Photograph of Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz at the Pasadena Retrospective in 1963-Courtesy of Mme. Jacqueline Matisse Monnier. Photo © 1963 Julian Wasser
“Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable.”
“We can take of the same [four-dimensional] figure several perspectives from different points of view” Henry Poincaré
Gerald Holton, Henri Poincaré, Marcel Duchamp and Innovation in Science and Art, 2000.
La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre)- 1915–1923.
Fig. 3. From Marcel Duchamp, Notes and Projects for the Large Glass, Arturo Schwartz, ed. (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1969. © 2001 Artists
Rights Society [ARS}, New York/ADAGP, Paris.)
“The set of these 3-dimensional perceptions of the 4-dimensional figures would be the foundation for the reconstruction of the 4-dimensional figure.” Marcel Duchamp.
The Large Glass «is a humorous allegory of sexual quest cast in scientific/ technological language: a four-dimensional, biomechanical Bride hangs in the upper half of the Glass ever beyond the reach of the mechanical Bachelors, who are confined to the three-dimensional, gravity-bound realm below. Unlike his friend Francis Picabia, Duchamp almost never replicated specific images from science and technology. Rather, he used visual and verbal metonymy to encode his scientific content and usually layered one meaning over another in individual components of the Glass. Duchamp’s models for his creative invention were the writers Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, and, like them, he was ever alert to the possibilities for humor (especially wordplay and visual and verbal punning) as he ranged through the milieu of science and technology. In his “painting of precision” and its accompanying notes, Duchamp fashioned a new identity for himself as a detached artist/engineer operating in the realm of the intellect— in deliberate contrast to his former Cubist colleagues, who by 1912 had embraced the philosophy of Henri Bergson and now promoted an art based on intuition, profound self-expression and the sensitive touch of the artist»
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Large Glass Seen Anew: Reflections of Contemporary Science and Technology in Marcel Duchamp’s “Hilarious Picture”, Princeton University Press, 1998.
Ver também: Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ.Press, 1998)
; um vídeo (cortesia Maryvonne de Jesus)
e Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp para animação do Grande Vidro