her story is more than simply illustrative. Hellbent on breaking free of the expectations of her upbringing, Wood seems to me a singular, wild-card creative personality of the twentieth century.

Duchamp was enchanted but without romantic intent. He introduced Wood to the Arensberg group, where she was an immediate hit. He gave her the use of his studio, which the Arensbergs had rented to him on a promise of first dibs on future works of his. There she made deft, witty drawings undisturbed by the relentless hysterics of her mother, who counted on proper upper-crust matrimony, loathed bohemians, and was only further alarmed by Duchamp’s disarming suavity when Wood brought him home for dinner. Poor mom. Whatever she urged upon her daughter, Wood predictably did the opposite. Falling into bed with Duchamp, she later recalled their first encounter, cited in “Duchamp: A Biography,” by Calvin Tomkins, as having come about “in the most natural way. . . . He was gentle in that as he was in everything else.” But, for the Arensberg chronicle, the cardinal point is their friendship—the French magus and the gamier avatar of Henry James’s Daisy Miller.

Wood posed a problem for Duchamp by falling deeply in love with him. She was hardly alone in this among the women he met throughout his life, but the relationship was complicated by his particular and even avuncular fondness for her and by his shyness of commitments. He successfully engineered a transferal of her affections to a French writer friend who was also in New York, Henri-Pierre Roché, whom Brandon succinctly describes as an “artistic hanger-on and compulsive womanizer” with a recurring interest in the wives and mistresses of other men. Roché and Wood kept daily diaries, yielding abundant grist for Brandon. Duchamp, idolized by both of them, registers as the fulcrum of their affair, exemplifying his impact on the lives and, to varying degrees, the art of the many people whom he amazed.

In New York, Duchamp emerged as the Olympian antihero of modernism whom we salute today. Still, he haunts rather than advances Brandon’s narrative, as an unfailingly charming, fun-loving presence, but not as a man so much as a shadowy affect. He grew up in a richly cultured family. Two older brothers became prominent artists: the painter Jacques Villon and the extraordinary sculptor, who died too young, Raymond Duchamp-Villon. A younger sister whom he adored, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, also took up art, as a Dadaist in several mediums. Ever cerebral—his strongest subject at school was math, and he delighted in games, puzzles, and ribald humor—Duchamp was educated in art but, after tentative stabs at painting, took no interest in rivalling his brothers. “Nude Descending,” instantly an icon of modernist chic, was one of his last canvases. Renouncing painting as a tired medium that was trivially “retinal,” he embarked on startling mind games, notably by presenting common objects as art—“readymades,” he dubbed them.

The most famous of those is “Fountain,” an inverted store-bought urinal, crudely signed “R. Mutt 1917,” that Duchamp submitted to a show at the Society of Independent Artists. Recent scholarship indicates that he may have got the idea from von Freytag-Loringhoven, who had emigrated from Germany in 1910 and acquired her title from her third marriage. (Later a collaborator and lover of Djuna Barnes, the Baroness had many outré, mostly exhibitionist impulses, such as being filmed by Duchamp and Man Ray shaving her pubic hair.) The “Fountain” that you see at the Museum of Modern Art is not the original, if that designation for an infinitely repeatable jape even counts for anything. Duchamp took no pains to preserve the first iteration. He enjoyed and encouraged the furor that resulted, but said that he expected it to be fleeting, destined for oblivion. He may have been as slow as others were to realize that he had lit a long fuse for concatenating detonations in future artistic and intellectual culture.

“Fountain” was turned down by the show’s organizers despite a stated policy of accepting submissions from anyone, for a fee of six dollars. Among the blackballers was Katherine Dreier, who rued the decision when she learned of the work’s author. In 1920, Dreier collaborated with Duchamp and Man Ray in the formation, in New York, of a modernism-evangelizing organization, dubbed the Société Anonyme. Duchamp supported himself, when necessary, by giving French lessons and serving as a private art dealer, primarily in sculptures by Constantin Brancusi that became costly catnip for daring collectors. A growing demand for the far-out and, in Brancusi’s case, the transcendently beautiful, capitalized inventory. But the Arensbergs served as Duchamp’s default sponsors.

The rejection of “Fountain” confirmed Duchamp’s already temperamental disdain for artists’ groups. He parodied them, in league with his bosom crony the Cuban French painter Francis Picabia (given to “fast cars, opium, and drink,” Brandon writes), by initiating a facetious movement—New York Dada, alluding to the artistic insurrection that had erupted in Zurich in 1916. Never conspicuously serious, Duchamp cultivated a novel tone for art: call it seriously unserious. He had been inspired by the methodical nonsense of the French literary renegade Raymond Roussel, who built lengthy novels and plays around arbitrary puns. Duchamp’s modus operandi was to be recognized without being understood—impenetrably deadpan. He required an audience, positing that art works, hazarded by artists, are completed in the perception of viewers. Americans supplied him with something like a focus group for that premise.

Brandon dutifully hits familiar high points of the Arensberg saga. Walter, a likable eccentric, spent his life endeavoring to prove, by way of cryptic codes, that Francis Bacon had written the works of Shakespeare. Louise, musically talented and given to entertaining her guests at the piano but averse to performing in public, was the perfect doyenne for spirited conversation and inevitable dalliances. Duchamp’s arcane intellect enthralled Walter. Having bid just too late to acquire “Nude Descending,” he bought it years later from the San Francisco lawyer who had beaten him to the punch. And he didn’t miss much of the artist’s sporadic later works, as Duchamp almost kept his famous pledge to give up on art altogether in favor of chess (at which he came to rate as a master, short of grandmaster status).

The Arensberg collection was eventually donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum also holds the laborious project that preoccupied Duchamp throughout his New York years, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”—a large, fearsomely recondite standing array of gnomic images in various materials, mainly lead wire between panes of glass. Picabia’s wife, the writer Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia, described it as a work in which, without touching one another, “machine organisms have extremely human adventures.” Subsequent efforts to interpret the piece, consulting a wealth of enigmatic notes and diagrams that Duchamp made while conceiving it, have roiled scholars ever since. In my experience, it is more to be gawked at than quite relished, but it remains epically unusual.

Beatrice Wood, who was bilingual and a willing diplomat, actively collaborated in New York Dada. In Brandon’s book, she glows from a gem of a photograph, sporting a broad-brimmed hat, with Duchamp and Picabia on an outing to Coney Island in 1917. That year, she was listed as an editor, along with Louise Norton and Duchamp, of little magazines advancing the conceit, The Blind Man and Rongwrong, which were supported by the major photographer, sage art dealer, and champion of all things modern, Alfred Stieglitz. In the second issue of Blind Man, Wood defended “Fountain” by penning—or perhaps translating from Duchamp—an immortal witticism: “As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are plumbing and her bridges.” Also in 1917, Duchamp enhanced a drawing by Wood, of a woman bathing, by gluing a bar of soap atop the crotch. Shown publicly, the work precipitated a flurry of satisfying indignation. Outraging or, at least, tantalizing American art folk was like shooting fish in a barrel.

I am not a Marcel Duchamp enthusiast, though I’m forever in awe of his cast of mind and, oh my, his cleverness. His sparse production can’t contain him. Ad-hoc ideas that for him were amusing, sneakily hostile, and attended by a stubborn indifference to their meaning, if any, aren’t fungible. They evoke a hobby more than a vocation. The practically scientific detachment that was his second nature became a posture for subsequent artists who kept—and still keep—taking cues from him, the most profoundly comprehending of whom has been the protean painter, sculptor, and printmaker Jasper Johns. Others, termed conceptualists, have drawn on his authority for varieties of art that are more or less used up in thinking about them, whatever their material trappings.

I am partial to the retinal. Duchamp’s disdain for painting came to be weaponized by university-trained artists and theorists who took being as blind as bats to be a good thing. But give me anything by Matisse—or by Johns, who never subordinates the visual beauty of things to the ideas that inform them—in favor of any readymade, even the most beguiling, such as a dangling snow shovel entitled “In Advance of the Broken Arm” (1915), which Duchamp created during his first winter in New York. Pairing banal objects with poetic captions, he activated polar extremes of objectivity and subjectivity with nothing in the middle. The trope became a standing test case of what is required to qualify anything as “art,” which turns out to be no more or less than its acceptance as such by one or another institutional agency—a designated burr under the saddle of traditional connoisseurship.

Members of the Arensberg circle found Duchamp’s subversive jeux d’esprit a capital diversion. Their affection for him shines in a jolly painting by Florine Stettheimer, reproduced in Brandon’s book, that memorializes a picnic for his thirtieth birthday, in 1917. Everybody is on hand—except Wood. Perhaps still bruised from the humiliating end, the previous year, of her affair with Roché and touchy about the group’s knowledge of it, she spent the day at the country home of other friends. Duchamp arrived late, in a red roadster driven by Picabia. He stands alone in the picture, the tall and taciturn cynosure of the occasion.

Duchamp’s love life, gamely traced by Brandon before, during, and after the Arensberg days, was low key, bracketed by an unrequited passion for Buffet-Picabia early on and, four decades later, by a consuming affair with Maria Martins, a sculptor and the wife of the Brazilian Ambassador to the United States. That ardor also came to naught, despite his pleas. In between, declaring himself “antimarriage but not antiwomen,” he radiated an air of gallant reserve in romance as in art. For a spell, in New York, he came to prefer the company of the Stettheimer sisters and other undemanding older women. His favorite, Ettie Stettheimer, detected loneliness beneath his aplomb: “poor little floating atom,” she characterized him, tenderly.

As reported by Brandon in an epilogue to her book, Duchamp married an unprepossessing rich woman in 1927, in Paris, with Picabia as best man. The union reads cynically, as a financial stopgap. It lasted six months. For part of his time in New York, he inhabited an apartment on Fourteenth Street furnished with little more than a chair and a chessboard. His final years were enriched by a mutually happy marriage with Alexina (Teeny) Matisse, the smart, vivacious ex-wife of Henri Matisse’s youngest son. Duchamp had taken U.S. citizenship. He and Teeny lived on West Twelfth Street, bordering Greenwich Village. He was hospitable though scarcely informative—a courteous sphinx—to inquisitive callers.

When Duchamp died, in 1968, while visiting a second home in France, he left behind as a parting shot a final magnum opus, on which he had worked in secret for twenty years: “Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas.” This piece is also in Philadelphia now. You peer through a set of peepholes in a decrepit brick-framed door at a realistically sculpted, legs-spread naked woman without pubic hair, her face not visible, holding a lighted gas lamp aloft as a motorized artificial waterfall pours forth in the background. The work eludes pornography with characteristic sang-froid, evoking sex in a vein that is more forensic than lubricious.

As with his earlier cross-dressings as a female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy—sumptuously photographed by Man Ray—Duchamp’s own sexuality could seem as much a readymade for him as any material object. I don’t know that this penchant quite comes through in his pair of would-be masterworks, “Bride” and “Given.” They are so strange in so many ways as to paralyze exegesis. Duchamp’s popular prestige resides in the bare thought of him, known for being unknowable. His life and his art chase each other around a mulberry bush of bestirred, never satiated curiosity. His reticence inconveniences Brandon’s soap-operatic preoccupation with romantic and sexual matters.

We learn more from Brandon than we might like of Henri-Pierre Roché, whose one claim to fame is the novel “Jules et Jim” (1953), about two friends in love with an impulsive woman who, liking them both, resolves the imbroglio by killing herself along with one of the pair. François Truffaut adapted the book for his ravishing film, in 1962. Brandon debunks an apparently frequent speculation that Roché based the tale on his relations with Wood and Duchamp (which he did set out to recast in a novel, “Victor,” that was left incomplete upon his death, in 1959). In truth, “Jules et Jim” drew on another erotic triangle that involved a German poet friend and, off and on for thirteen years until 1933, the poet’s wife. Brandon opines that in each case the prevailing love—if not sexual—interest for Roché was the man.

Roché’s liaison with Wood was torrid but short-lived, lasting about two months in 1916. It was corrupted by Roché’s regular betrayals with Louise Arensberg, who took license from Walter’s concurrent peccadilloes, and with Wood’s journalist intimate Alissa Franc, who seems to have harbored a festering envy of her more magnetic friend. Franc dropped hints of the situation to Wood, but it isn’t clear how Wood finally wised up. Brandon’s documentation of the goings on is so replete, and she is so eager to show it off, that the brief episode dominates “Spellbound by Marcel.” Still, Roché was an avid tourist, and he and Wood made a wondrous toy of the city with such outings as a round trip on the Staten Island Ferry. Dates and places of their assignations cascade.

In 1919, Wood married a Belgian theatre manager in Montreal. She had gone there in pursuit of an acting career that then fizzled. She performed, she said, strictly for money to escape dependence on her parents. The groom turned out to be a bigamist, with a wife and child in Brussels, who repeatedly borrowed from the ever-obliging Arensbergs, behind Wood’s back, with lies about an incipient business windfall that concealed his disastrous gambles on the New York Stock Exchange. The already tepid marriage, having been undertaken at least partly because Wood’s mother deplored it, was annulled.