The Artist and His Critic Stripped Bare: Correspondence

“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.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.” Read more...

The Best Books by Artists

Michaela Unterdörfer, Art Historians, Critics & Curator