A Book About Paris Has Its Way With Me

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Taschen has had its way with me again. This time it's Paris: Portrait of a City, a voluptuous oversized volume of photographs of the city of my dreams, a visual feast covering 150 years of Parisian history and culture that put me in a prolonged trance-like state. Glancing at my notebook afterwards, I saw that I had jotted down notes about so many events, artists, writers, photographers, entertainers and architecture that I had almost re-created the index -- that's how rich this book is.

We see a photograph of Toulouse-Lautrec surrounded by a grouping of his paintings and a naked prostitute in the bordello he frequented; Brassai's portrait of a beautiful young Salvardor Dali in his studio; Man Ray's group portrait of the "Bureau for Surrealist Research;" another Brassai of Pablo Picasso in his studio seated next to a huge pagoda-like potbellied stove; and Edward Steichen's portraits of Rodin and Matisse with their work.

 Toulouse-Lautrec in the bordello he frequented in Rue des Moulins, shown with his paintings of its “residents”, 1894. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

We see an 1855 photograph of construction on the Louvre Palace, on the order of Napoleon III who decided to connect it to the Tuileries Palace making it the largest palace in the world. A 1942 image shows empty frames hanging in the museum, artists' names and titles chalked on the wall behind them, their contents having been removed and stored in a secret location when war was declared.

A four-page fold out shows the successive stages of construction of the Eiffel Tower; while the endpapers show a more modern view of the tower, Frank Horvat's 1974 Shoe and Eiffel Tower, the tower itself dwarfed by a woman's ankles and shoes. There is an eerie black and white photo of Hitler posing in front of the tower during the German occupation. More upbeat images show a woman hanging precariously on the edge of the tower, skirt flared out in the wind, while another captures the tower in silhouette against fireworks during the 1989 Bicentennial of the Revolution.

 One of the most spectacular accidents of the age occurred at the Montparnasse railway station: a train from Granville, travelling at somewhere between 40 and 60 kph, was unable to stop: it careered through the buffers, off the platform and through the façade of the building, from which it fell onto Place de Rennes below, 1895. © Antonin Neurdein/Roger-Viollet

There is Nadar's first aerial photo of Paris taken from a balloon, the first ever photo taken with a Kodak/Eastman camera, Lee Miller's Paris in the Snow, Cartier-Bresson's Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, and Rene Jacques' The Tarring Machine with its ghost-like image of Notre Dame in the background framed between two lamp posts.

Coco Chanel, Kiki de Montparnasse, Josephine Baker, Brigitte Bardot, Collette, Bijou, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Sarah Bernhardt, Simone de Beauvoir, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Jean Renoir, Balzac, Orson Welles, Sartre, Yves St. Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld are all represented. We see the Moulin Rouge, Cafe Les Deux Magots, dirigibles, balloons, expositions, revolutions, occupations, celebrations and much much more.

The actress La Pradvina, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1911. Photographie JH Lartigue © Ministère de la Culture-France/AAJHL.

  
The 500 photographs are accompanied by an index of the more than 150 photographers' biographies. Essays by editor and author Jean Claude Gautrand, one of France's distinguished experts on photography, in English, French and German round out this amazing book.


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Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

May 6 - June 3, 2012
Chuck Feesago: Retention

Closing Reception & Artist's Talk: Sunday, June 3, 2-5pm

May 6 - June 3, 2012
D. Jean Hester: A Rope Let Down From Heaven
Closing Reception & Artist's Talk: Sunday, June 3, 2-5pm

June 24 - August 5, 2012
Lou Beach: Stories & Pictures
Opening Reception: Sunday, June 24, 2-5pm

More on the Questionable Authorship of a Certain Urinal

I was a practicing artist for 15 years. During 10 of those years I worked at the LA Municipal Art Gallery, a 10,000 square foot venue that exhibited a never-ending parade of contemporary art. I was relatively young and didn't have the self-confidence to give voice to the questions in my head, a running monologue that told me that a lot of what I was seeing and hearing smacked of The Emperor's New Clothes. I stood mutely by in a prolonged state of bewilderment.

Fountain by R. Mutt
Photo: Alfred Stieglitz

I left painting and the art world behind and fled to New York to do other things. But that nagging voice wouldn't leave me alone. It was, and still is, a driving force in my opening Offramp Gallery and writing this blog. I'm still looking for answers.

It is in that spirit that I find myself semi-obsessed with the topic of my last post, Duchamp's Urinal? Maybe Not!, in which I wrote about research that questions the authorship of the iconic urinal. In his short book on contemporary/conceptual art, Con Art - Why you should sell your Damien Hirsts while you can, British art critic Julian Spalding cited two sources that had "proved beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt" that the urinal was not Duchamp's. I was able to find and write about one of his sources, Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity--A Cultural Biography. I was not able to track down the work by Spalding's other source, Dr. Glyn Thompson.

The day after I published the post, I received an email from Dr. Thompson, directing me to the "missing" evidence and giving me permission to publish and link to a shortened version of it. Click here to read Thompson's essay. Like Gammel, Thompson makes a very convincing case for Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, not Duchamp, being the artist behind the urinal. Thompson addresses what I call the "smoking gun" letter to his sister where Duchamp clearly states the urinal was submitted by a female friend, evidence that has been dismissed by other scholars who speculate that Duchamp was lying to his sister as part of a larger ruse:

". . . set against the style and content of every other letter of Duchamp's which has been preserved there are no grounds whatsoever for doubting that he was telling his sister the truth, especially given the trivial nature of an event which would, in his opinion, make no sense to anyone outside the hot-house of the New York avant-garde."

Fountain 1917; 1964 artist-authorized
replica made by the artist's dealer,
 Arturo Schwarz,based on a photograph
by Alfred Stieglitz. Porcelain,
360 x 480 x 610 mm. Tate Modern, London.

No one knows the whereabouts of the original urinal. It disappeared shortly after its one and only public appearance. The ones we see enshrined in museums today are from the edition of eight replicas that Duchamp commissioned in 1964, some 47 years after the initial appearance and almost as many since he had stopped making "retinal" art. Some of them have sold for astronomical prices.


A couple years ago I was at MOMA in New York looking at an exhibition of conceptual works from the museum's permanent collection. One piece consisted of an ordinary vertical window shade laid out on the floor. There was some explanatory text saying that the artist had had an epiphany of sorts as he removed the blind from an empty studio and carried it across the hall to his studio and placed it on the floor exactly like it was displayed at MOMA. The piece was titled "The Middle of the World." Really? (I suspect marijuana was involved.)

My BS sensors were on high-alert when I caught the eye of a sophisticated looking gentleman across from me viewing the same piece. As our eyes met, we both rolled them upwards in a gesture of shared incredulity and walked away.

Sometimes a window shade is just a window shade. Sometimes a shark in a tank is just a shark in a tank. Sometimes a "masterpiece" in a museum is just a replica of a found object of questionable origin.

You could argue that Duchamp's ready-mades, whether the urinal was his or not, made us look at art differently and made us question centuries of conventional art wisdom and that it was a good thing, opening the door to whole new ways of creating art. But what does it say when museums and collectors spend millions of dollars for replicas of that found object half century later and a cult of worship develops around it? Aren't they then institutionalizing a baser set of values than those Duchamp brought into question in the first place?

Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

May 19, 2012
Joe Santarromana: The Rememberers
Special Screening: 7pm
(the Gallery and Blog Store will open at 6pm)
 

May 6 - June 3, 2012
Chuck Feesago: Retention

Closing Reception & Artist's Talk: Sunday, June 3, 2-5pm

May 6 - June 3, 2012

D. Jean Hester: A Rope Let Down From Heaven

Closing Reception & Artist's Talk: Sunday, June 3, 2-5pm

June 24 - August 5, 2012
Lou Beach: Stories & Pictures

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 24, 2-5pm

Duchamp's Urinal? Maybe Not!

Fountain by R. Mutt
Photo: Alfred Stieglitz

I recently read an LA Times article about a public feud between artist Damien Hirst and British art critic Julian Spalding, the latter of whom had written a short book, Con Art - Why you should sell your Damien Hirsts while you can. I thought it might make an interesting blog topic, so I downloaded and began reading Spalding's book, a no-holds-barred polemic on contemporary/conceptual art.

When about half way through I read this:

"[Duchamp's] apotheosis was consummated in 1999 when the Tate Gallery bought his urinal, called Fountain, for $500,000, to celebrate the century of art they thought he'd done so much to create. Unfortunately for the Tate, the urinal wasn't his. The latest research . . . has now proved beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt -- that the urinal wasn't submitted to the Society of Independents exhibition in New York by Duchamp but by the redoubtable Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven." [emphases mine]

Wait . . . What?? Forget the Hirst/Spalding spat! Who the heck was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven? If what Spalding claimed was true, why wasn't that the headline? I needed to dig deeper.

Spalding cites two sources to back up his claim, Irene Gammel and Dr. Glyn Thompson. I immediately ordered a copy of Gammel's 2002 cultural biography Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity and began to read about this amazing, overlooked artist and poet who was light years ahead of her time.

Born Elsa Plötz in 1874, the future Baroness arrived in Berlin in 1893 ready to experience life in the extreme. Gammel writes:

" In a dazzling odyssey of sexual roles and experimentations she now began to armor her personality, emerging as a tough sexual and artistic warrior in her conquest of the modern city. Her ambivalence as androgyne allowed her to test a stunning range of erotically charged positions -- young ingenue, female flâneur, erotic art worker, priapic traveler, chorus girl cum prostitute, actress, cross-dresser, lesbian, and syphilitic patient -- all in a span of just a few years."


Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven

The flamboyant Elsa eventually follows her second husband to America after faking his suicide to escape creditors. When he leaves her in 1913, she makes her way to New York City, the same year as the Armory Show in which Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase becomes a succès de scandale.

Now 40 years old, Elsa Plötz Endell Greve marries Leopold Karl Friedrich Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven (a short-lived union) and the Baroness is born. On the way to the wedding Elsa finds an iron ring on the street and calls it Enduring Element, her first piece of found-object art. This is a full two years before Duchamp and Picabia arrive in New York and Duchamp coins the term "ready-mades."

Elsa plunged headfirst into New York's avant-garde artistic circles. When she met Duchamp, 13 years her junior, she immediately fell in love and began her pursuit of him. Duchamp resisted her advances, causing her to refer to him as her "platonic lover." The two lived in the same apartment building for a time and were well acquainted.

The key piece of evidence in Gammel's compelling case for why the urinal may have been Elsa's is a letter Duchamp wrote to his sister in April 1917 in which he states:

"One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it." (When he speaks of not rejecting the urinal, Duchamp is referring to the fact that he was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists who chose work for the exhibition.)

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Is this the smoking gun? Gammel stops short of saying so, careful to point out that final, conclusive evidence is missing, but "there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that points to her [Elsa's] artistic fingerprint."

As for Spalding's other source, Dr. Glyn Thompson, I wasn't able to find anything published except an online PDF of a 2008 doctoral thesis for the History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds School of Fine Art, titled Unwinding Duchamp: Mots et Paroles à Tous les Étages.

It is well beyond the limits of my time to read Thompson's entire thesis, so I tried keyword searches ("urinal," "fountain," "baroness," "elsa," "freytag-loringhoven.") to see if I could find the corroborating evidence Spalding cites. I couldn't.

Given the urinal's enormous influence twentieth-century art, I would very much like to know Spalding's further substantiation that "has now proved beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt" that the Baroness, and not Duchamp, was responsible for the iconic urinal. If you know of this evidence, you can email me at jane@offrampgallery.com and I'll report it in a future column.

Is Spalding right when he claims "Duchamp stole the idea from, of all people, a woman to cement his reputation. He then commissioned a set of replicas to sell -- cast of a copy of a found object! They sit like thrones in the major collections of modern art around the world." If Spalding is right, how does this alter your view of Duchamp and his legacy?

Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

 

May 6 - June 3, 2012
Chuck Feesago: Retention

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

May 6 - June 3, 2012

D. Jean Hester: A Rope Let Down From Heaven

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 6, 2-5pm

May 19, 2012
Joe Santarromana: The Rememberers
Special Screening: 7pm

June 24 - August 5, 2012
Lou Beach: Stories & Pictures

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 24, 2-5pm