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Boxes & Coffee Grinders. One of Duchamp's newfound admirers, Pop Painter Jasper Johns, likes to remind scoffers of the cartoon caption, "O.K. So he invented fire—but what did he do after that?" In terms of sheer production, Duchamp is but a pint-sized Prometheus. His lifelong catalogue lists only 208 works. He once miniaturized all of his work that he thought worthwhile, and packaged this portable museum in dispatch cases (200 of them were sold). But as his current exhibition at Manhattan's Cordier & Ekstrom gallery* gives ample proof, his work struck the sparks that set others afire.
In retrospect, Duchamp's ready-mades paved the way for the esthetic appreciation of machine-made objects. These off-the-shelf items presage pop artists' use of beer cans and soup cans as objets d'art. His art in boxes anticipated the present-day boxes of Louise Nevelson and Joseph Cornell. Even his dazzling eye bafflers that spun at 33 r.p.m. are the ancestors of today's kinetic op art. And critics are far from convinced that all the ideas have been mined from his Bride, etc., the first industrial collage, a 5-ft. by 9⅔-ft. sandwich of windowpane within which snipped tin and copper forms (the suitors) float without overlapping, obediently awaiting the operation of a rotating coffee grinder that can, yet never will, unite them with the abstract floating bride.
Duchamp was clearly cut out to be an intellectual in the realm of art. As a young man, he experimented with painting in the manner of Toulouse-Lautrec, the Fauves, and even the cubists, only to abandon each. He rejected the romantic concept of the artist in smudgy smock and flowing cravat, abhorred the veneration of art given to official "masterpieces," decided that "oil painting is old hat and should be discarded forever." As the naturalists of Courbet's day had proved that anything could be a subject for art, Duchamp set out to prove that art could be made of anything. By taking all kinds of man-and machine-made objects, from bottle dryers to plumbing fixtures, removing them from their context, and exhibiting them as art, he made his point. And having made it, he quit.
''I gave up painting," says Duchamp today, "because I felt it was too retinal. It didn't go beyond the eye." A visitor to the U.S. since 1915 and citizen for the past decade, Duchamp and his second wife, Alexina ("Teeny"), nowadays play once a week at New York's London Terrace Chess Club. "Breathing is my prime occupation," he declares with a twinkle. "I am a respirateur." He is content to be a wry and impish commentator, and from his septuagenarian's viewpoint, he sees much to cheer.
icniV ad odranoeL. "The proof of good painting comes when intelligence is part of it," he believes, and adds: "Abstract expressionism was not intellectual at all for me. It is under the yoke of the retinal; I see no grey matter there. Jasper Johns, one of our lights, and Rauschenberg are much more than that; they have intelligence in addition to painting facilities. A technique can be learned, but you can't learn to have an original imagination."