Linda Dalryple Henderson Marcel Duchamp's The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) and the Invisible World of Electrons
NOTES 1 The present essay is drawn from Henderson, Duchamp in Context (forthcoming), where the issues raised here are discussed and documented in full. On the importance of X- rays for Cubist painting as well as Duchamp's Nude, with its additional debt to E.-J. Marey's chronophotography, see Henderson, "X Rays." For an introduction to Duchamp's Large Glass (fig. 11), see Henderson, "Etherial Bride." 2 For an illustration of the latter work, see d'Harnoncourt and McShine, cat. 77. 3 John Golding seems to have intuited such a connection when he remarked in passing that the "swift nudes" in Duchamp's final painting were characterized by a "flurry of small planes...like an electric current rendered visible," 32-33. 4 On Thomson's experiments see, e.g., Keller 63-66. 5 For Duchamp's works of summer 1912 that respond to radioactivity and contemporary interest in alchemy, see Henderson, Duchamp in Context chap. 2. 6 See Keller chaps. 6, 8. 7 Lodge, "Electric Theory of Matter" 387; and Lodge, "Électricité et matière" 554-59. See also Le Bon, "L'Énergie intra-atomique" 513-14; and Le Bon, L'Évolution de la matière. 8 Lodge, "Electric Theory" 384. In language typical of these discussions, Georges Claude refers to the "énorme vitesse" of cathode rays, 399. 9 On these early models of the atom, see Keller chap. 8. 10 Although readings of the identity of king versus queen throughout the Swift Nudes series have varied, in the final painting, at least, Schwarz 116 and Golding 32 agree that the figure on the right is the king. 11 For example, Georges Bohn had described Perrin's model of the atom as having at its center "one or more masses strongly charged [fortement chargées] with positive electricity," "Le Radium" 8. 12 See, e.g., Rutherford 670; Perrin 282. 13 On Wilson's work, see Keller 67-69, 143. 14 See Wilson, "On a Method of Making Visible" 285. 15 See Wilson, "On an Expansion Apparatus." Compared to virtually every other scientist discussed in my Duchamp in Context study, the retiring Wilson attracted relatively little attention in pre-World War I France. Nonetheless, his photographs were incorporated into Jean Perrin's 1914 edition of Les Atomes, and they may well have appeared in other French sources available to Duchamp at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. 16 On the importance of a possible fourth dimension of space for modern artists, including Duchamp, see Henderson, Fourth Dimension. 17 For an illustration of this work, see d'Harnoncourt and McShine cat. 79. 18 See, e.g., Golding's description of the Bachelors as "two science-fiction male presences who point at the bridal figure a whole battery of upright phallic forms," which Golding compares to the fencing foils in Marey's well-known image of a lunging fencer, 41. 19 See, e.g., Guillaume 43-48. On the debate over cathode rays, see Keller chap. 3. 20 See d'Ault 207 and, e.g., Wetzler 524. Tesla himself also talked of electric "flames" in his lectures of 1891-1892. 21 See, e.g., Thompson, lesson 24. 22 For this term, see the 1909 book review of Code des couleurs by Klincksieck and Valette. Duchamp's interest in flames was undoubtedly augmented by the renewed interest in this period in the practice of Magnetism, rooted in Baron Karl von Reichenbach's idea of "Odic force" as updated by the French author Albert de Rochas. On Rochas and his publications, such as L'Extériorisation de la sensibilité (in its sixth edition in 1909), which also relied on contemporary scientific developments in electromagnetism, see Henderson, Duchamp in Context. 23 See, e.g., the drawing for the Bride's "Milky Way" or "Cinematic Blossoming," the cloud-like form at the top of the Large Glass through which she transmits her wave-borne commands to the Bachelors below (reproduced in Duchamp, Writings 37). 24 On these two authors and their engagement with science, as well as the central importance of Roussel's wordplay for Duchamp, see Henderson, Duchamp in Context chap. 4. 25 For Duchamp's conception of the Large Glass in terms of "collisions," see Duchamp, Writings 28. For Duchamp and the theme of collision, see both Henderson, Duchamp in Context and "Etherial Bride and Mechanical Bachelors." 26 The contents of these three boxes (totaling 189 notes and documents) are reproduced in Duchamp, Writings. After Duchamp's death another 289 notes were found, nearly 100 of them dating from the period of his work on the Large Glass project. Those notes are reproduced in Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes. These previously unknown notes, many of which are more overtly engaged with science, are a central focus of the Duchamp in Context book. 27 Duchamp's painting was later acquired by his New York patron Walter Arensberg and can be seen hanging in the Arensbergs' apartment in a painting recreating the latter's avant-garde salon, which was at the center of New York Dada activities during the later 1910s. See The New Yorker 11 Nov. 1996: 78-79.