Marcel Duchamp’s ‘The Creative Act’

ABSTRACT

An exegetical hermeneutical commentary on Marcel Duchamp’s essay ‘The Creative Act,’ where Duchamp summarized his views on the nature of the creative process, the ‘work’ of art, and the roles played by artists, art participants, and posterity.

KEYWORDS:

• Duchamp
• Eliot
• Kandinsky
• Dreier
• Dewey
• Poincaré

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The essay was published again in Robert Lebel’s (1959) monograph. It is also widely available on the Internet.

2 Bibliographic entries cite Katherine S. Dreier with Matta Echaurren as authors. Matta Echaurren’s contribution would seem to have been limited to reproduction of his 1943 painting, The Bachelors Twenty Years Later, now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

3 Dreier’s manuscript, with edits in Duchamp’s hand, is in the Beinecke Library, Yale University: Katherine S. Dreier papers, Société Anonyme archive, Box 43, Folder 1287. Warm thanks to Nina Hubbs Zurier for sharing this information.

4 See Perl and Tuck (1985). Regarding Duchamp and Eliot, see Baas (2019, 2021).

5 Rule Five of Descartes’ ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’ includes the line: ‘he who would approach the investigation of truth must hold to this rule [of step-by-step investigation] as closely as he who enters the labyrinth must follow the thread which guided Theseus’ (1986, 14). In Morgenröte (1881), Nietzsche wrote: ‘If we desired and dared an architecture corresponding to the nature of our soul … our model would have to be the labyrinth!’ (Nietzsche 1997, Thought 169, 104). See also Karsten Harries (1999).

6 Duchamp told Cabanne, ‘I had tried to read things by Povolowski [sic], who explained measurements, straight lines, curves, etc. That was working in my head while I worked [on The Large Glass]. Simply, I thought of the idea of a projection, of an invisible Fourth dimension, something you couldn’t see with your eyes’ (Cabanne 1987, 39–40).

7 There are other parallels as well; for example, between Duchamp’s artist/artwork/spectator triad and Heidegger’s (2001, 68–69; 75) creator/work/preserver; between Duchamp’s ‘posterity’ and Heidegger’s art-as-history (75).

8 This may have been a veiled barb at the contemporary Abstract Expressionists—a case made by both Nelson (1994) and Haladyn (2015).

9 “LE POÈTE A FEU CONTINU. A vendre gros et détail. Livraison rapide à domicile. S’adresser à T. S. Eliot qui transmettre” (cited in Kleiber 2014, 16).

10 This may be another nod to T. S. Eliot, who identified as Anglo-Catholic.

11 Most notably by Arturo Schwarz (1973, 81ff) and Moffitt (2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacquelynn Baas

Jacquelynn Baas is Director Emeritus, University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She is a cultural historian, writer, and curator. She was founding director of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College and served as director of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from 1988 to 1999. In 2000 Baas co-founded the arts consortium Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness, which generated some fifty exhibitions, educational programs, artist residencies, and two books: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004) and Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (2005). She has organized over thirty exhibitions, including The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (1990) and Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life (2011). Baas has published widely on modern and contemporary art, artists, and writers; her most recent book is Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (2019).