ratak-monodosico:

Marcel Duchamp, In the Manner of Delvaux, 1942

35. In a telephone conversation with Michel Waldberg (see footnote 11), the son of the artist is convinced that the lost sculpture was one of his mother’s, suggesting that Duchamp might have chosen it because of the likeness to what he secretly had in mind. The material used in Waldberg’s sculpture cannot be clearly defined, however. Hans Christoph von Tavel’s Isabelle Waldberg: Skulpturen 1943-1980 (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1981 [exh. cat.]) states that all of her New York “constructions” were made of bent twigs, with wire “constructions” only appearing in her oeuvre upon Waldberg’s return to Europe in 1946 (p. 10). Both wire and wood would have suited Duchamp well. Given’s torso rests on tree branches and he often referred to the Bride in his Large Glass as “arbor type”, with its roots in “the skeletal part of the bride” (see: Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, 1989, pp. 42, 43). Already in 1942, Duchamp had made the small collage In the Manner of Delvaux, showing a female breast appearing in a mirror. This image itself was a detail appropriated from Paul Delvaux’s painting Dawn, 1937, in which four women, naked from the waist up, seem to emerge from solid tree trunks (see Arturo Schwarz, Complete Works, p. 224).

Paul Delvaux, In the Manner of Delvaux, 1942