{"id":3026,"date":"2024-09-30T19:32:53","date_gmt":"2024-09-30T17:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/?p=3026"},"modified":"2024-09-30T20:01:27","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T18:01:27","slug":"dali-and-duchamp-in-cadaques","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/dali-and-duchamp-in-cadaques\/","title":{"rendered":"Dal\u00ed And Duchamp In Cadaqu\u00e9s"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dal\u00ed
Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Dal\u00ed and Duchamp in Cadaqu\u00e9s played chess at Bar Melit\u00f3n in the barren years after World War Two and collaborated on a secret project that only came to light after Duchamp\u2019s death in 1968.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dal\u00ed
marcel duchamp playing chess<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Salvador Dal\u00ed and Marcel Duchamp appear at first glance to have been opposites, but both were flag bearers of the avant-garde and dedicated to art as an intellectual pursuit. Dal\u00ed produced an endless torrent of paintings, sculptures, lithographs, movie sets, books and \u2018divine madness.\u2019 If you saw a baby hippopotamus walking through the square or a life-sized Lanvin chocolate mannequin being broken up to give to the children, you knew Dal\u00ed was in the midst of a \u2018happening\u2019. Duchamp was developing a new major work that evolved over many years and it was only through his private letters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

published after his death that it became known that Dal\u00ed<\/a> played an important role in the finished product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Normandy, France, in 1887, Marcel Duchamp was a key figure in Dada, the early 20th<\/sup> century movement that questioned conventional assumptions about what art should be and how it should be created. His 1912 Cubist painting \u2018Nude Descending a Staircase\u2019 captures movement perhaps better than any painting before or since and was originally rejected by the Cubists as being too \u2018Futuristic.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five years later, in 1917, Duchamp submitted for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York a standard white porcelain urinal he had bought at a plumbing store. He titled the object Fountain<\/em> and signed it R. Mutt. The proposition made by what became known as a \u2018readymade\u2019 wasn\u2019t \u2018This is Art,\u2019 as some critics expressed at the time, but the question: \u2018What is Art?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What exactly was a readymade? Duchamp explained that it was \u2018an everyday object raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist\u2019s act of choosing it.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fountain<\/em> was never shown in the main exhibition hall at the Grand Central Palace, only in a side room by appointment. The original was lost, but a photograph appeared in the Dada journal The Blind Man <\/em>and the urinal was soon recognised as a landmark of 20th<\/sup> century art. The suggestion that the artist-poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven had originated the idea for the urinal was rejected by art historians<\/a> and Duchamp commissioned 16 replicas now scattered in museums across the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This solitary object, pure white and inherently graceful like polished marble was the key that opened Pandora\u2019s box and freed artists to create in any form or fashion that pleased them. It inspired new generations from Andy Warhol with his obsession for consumer products, to Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping landmarks in fabric, to Tracey Emin with her dystopian Turner Prize entry \u2018My Bed.\u2019 Unfailingly courteous with an air of mystery, the Fountain<\/em> sealed Duchamp\u2019s reputation as a sage and visionary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Dal\u00ed and Duchamp in Cadaqu\u00e9s weren\u2019t playing chess, Dal\u00ed like a Hindu God with many arms was manically creating while Duchamp sat smoking his cheroot and staring out to sea from the semi-circular terrace jutting out from his apartment in Port Alguer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was working on \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em> \u2013 translated as: considering, given, in view of, seeing that, what with \u2013 an enigmatic and haunting diorama that \u2013 when finished \u2013 would reveal a naked woman prone in a thicket of brambles, legs spread wide and holding an antique lantern. Behind her, the painted backdrop would show a forest coming into autumn and a waterfall that sparkles and appears to be flowing. The scene would be viewed by only one person at a time \u2013 preventing discussion or collusion \u2013 through a pair of peepholes at eye level in an old Cadaqu\u00e9s door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duchamp thought of artists as a \u2018family,\u2019 a loosely connected tribe of thinkers, mavericks, outsiders who should take ideas from each other and stretch them into new areas, not in competition, not as a cult of the individual, but to challenge orthodoxy in politics as well as art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dal\u00ed
Marcel Duchamp & Salvador Dali<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

During the six months before Duchamp\u2019s death in 1968, Dal\u00ed helped his old chess partner paint the background scenery in \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>, a collaboration that only came to light thanks to the letters Duchamp shared with the Brazilian sculptress Maria Martins. <\/a>As the wife of the Brazilian ambassador, Marcel had been her lover, his confidante, a regular visitor to Cadaqu\u00e9s and the model for the nude figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duchamp prepared a manual illustrating how to disassemble and reassemble his final work when it was moved in 1969 from his studio to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Crowds flocked to view the installation and came away from the peeping Tom holes in the door chilled, shocked and unsure if what they had seen was prescient and pornographic. \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em> resonated uncomfortably in a culture where women through movies and advertising were being turned more than ever into sexual objects and serial killers with grotesque fetishises had entered the life and minds of America. This last masterpiece made Marcel Duchamp in death even more controversial than he had been all his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dal\u00ed<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To see more articles related to this topic, follow this link<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dal\u00ed and Duchamp in Cadaqu\u00e9s played chess at Bar Melit\u00f3n in the barren years after World War Two…","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":3037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[2326,2323,2324,2328,887,2329,2325,2319,2321,2318,2320,2317,2322,2327],"class_list":{"0":"post-3026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-art-culture","8":"tag-20thcenturyart","9":"tag-artcollaboration","10":"tag-arthistory","11":"tag-avantgarde","12":"tag-cadaques","13":"tag-chessandart","14":"tag-dadamovement","15":"tag-daliandduchamp","16":"tag-etantdonnes","17":"tag-fountainbyduchamp","18":"tag-marcelduchamp","19":"tag-postwarart","20":"tag-salvadordali","21":"tag-surrealism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3026"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3040,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3026\/revisions\/3040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metaphoremagazine.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}