Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise 1935-1941
When Marcel Duchamp said, “Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase,” in 1952, he wasn’t being self-deprecating. Rather, he was referring to his Boîte-en-Valise, or box-in-a-suitcase, the receptacle containing miniature versions of 70 or so of his artworks that he deemed “important” enough to reproduce and store together for collectors. Between 1935 and 1940, Duchamp created 20 editions of the Boîte, which are now dispersed across museums and private collections. Like a portable museum, the box unfolds to serve as a mini display wall for the diminutive works, which vary slightly between boxes—including combinations of Nude Descending A Staircase (1912), L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23), and reproductions of readymades, including dollhouse-size urinals.
The boxes are kept in small, brown leather suitcases. (He later made more versions of Boîtes without valises.) The concept is classic Duchamp, who spent a lifetime flouting the art world’s fixation on originality and authenticity with his readymades, reproductions, and numerous variations of each. But the valise also has deep personal significance, reflecting Duchamp’s itinerant existence for many years. He moved from Paris, to New York, to Buenos Aires, back to Paris, and finally escaped to New York, in 1942, as the Nazis advanced to occupy the French capital.
From ARTSY, 9 Artists Who Turned Suitcases into Works of Art.
The boxes are kept in small, brown leather suitcases. (He later made more versions of Boîtes without valises.) The concept is classic Duchamp, who spent a lifetime flouting the art world’s fixation on originality and authenticity with his readymades, reproductions, and numerous variations of each. But the valise also has deep personal significance, reflecting Duchamp’s itinerant existence for many years. He moved from Paris, to New York, to Buenos Aires, back to Paris, and finally escaped to New York, in 1942, as the Nazis advanced to occupy the French capital.
From ARTSY, 9 Artists Who Turned Suitcases into Works of Art.
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