A loss has been incurred, yet the last little paragraph is neither pathetic nor anguished, merely resigned: ‘Perhaps it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done.’ Bucephalus, like Prufrock, like Crispin, can no longer summon up the energy to fly in the face of reality, like Don Quixote. His flanks are at least unhampered by the thighs of any rider — yet we recall the high action of his legs as he strides up the staircase of the law-courts and feel the waste: a rider pressing into those flanks would at least have given him a goal, a sense of direction. Instead, he consoles himself by poring over ancient law books, though whether he does this out of a sense of duty, or desire, or merely to pass the time, the story does not say.
The fourth of my sad clowns comes in the form not of words but of images — and a very unusual image it is. Here is what its creator had to say about it many years later:
From Munich on, I had the idea of the Large Glass. I was finished with cubism … The whole trend of painting was something I didn't care to continue … There was no essential satisfaction for me in painting ever. And then of course I just wanted to react against what the others were doing, Matisse and all the rest, all that work of the hand. In French there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his ‘paw’. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.
Duchamp was to describe the work that he now (1914–21) embarked on as ‘a delay in glass’, but the title he gave it was: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (‘The Bride Laid Bare By Her Bachelors, Even’), an odd title couched in odd grammar, but not at all untypical of Duchamp and actually a good deal more comprehensible than some. On two large rectangular glass panels, one below the other, each encased in a metal frame, the whole free-standing, a number of elements are painted: in the top panel is the Bride herself, a wavy cloud lacking all clear outline, with three square holes in the middle, and, hanging from the left-hand side, something like a pulled-out wall socket, giving the whole a vaguely insect-like quality; in the lower panel there is a precisely painted larger-than-life chocolate-grinder (a faithful copy of a machine found by Duchamp in his native Rouen), a group of what could be stylised clothes-pegs, a kind of pulley contraption, and a number of circular diagrams such as one finds in opticians' offices, above which an eyehole has been cut into the glass.
It may help to recall Either/Or, the first part of which is spoken/written by a young man, a bachelor, only too aware of his historical condition and the impossibility of meaningful choice in today's world, and the second by a maturer man, a Judge, happily married, who argues that once the young man has made the leap into marriage, the transition from bachelor to husband, all his troubles will be solved. The problem is that the young man feels he has no grounds for choosing one woman rather than another, and, moreover, he has the sneaking suspicion that any choice would be a disaster, robbing him of life's most precious quality, freedom. Yet at the same time he acknowledges — and he is quite genuine here — that the Judge may well be right and that it is his fault that he cannot make the leap into marriage. The book, as the title implies, sets the two up against each other but refuses to occupy a position above both, from which it might be possible to adjudicate between them. Duchamp's Large Glass is his Either/Or. It is also his ‘Prufrock’, his ironical self-portrait as an artist in troubled times. It is both his farewell to painting and his examination, tongue in cheek as always, of why painting has reached the pass it has. It is the early twentieth-century version of Durer's Melencolia I.
The Bachelors below may grind out their chocolate, but they are clearly powerless to reach the Bride, just as the artist can no longer approach his sacred subject. The erotic subtext is clear and again typical of Duchamp, as it is of Sterne: the futile, mechanical, masturbation of the Bachelors will never lead to any congruence with the Bride, far less to any offspring. But this is perhaps too simple. After all, there is not one bridegroom or even fiancé, but a group of Bachelors — who perhaps are doomed to remain bachelors because what they long for cannot be attained. Thierry de Duve suggests that the idea of stripping the Bride bare relates to Duchamp's sense of the new moves towards abstraction, which painters like Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian were convinced would lay bare the essence of art (once figuration, the world, had been stripped away). He also suggests that the chocolate-grinder relates to the old notion, already touched on above, that once painters used to grind out their own colours, but now buy them ready-made. The chocolate grinder is thus both an emblem of industrialisation, that industrialisation which has rendered painting meaningless, and an emblem of a kind of pre-industrialisation (since now we more often buy our chocolate already ground), for which we are all, and artists in particular, so nostalgic.
But why ‘A delay in glass’? Partly of course because of the delay, which will stretch to infinity, between the desires of the Bachelors and the embrace of the Bride. But also because the work is so made that we cannot take it in at one go as we can all paintings, however complex, and however often we need to return to them to flesh out that initial ‘retinal’ impression. Because it is painted on glass and because the object is free-standing, as we look we see not only what is on the glass but also, through the glass, the room beyond and the other visitors looking at the art in this room. The peep-hole on the right-hand side of the lower panel is a further source of perplexity, for it implies an opaque surface, a closed door such as Duchamp will create for his last work, Etant Donnés (‘Being Given’), a wooden surface breached by a single tiny circular hole to which the eye can be put. Here, however, looking through the peep-hole, perhaps imagining that it will reveal some further, as yet unseen, vision, we see only what we could already see through the glass.
The work is extremely beautiful and meticulously made, Duchamp spending eight years transferring its elements — the Bride above and the ‘Bachelor Machine’ below — from sketches and preliminary works onto the two glass panels. The Large Glass, as it has come to be known, is also accompanied by boxes of detailed notes on physics, alchemy, metaphysics and much else, which — Duchamp being Duchamp — it is difficult to know whether to take seriously or as a spoof. They have of course, like the novels of Thomas Bernhard, to be taken both ways.
Today the original stands in the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art, but there is a copy by Richard Hamilton in Tate Modern in London. Yet, unlike Fountain, which both does not exist anywhere and yet can exist in multiple sets, the Philadelphia Glass is unique, and the story of why it is unique is wonderfully Duchampian. Duchamp finished The Large Glass in 1921, in time for it to be exhibited at a show in New York. In transit from Philadelphia to New York, however, the two glass panels, which had been laid one on top of the other but not well enough insulated, ground against each other and, when the work was removed from its packaging on arrival, both panels were found to be shattered. Duchamp was immediately summoned to see if he could repair the damage, but when he looked at it he let out a whoop of joy, for the work now had a giant rainbow of cracks on the top panel mirrored by a similar pattern on the lower one. And one can see why he was so delighted. For years he had been trying to bring chance into his work, but chance brought in by the artist is never exactly chance. Now chance had led to an unexpected copulation in the back of a van and the result was a beautiful pattern which bound the top panel to the lower, while, amazingly, leaving all the main elements of the object perfectly visible and the whole still capable of standing up. He could not have asked for more from the gods.