+ Expand

Provenance: Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Paris.
Edmond Bomsel, Paris.
Dr. Emile-Jean Bomsel, Paris.
Anonymous sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 25 November 1982, lot 51.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

+ Expand

Exhibited: Paris, Musée Pédagogique, Perennité de l'Art Gaulois, February - March 1955, no. 465.
Paris, Bateau-Lavoir, Dessins Cubistes, June - July 1957.
London, The Tate Gallery, The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, June - July 1966, no. 84.
Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Les Duchamps, April - June 1967, no. 59; this exhibition later travelled to Paris, Musée national d'Art moderne, June - July 1967.
Philadelphia, Museum of Art, Marcel Duchamp, September 1973 - November 1973, no. 75 (illustrated p. 259); this exhibition later travelled to New York, Museum of Modern Art, December 1973 - February 1974 and Chicago, The Art Institute, March - April 1974.
Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, L'oeuvre de Marcel Duchamp, January - May 1977, no. 67 (illustrated p. 52).
Rome, Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, soprintendenza speciale alla galleria nazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Apollinaire e l'avan, November 1980 - January 1981.
Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró, Duchamp, February - April 1984, no. 34; this exhibition later travelled to Madrid, Sala de Exposiciones de la Caja de Pensiones, May - June 1984 and Cologne, Museum Ludwig, June - August 1984.
Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Marcel Duchamp, April - July 1993, n.n. (illustrated p. 126).

+ Expand

Literature: R. Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1967, no. 91 (illustrated pl. 53).
A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, London, 1969, no. 186 (illustrated p. 434).
A. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, la mariée mise à nu chez Marcel Duchamp, même, Paris, 1974, no. 36, p. 138 (illustrated pl. XX).
A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. II, New York, 1997, no. 245 (illustrated pp. 320, pl. 56, and 565).

+ Expand

Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE FRENCH COLLECTION
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
'Like Alice in Wonderland the young artist of tomorrow will pass through the looking glass of the retina to reach deeper mines of expression... to uncover new shock values which are and always will be the basis of a revolution in art' (Marcel Duchamp, 'Where Do We Go from Here,' Symposium at Philadelphia Museum College of Art, March 1961, first published in Studio International, 1973).

Formerly belonging to Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, 2 Nus, un fort et un vite (Two Nudes One Strong, One Swift) is one of very few completed drawings by Duchamp to remain in private hands. The first of three radical and groundbreaking works that Duchamp made in the spring of 1912 in preparation for his painting The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, this work is also the very first to articulate the unique and strange metaphysical world of allegory and eroto-mechanics that culminated in his Large Glass.

Marking a development away from the Cubo-Futurist-inspired study of motion that had characterised his previous painting - the notorious Nude Descending a Staircase No 2. that he had painted a month or two before, in January 1912 - 2 Nus, un fort et un vite marks the beginning of Duchamp's interest in rendering unseen elements of the world. This was a metaphorical non-abstract realm, as yet unexplored in the medium of painting, that was pioneered by Duchamp and Picabia at this time to which Gabrielle Buffet gave the name of the 'nonperceptible'.

In contrast to what Duchamp termed the 'static representation of movement' of his Nude Descending a Staircase, the emphasis in the three new drawings he made in the spring of 1912, (this work, The King and the Queen traversed by nudes at high speed and The King and the Queen surrounded by Swift Nudes) was primarily on speed and fluid motion.

In this, each of these works marked an important and extraordinary extension of the 'Elementary Parallelism' that Duchamp had used in Nude Descending a Staircase into a new, wider and seemingly multi-dimensional realm. 'Elementary Parallelism' had been Duchamp's unique system of rendering the motion of the body solely through dots or abstract 'lines of force' - a system that he had derived directly from the chronophotographic motion studies of Muybridge and Marey. Part of Duchamp's first attempts to make art that had little or nothing to do with the techniques or 'languages' of art, and mimicking the X-Rays of the then relatively new science of radiography, this technique, applied in Nude Descending... was still centred within the demonstrable movement of the body, being more-or-less a logical extension of imagined lines of movement. Like Giacomo Balla's 'lines of force' for example', Duchamp's 'Elementary Parallelism' was essentially an abstraction of visible reality that remained rooted in the realm of the visible world and, by extension therefore, the representational world of pictorial art. 2 Nus, un fort et un vite is the first of Duchamp's works where, in addition to its more poetic title - inscribed by the artist along the bottom of the work - becoming an important and integral part of the picture itself, the motion implied is more metaphysical than physical. For not only is one nude poetically described as 'strong' and the other 'swift,' but each was also intended to represent the King and Queen of the chess set. In this way the work becomes not just a mysterious meeting point between the art of representation and the strategic and conceptual logic of chess, but also, in that the drawing also represents a moving encounter between a male and female nude, a combination of what Duchamp has said were his primary interests at this time - motion and eroticism.
'Obviously the difference' (between this work and the Nude Descending a Staircase) Duchamp said, 'was the introduction of the strong nude and the swift nude. Perhaps it was a bit Futurist because by then I knew about the Futurists, and I changed it into a king and queen' (Marcel Duchamp, quoted in P. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1971, p. 35). 'I expected to render the idea of a strong king, or a male king and a feminine queen, a female queen', he later commented, 'and the nudes were not anatomical nudes, rather things floating around the King and Queen without being hampered by their materiality' (Marcel Duchamp quoted in A. Schwarz (ed.), The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 2nd revision, New York, 1970, p. 116).

While the concept of the King and the Queen (as yet unspecified in the title of this work) centred upon the notion of a strategic, symmetrical and erotic encounter, the 'use of nudes', as Duchamp also pointed out, 'completely removed any chance of suggesting an actual scene or an actual king and queen' (Marcel Duchamp, quoted in K. Kuh, The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, New York, 1962, p. 88).

Neither an abstraction nor a distortion from reality, these drawings by Duchamp recall the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci or the pictures of 17th Century alchemists in the way in which ideas, strategies and more abstracted form are all pictorially intertwined. The world that Duchamp describes in these works is one beyond the physical and the material - a world of hidden reality. Indeed, one of the main concepts invoked in this drawing is of the notion of dematerialisation - of the mystical, alchemical and even Einsteinian notion of the interaction of energy and matter.

This was a subject of much conjecture in the popular imagination of the early 20th Century, where the recent scientific discoveries of atomic particles, radiation and X-rays had revealed the hidden non-material essence of the universe. At its simplest, 2 Nus, un fort et un vite articulates two opposing nudes, one 'strong', definable, material and solid if also moving in the manner of the Nude descending... The other, the 'swift' nude is a dematerialized figure - a schematic construction of abstract lines articulating movement in the manner of a scientific diagram illustrating the path or orbit of a number of energized particles. The source of the later 'speeding' nudes that moved between the figures of the King and the Queen in the final painting, these 'lines of force' have been interpreted widely and variously as invoking electrons and the energy of electricity (Lynda Dalrymple Henderson), as meteors (Robert Lebel) or as the linear traces of the mysterious presence of the fourth dimension (Arturo Schwarz, Henderson). Robert Lebel considered them the illegitimate offspring of the King and Queen and others have seen in them an articulation of erotic energy symbolic and reflective of Duchamp's passion for the wife of his new friend Picabia, Gabrielle Buffet.

At the time he began working on 2 Nus, un fort et un vite Duchamp was also reading Gaston Pawlowski's recently published fantasy novel Voyage to the Land of the Fourth Dimension. This, and the revelation he experienced in the company of Picabia and Gabrielle Buffet when they saw a production of Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique in February 1912, led to Duchamp's breakaway from both the traditions of art and from his enclosed family background in Neuilly. It was the inclusion of humour and the irrational into the working aesthetic of the play that so impressed Duchamp about Impressions d'Afrique, how wordplay, coincidence and simple puns were used by Roussel to dictate both plot and structure. This, in the tradition of other 'irrationalists' such as Lautréamont, Rimbaud or Jarry for example proved a liberation for Duchamp and, as he said, 'delivered me from the whole 'physioplastic' past I had been trying to get out of' (Marcel Duchamp, Letter to Jean Suquet, December 1949, quoted in C. Cros, Marcel Duchamp, King's Lynn, 2006, p. 30).

Apollinaire wrote in the autumn of 1912 that 'Duchamp is the only painter of the modern school who concerns himself with the nude', but Duchamp's concentration on this traditional subject matter of the painter was ultimately to lead him away from painting altogether. As the new direction he took in 2 Nus, un fort et un vite illustrates, through his concentration on speed and the inner workings of motion, in a world of constantly moving particles, Duchamp discovered a transrational, pataphysical pictorial universe where absolutely anything was possible.

'The reduction of a head in movement to a bare line seemed to me defensible. A form passing through space would traverse a line; and as the form moved the line it traversed would be replaced by another line - and another and another. Therefore I felt justified in reducing a figure in movement to a line rather than to a skeleton. Reduce, reduce, reduce was my thought - but at the same time my aim was turning inward, rather than towards externals. And later, following this view, I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - to say what he wanted' (Marcel Duchamp, quoted in A. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. I, London, 1997, p. 20).

It is in this way that 2 Nus, un fort et un vite takes the first step towards not just the birth of Duchamp's Bride stripped bare and the story of the Large Glass, but also towards his development of the ready-mades and the beginnings of conceptual art.