The Artist and His Critic Stripped Bare: Correspondence

"I have been always very fascinated by understanding how other people live. Curiosity is a great motivator. And for me this is curiosity about the personal but also the public life of artists, creatives and intellectuals. These tend to be individuals highly sensitive to what’s happening in society and in the world. Artists’ writings, conversations, diaries and other records are something which have always intrigued me. The first title I’ve selected is The Artist and His Critics Stripped Bare , which represents the correspondence of the artist Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel, who was a poet, novelist, essayist, and art historian who championed Surrealism. These are the letters of a seminal artist, Marcel Duchamp, who I think it’s no exaggeration to say is a legend. The title is a play on the name of an artwork by Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) , which Duchamp considered his most important single work. For years, Duchamp and Lebel carried on a conversation in letters, a collection which is now in the Getty Research Institute archives. This correspondence has been very thoroughly edited and insightfully translated by Paul Franklin, whose annotated rendering of this conversation is masterfully presented. “There are many contemporary artists who take Duchamp as a sort of role model. With the help of original source material, we can really approach the artist directly, unmediated by secondary sources.” The exchange happened during a period where both the artist and the author of his first monograph, Lebel, were working on that very book. For me as a publisher it’s absolutely fascinating to witness the process firsthand via this correspondence. The two of them give shape to the concept, they discuss in intricate detail how to approach publishers—they eventually found one who would make it possible. Duchamp was very much involved in the whole concept of the book and in the layout, right down to the typeface, the placement of illustrations, the sequencing of the text. Correspondence in the Getty archives shows just how very closely the two of them worked on this. At Hauser & Wirth we are currently working on a reedition of the out-of-print English version of the monograph that Duchamp and Lebel collaborated on, originally published in 1959. So it’s a bit like seeing through the lens of this correspondence how our new edition of the book might once again take shape, published as a facsimile that is accompanied with a coda publication that contextualises the monograph and the artist. It’s exciting really to get so close to Marcel Duchamp. We know him best through some of his ground-breaking art, and indeed anti- art gestures. It’s time we believe to reposition and show once again what his work was really about. Absolutely. This book is not only a unique document—the ‘making of’ a monograph—but it is also very transparent about the challenges of approaching such a landmark artist, who was always playing with meanings and playing with his audience. Already in the language this comes across clearly. Duchamp and Lebel corresponded in French, and the text is replete with puns and wordplay. It’s not an easy task to translate these into English and I think Franklin did a fantastic job with it, capturing Duchamp’s very distinctive creative voice. I do hope that this book will gain another audience, even beyond Getty’s distribution channels through the facsimile edition of Marcel Duchamp that we are working on. The facsimile is a work of great passion, encompassing also contributions by Lebel’s son Jean-Jacques, who edited several of the component texts, and whose essay from the Getty’s book is reprinted in the facsimile’s coda. The primary source material featured in The Artist and His Critic Stripped Bare is of the highest quality, and I wanted this in my selection of books to make this visible to more people. Although if you ask people why, they hardly know! We really want to continue this conversation. What is the role of Duchamp for contemporary art? There are many contemporary artists who take him as a sort of role model. With the help of original source material, we can really approach the artist directly, unmediated by secondary sources."