The Passage from Virgin to Bride

September 1911

Meeting Francis Picabia

They met at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, where both were exhibiting; Duchamp showed a larger version of his “Young Man and Girl in Spring”. “Our friendship began right there,” he said.

1912

Takes the “Nude” back from the Salon des Indépendants

Through Duchamp’s brothers, Albert Gleizes asked him to withdraw the painting or at least rename it (as Duchamp later told it); he quietly refused, but went straight to the show and took the canvas home by taxi. “It was really a turning point in my life,” he recalled, adding that after this he would not be very much interested in groups.

1912

A stage version of Raymond Roussel

He saw a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel’s novel Impressions of Africa, with plots that turned in on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets and humanoid machines. He credited it with radically changing his approach to art and inspiring the Large Glass.

1912

Two months in Munich

He painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings, started the image of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and began scribbling plans for the Large Glass, which would take more than ten years to complete. He walked to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek every day, where he was struck by the works of Lucas Cranach the Elder, while the friend he visited kept showing him the sights and the nightlife.

November 1912 · Education

École des chartes

1913

The Armory Show: the scandal of the “Nude”

At the first major exhibition in New York of the modern trends coming out of Paris, American viewers accustomed to realistic art were scandalised and the Nude stood at the centre of the controversy; it helped secure the sale of all four of Duchamp’s paintings in the show.