Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp in the Library at the Haven, West Redding, Connecticut, Late Summer. 1936

Home , Leather and Lace, Marie Laurencin

Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp in the library at The Haven, West Redding, Connecticut, late summer. 1936.

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GEORGE BAKER

In the true sense of the word, the “Société Anonyme” is today the only sanctuary of eso - teric character, contrasting sharply with the commercial trend of our times. 1

So wrote Marcel Duchamp in 1946, describing the “Société Anonyme, Inc.” at the moment of its historical culmination, an organization that, at its founding, had been subtitled the “Museum of Modern Art 1920,” and was housed in galleries at 19 East 47th Street in New York. In 1950, Duchamp’s main partner in this endeavor, Katherine S. Dreier, received a letter signed by Nelson Rockefeller on behalf of another institution, one situated by then some six blocks north, on 53rd Street. In actuality, the letter was written by that institution’s ﬁrst director, Alfred Barr: In 1929 when we opened our doors, the Museum of Modern Art quite unwittingly assumed the second half of the Société Anonyme’s name. Since then we have followed your lead not only in name, but in several more important ways as our exhibitions and collections clearly show. Your foresight, imagination, courage, and integrity have been a frequent and important example to us. 2 At stake in this letter is a claim for continuity proposed at a moment of rupture: the letter was written on the very day the Société Anonyme was ofﬁcially dissolved. But ghosts are stirring. The essay that follows began its life as a lecture written in response to an exhibition: the opening, three years ago, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, of the Yale University Art Gallery’s survey of the Société Anonyme collection. 3 It was an extraordinary exhibition that allowed at least two things to

1. Marcel Duchamp, “Katherine S. Dreier,” entry from The Collection of the Société Anonyme , reprint - ed in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp , ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1989), p. 148. 2. Nelson Rockefeller, letter to Katherine Dreier, April 30, 1950, Box 26, Folder 738, Katherine S. Dreier Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York [AAA: 2172; 973], cited in Jennifer Gross, “An Artist’s Museum,” The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 5. 3. Organized by Jennifer Gross, the exhibition “The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America”

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occur: first, it posed a rethinking of modernism itself, a revision of its history pro - pelled by a collection organized outside of (and before the establishment of) the now-accepted paradigms that defined modernism as an historical and cultural field. I will give just one, telling, example of what this might mean: the Société Anonyme was evidently a collection of modernist artworks organized from the perspective of Dada as an avant-garde (organized with the belief that Dada occupied the center of the avant-garde). It was thus, in many senses, an anti-collection —a collection of misfits, exceptions, anomalies. It was a collection, more precisely, that defined modernism as an operation of the misfit, the exception, the anomaly, with all the ramifications this might entail for any attempt to embody its aspirations in the form of a museum. And thus, just as important, the exhibition offered an implicit rethinking of the museum—especially the modern art museum—at another moment of rupture or dissolution. The story of the Société Anonyme has returned, it seems, precisely at the moment of the museum of modern art’s own self-eclipse—the moment of transfor - mation that we inhabit today, in which the story of modernism once defined by New York’s Museum of Modern Art has been dismantled, the architecture of such muse - ums expanded and spectacularized, collections deaccessioned, redefined. New stories are being told, and the old, forgotten. What follows is a specula - tive (and informal) attempt to tell a story of modernism that was never remembered in the first place. But the Société Anonyme preserved it.

Give to me your leather Take from me . . . my lace.

So sang Stevie Nicks and Don Henley in 1981, and I remind us of this here not to perfume these pages with the stink of kitsch trailing from Nicks’s gothic lace veils—although this perfume is not out of place in the story I wish to tell—but rather to take up these lyrics’ oppositions of gender and material, as well as their intimation of exchange, of dialogue, of give and take. For it will be my gambit that the Société Anonyme collection preserves one of the most extraordinary examples of the “dialogue” between Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia—a speciﬁc instance of their dynamic of exchange and collaboration that, although I have been working on this very problem for years, had until recently thoroughly eluded my atten - tion. 4 It thus seems right to begin my story with reference to a musical duet —a form, mass-cultural or not, for which we don’t have an easy translation in the

ran at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from April 23 to August 20, 2006 and then traveled to The Phillips Collection, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. It opens at its institutional home in the Yale University Art Gallery in the fall of 2010. 4. Since this will be my focus, I should mention that this essay was also delivered in April 2008 as a lec - ture in response to another exhibition, Jennifer Mundy’s “Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia” at the Tate Modern from February 21 to May 26, 2008. It beneﬁted from the comments of Dawn Ades upon that occasion.

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visual arts. Two voices singing as one, or alternating in call and response: I have a hard time thinking of too many painted or sculpted “duets” in the history of mod - ern art. Braque and Picasso perhaps come close (Matisse and Picasso as well, but a “gentle rivalry” hardly amounts to the same thing). 5 Many of those that I can think of—for example the work of George Grosz and John Heartfield, or Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp—emerge from the Dada moment. And so it is with the form of the duet in mind that I wish to begin to explore the terms of the “dia - logue” between Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia. It must be admitted that, until recently, art history and the museum have not known what to do with this dialogue. We don’t have a language—of form or style, movement or medium—to speak about forms of dialogue in modern art. We thus have for a very long time relegated many of the most radical and interesting ges - tures of these three artists to historical oblivion. Other fields and disciplines, perhaps, could help us here—literary theory’s concern with “dialogism,” psycho - analysis and its interest in “intersubjectivity,” queer theory’s more recent mapping of the space of “homosociality”—and I intend to lean implicitly on all of these concerns in what follows. But the dialogue between Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia exceeds the established categories or even anti-categories of artistic cre - ation that modernism has otherwise bequeathed to us. It belongs manifestly neither to the bourgeois model of the artist as individual alienated genius; nor does it follow the utopian anti-capitalist model of Constructivism’s opening of artistic production to the social collective. The dialogue between Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia falls outside this opposition itself—alienated individual versus utopian collective—lying incoherently between its terms, or exceeding those terms altogether. This notion of dialogue as the “misfit” of modernist form is one that I find useful in several ways. First, in histories of art, dialogue is usually considered to be an extrinsic concern: part of a framing apparatus, or what art history might other - wise call “context,” but most definitely outside of any given work of art. What if dialogue were instead the substance of a work of art? And what if an artistic dia - logue didn’t frame a work of art, but was enacted upon the frame , on the very borderline between what is or is not considered the work of art, what is or is not inside or outside of the realm of art? What if, indeed, rather than belonging to a framing convention, a central part of the Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia dia - logue was literally about frames? Such is the question raised by the object at the center of the story that I want to tell here. It is an object that embraces dialogue as a “misfit” form in the most direct of senses. For I want to focus on an artwork that has fallen outside of all estab - lished accounts of modernism and the avant-garde. It is a true monster of a misfit, an artwork that intersects more with the worlds of design and of fashion than it does with accepted histories of twentieth-century art. Long buried in stor age, and only

5. See Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry (Paris: Flammarion, 1999).

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just dusted off and restored, this painting was included in the recent Société Anonyme exhibition, and by most accounts it amounted to the most extraordinary object in an exhibition of extraordinary objects, many of them largely forgotten. I was utterly shocked when I encountered it, for the object that I speak of is a painting “by” Picabia, and, at the time of my confrontation with this painting, I had been working on a book on Picabia for something like ten years. But I had utterly ignored its existence—scotomized it, a therapist might say. Of course, one wants to know why. Here is my misﬁt object, and here is a frame: Francis Picabia’s Midi (or Promenade des Anglais ), dated c. 1923 to 1926. 6 Here is the object whose story I want to explore, an object whose story has been forgotten, or was simply never told. Here is an imbecilic painting of the most dubious “taste,” an image of an improba - ble mustard-yellow road following a snow-white beach beneath a hazy blue sky. Here is a painting made with the most outré of materials, like cheesy Ripolin house paint: viscous, nasty, piled up into an epidermis wrinkled with weight and age. Here is an image of palm trees, and yet each is less painted than a readymade, built from a ludicrous accumulation of macaroni—the pasta called “bucatini,” it

6. But probably made after the defection of Picabia from Dada and the Paris avant-garde, and his move to the south of France by 1925. Surely, as we will see, the frame for the work was not made until 1926.

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seems—and topped with fronds crafted as well from actual objects, a collection of so many flamboyant ostrich feathers. And here are some “people”—bathers or strollers, perhaps—dotting the expanse of the canvas, and yet they too are ready - mades, not the heavy daubs of black paint that they at first seem but discarded scraps from a cut-up leather shoe- or purse-string. And then, here is a bit more leather. For Picabia’s painting has been framed with an alien, almost unidentifi - able, affair of angled wood planes or shutters, an overachieving border wrapped in a thick, glistening layer of snakeskin. My first reaction to Midi was silence—nothing to say, the wordlessness of shock and surprise. The object, indeed, is unlovely—perhaps meant to be res - olutely unloveable. Immediately, one could see the connection of Midi to the post-Dada collages that Picabia produced in the mid-1920s, a series of paintings constructed from readymade objects that I had otherwise excluded from my larger consideration of Picabia’s Dada oeuvre. 7 Less comprehensible, however, was the work’s snakeskin frame—the only one in the entire history of art, I believe. (I am, of course, willing to be disabused of this belief.) Of all the alternate histories and untold stories of modernism that the Société Anonyme collection preserves, the story of Midi and its frame seems particularly strange, and thus repressed in our official knowledge of this moment. But the frame was actually central—not a peripheral or marginal eccentricity—to the Société Anonyme’s history. And it was central to the (as-yet unrecognized) full scope of Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia’s dialogue. What is the story of this frame? Where did it come from? Why this bizarre, monstrous, misfit form? The story that I have been able to unearth should be taken as speculative. Much remains hidden from me, lost perhaps to history. Dialogues are like that; at times, they conceal as much as they reveal. But I want to start my speculations with a letter that has been preserved, and that Katherine Dreier writes to Marcel Duchamp in 1936. Here she simply wonders: “Do you suppose Picabia would let us have his [painting] which I thought was yours?” 8 The wording of this query is strange: imagine for a moment that Dreier is implying that she once thought that the Picabia work in question was by Marcel Duchamp. If such were the case, you would surely think she was referring to the other major Picabia in the Société Anonyme collection, the painting that more scholars know about and remember, as it comes from the height of Picabia’s Dada years and thus from the moment that his work most closely approached the thematics, process, and form of Duchamp’s own: the 1918–19 painting Universal Prostitution . But she was not saying this. For, exhibited early in the life of the Société Anonyme, that painting is recorded in all the documents of the collection as entering it by 1924. It is in 1937, however, one year after Dreier’s letter to Duchamp, that Midi

7. See George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007). 8. Dreier, Letter to Duchamp, April 4, 1936, cited in Gross, “An Artists’ Museum,” p. 12.

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is ﬁrst noted as being part of the collection, a “gift from the artist.” 9 In 1936, in her letter to Duchamp, she was evidently referring to Midi . Now, of course, I don’t really believe that Dreier thought Midi was by Marcel Duchamp, for one would expect that she more than anyone else knew of Duchamp’s public disavowal of art-making by 1923, and she of course owned his last painting, his interment of painting, the melancholically entitled (relationally entitled? Dialogically entitled?) Tu m’ of 1918. 10 It would however be interesting to speculate on what exactly it could mean to mistake Midi for a Duchamp, a con - fusion of Picabia’s and Duchamp’s strategies that would in fact be faithful to their long-term dialogue and that I intend to explore here. What seems likely is that Dreier, fully aware of the authorship of the Picabia, was implying that she thought Duchamp owned this particular work. “Do you sup - pose Picabia would let us have his [painting] which I thought was yours?” While I will not so easily give up on the idea that Duchamp did perhaps have some author - ing function to play in the ﬁnal appearance of Midi , even the correct interpretation of Dreier’s words constitutes an interesting mistake. For it seems that at the time of this letter, Midi had been in Dreier’s hands, un-purchased from or gifted by the artist, for at least a decade, dating from the Société Anonyme’s massive and important exhibition of modern art in Brooklyn in the fall of 1926. An untitled “ peinture ” with a frame by “Legrain”—the Art Deco designer responsi - ble for Midi ’s snakeskin border—is listed among Picabia’s contributions to the 1926 exhibit. 11 However, 1926 was also the year when—in an almost completely forgotten gesture—Duchamp posed as a major collector of Picabia’s art, writing his essay “80 Picabias” and offering for sale in March of 1926 at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris his extensive Picabia “collection.” This was in fact a leave-taking on

9. See, for example, The Collection of the Société Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art 1920 (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1950), p. 5, where the work is labeled, “Gift of the artist, Paris, 1937.” Indeed, Midi is illustrated on the fourth page of this early catalogue of the Yale collection, as if the work occupied a special place in Dreier’s and Duchamp’s attentions, a regard that later caretakers of the collection would not share (compare the scholarly publication of 1984 and one finds very little dis - cussion of Midi at all, as well as the denial to either of the important Picabia works in the collection of any of the color plates devoted to more mainstream modernist figures like Mondrian or Lissitzky. It is also my personal memory of being a student at Yale University in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Midi was never hung in the modern galleries). 10. It has been suggested that Duchamp’s public renunciation of art-making was prompted, at least in part, by a “last straw” kind of rejection directly related to Katherine Dreier (as the earlier Fountain controversy had been as well): the refusal of a work that the artist created at Dreier’s request for her sister, entitled Why Not Sneeze Rrose Selavy? (1921). Neither Dreier nor her sister in the end chose to keep the object. See Helen Molesworth, “Rrose Selavy Goes Shopping,” in The Dada Seminars , ed. Leah Dickerman and Matthew Witkovsky (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005), p. 187. 11. See the catalogue International Exhibition of Modern Art, Assembled by Société Anonyme (New York: Brooklyn Museum, Nov. 19, 1926–Jan. 1, 1927), n.p., where Picabia’s entries are listed as “Force Comique,” “Peinture. Frame by Legrain,” and “Peinture Voiles.” I will speculate on the identity of this last work (the first is a well known early work by Picabia from the ’teens). One wonders if it is an early work by Picabia, a painting entitled Voiles from one of his early periods, or the work now known as Retour de barques made with shoe soles and canvas stretcher equipment from the late or post-Dada col - lage series. After this last entry, the catalogue notes “Peinture Voiles” as “Lent through the courtesy of Marcel Duchamp,” which perhaps connects to Dreier’s confusion ten years later.

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Picabia’s part, a liquidation sale of the painter’s entire avant-garde production, the remnants left in the artist’s studio from his Impressionist and then Dadaist years, and Duchamp of course hardly owned a single one of them. 12 Later, in con - versation with Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp claimed that the sale was organized by Picabia to earn him (Duchamp) some money (along the lines perhaps of Picabia’s role in arranging Duchamp’s ill- fated marriage the following year to a wealthy heiress—one artist abandoning Dada and the avant-garde, another renouncing his “bachelorhood”). 13 Whatever the circumstance, the year 1926 was a year in which Duchamp was thus busy not only playing the role of a museum director for the Société Anonyme, but of an important private col - lector as well. Two different spaces or destinations for avant-garde art were being imagined. Two different roles for the artist as well. Duchamp’s painting-as-a-collection Tu m’ had already predicted the impor - tance of the activity of collecting in his activities alongside Katherine Dreier. The Société Anonyme itself was simply another form of this. And yet the events of 1926 point to the fact that the notion of the col - lection was more complex than even this Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings by Francis Picabia Belonging to Mr. relation between Duchamp’s Tu m’ and the Marcel Duchamp . Auction catalogue, institutional work of the Société Anonyme Hôtel Drouot, Paris. 1926. would suggest, and it is this complexity into which Picabia’s Midi must be inserted. It may be jumping the gun, but at this point I should lay down my cards about Midi . If one could talk about a “dialogue” between Duchamp and Picabia

12. Many scholars refer to this sale as if it were not a staged event; nothing in its documentation points to the performative nature of Duchamp’s masquerade. The auction did take place and was financially successful; a copy of the catalogue in the archives of the Centre Pompidou records the vari - ous buyers and prices paid for Picabia’s works (including André Breton, Jacques Doucet, Paul Éluard, etc.). See Marcel Duchamp, “80 Picabias,” in Tableaux, aquarelles et dessins par Francis Picabia appartenant à M. Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Hôtel Drouot, March 8, 1926). 13. William Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 217. In an interview published in 1926, when asked, “Will you please tell me the rea - son you sold all your paintings to M. Marcel Duchamp?” Picabia instead demurred: “Because he was the only man who proposed it to me.” Francis Picabia, “Interview,” Volunté (March 4, 1926), cited in Camfield, p. 217. In part arranged by Picabia, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor in June of 1927. They divorced the following year.

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around this work, a confusion of their strategies, this dialogue would center around its most startling feature—which is not the pasta or the feathers but the snakeskin frame. One might be able to go so far as to claim that Duchamp, in line with his posing as a Picabia collector, arranged for the painting to be framed in this way, although I suspect that he and Picabia did this collectively. Of course, I have no proof of any of this. But from the correspondence that survives, Duchamp seems to have overseen on Dreier’s behalf the collaboration of the Société Anonyme with the Art Deco designer Pierre Legrain in 1926, writing back to Dreier with news and organizing the shipping from Paris of a number of Legrain frames (we are not exactly sure how many, but at least four) for the French artists included in the Brooklyn exhibition of that year. We do know that Legrain had an exhibition of his designs in New York at the Seligman Galleries in 1925; that Dreier knew the exhibit; and that she had met with him on a trip to Paris in the spring of 1926. 14 We know as well that by the late 1920s, Duchamp was involved personally with the designer in some peripheral ways, as he arranged for his part - ner of these years, the book-binder Mary Reynolds, to be apprenticed to Legrain. 15 But the connection is also there in the work. As David Joselit has shown, framing had been a crucial part of Duchamp’s

14. Typically, in her text Modern Art of 1926, Dreier writes about the designer Legrain as if in her eyes he were on equal footing with the avant-garde artists in the Société Anonyme, and she men - tions there the Seligman Galleries exhibition in New York; see Dreier and Constantin Aladjalov, Modern Art (New York: Société Anonyme–Museum of Modern Art, 1926), p. 16. Dreier mentions the Seligman exhibit again in a later entry on Legrain in the 1950 catalogue of the Yale collection (I will cite this passage later in my text). Also in Modern Art , Dreier describes Picabia’s work in the following way, proving her awareness of the authorship and import of Midi : “Since 1924 he has created pic - tures by using materials instead of paint. There is a constant growing demand in the minds of many modern artists that another medium should be looked for. To those who do not feel this need, these experiments seem ridiculous” (p. 22). In the 1984 catalogue of the Société Anonyme, Daniel Robbins’s entry on the Legrain-framed Marcoussis in the collection states the following, without any supporting citations (one assumes the support exists in archival correspondence, which I have not had opportunity to consult for this essay): “The zigzag wood frame [for the Marcoussis] was commis - sioned by Katherine Dreier when she met Pierre Legrain in Paris, in April 1926. It was Duchamp who convinced the bookbinder to make this frame and another for Villon’s Song (now in the Guggenheim Museum).” See Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter, and Elise K. Kenney, eds., The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 438. 15. I will not confront this subject directly here, but there is an important postscript to the topic of my essay that needs investigation. This would concern the book designs of Mary Reynolds herself, espe - cially those done in collaboration with Duchamp (such as the designs for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi , or Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros ). Speciﬁc Reynolds’s designs such as those for Jean-Pierre Brisset’s Le science de dieu , Queneau’s Saint Glinglin , Jarry’s Le Surmâle , Man Ray and Paul Éluard’s Les mains libres , or William Seabrook’s Secrets de la jungle , while obviously linked to the moment of Surrealism, evoke the Legrain problematic of the snakeskin frame for Midi , with their use of animal skins such as the boa constrictor skin on the Seabrook, the actual toad skins for the Brisset, or fetishistic materials from the world of fashion, such as the real gloves on the Man Ray and Éluard, or the corset spring on the Jarry. On Reynolds’s book bindings, see Susan Glover Godlewski, “Warm Ashes: The Life and Career of Mary Reynolds,” http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/godlewski2.php, accessed on May 31, 2006. Linked to this topic, one should also consider the book designs or covers done directly by Duchamp alone, such as the catalogue Le Surréalisme in 1947 . Many aspects of both bodies of work seem predicted by the Dada-Legrain relationship of the 1920s, and by speciﬁc Legrain designs.

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Marcel Duchamp. Postcard showing Jacques Villon’s In Memoriam (Figure) , 1919, with lace frame. Photograph by Man Ray, 1920. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp.

activity within the context of the Société Anonyme from its inaugural exhibition of 1920. Another long-forgotten gesture, the Société Anonyme’s inaugural exhibition seems to have been in effect Duchamp’s first major exhibition design, looking for - ward to his later Surrealist installations, and for it he covered the floor of the entire space with industrial rubber, wrapped the walls with a special oilskin fabric that would reflect the blue of the sky, and encircled all of the individual paintings with lace doily frames. 16 No photographs of this exhibition, sadly, survive. However, from verbal descriptions of the installation by critics, the curators of the Yale University/Hammer Museum show reconstructed the inaugural exhibition—both its works and design—in the show’s first room. And we do have one photograph that substantiates this reconstruction, an image made in 1920 by Man Ray for Duchamp of a painting by Duchamp’s brother Jacques Villon, entitled In Memoriam (1919), a work that seems to respond to the then-recent death of the third Duchamp brother, Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Marcel dressed up the work in lace to be photographed, like a reliquary object or a pastry cake or some refugee from the most overdone of bourgeois interiors. From leather to lace, snakeskin to doilies: one will need to parse the gen - dered implications of surrounding art with these two materials, producing a set

16. See David Joselit, “The Artist Readymade: Marcel Duchamp and the Société Anonyme,” in The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America , pp. 33–43.

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of evocations that range from parodic feminin - ity to fetishistic sensuousness, from the prim to the sexy, from mourning (perhaps) to sado - masochism (maybe). 17 Different destinations indeed (different fantasies) were being imag - ined for avant-garde art. But the connections to Midi stretch further through Duchamp’s work of these years. Midi may present the only snake - skin frame (that I know of) from the history of the avant-garde, but it is not the only work to use leather. Contemporaneous with the inaugu - ration of the Société Anonyme in 1920, Duchamp beat Picabia to the punch with his mournful pendant to Tu m’ , the construction Fresh Widow of that same year. For here, Duchamp’s reconstructed French window had all of its glass panes covered over with highly Marcel Duchamp. Fresh polished black leather, a reversal of the visual Widow. 1920. © 2010 structure of the artist’s Large Glass (1915–23). Artists Rights Society (ARS), From the lace dressing of the Société New York / ADAGP, Paris. Anonyme’s inaugural exhibition to the opaque coverings of Fresh Widow , the path from leather to lace was one that Duchamp had thus already taken alone in 1920. 18 Beyond its mournful closure of the space of painting, beyond its inaugura - tion of Duchamp’s activity under the female pseudonym Rose Selavy, Fresh Widow has always puzzled me as an object. Evidently, it concerns not just the death of painting and of the (male) author, but the object status of the frame as well. It cedes the activity of painting to the knowledge of the industrial designer or traditional craftsman. It operates a displacement of the medium by an archi - tectural fragment. It imagines painting transformed into an object that can be handled and even literally opened, not only entered into contemplatively or imaginatively. Fresh Widow is thus more like a book than an image. And, in substi - tuting animal skin and polishing for the material of oil paint and the activity of painting, it brings the hybrid object close both to the status of a body, and to

17. The sadomasochistic implications of framing art in leather remain to be unpacked, but the mournful or melancholic aspect of Duchamp’s lace frames is supported by the connection of Villon’s In Memoriam to the death of Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Duchamp’s lace framing intensiﬁes precisely this aspect of the piece. It also carries forward a larger interest of Duchamp in “feminine” work and textiles, from at least the moment of the Three Standard Stoppages ; surely, too, its connotations of mourning reach beyond biography to the activity of painting (and its “death”) more generally. Taking the lace speciﬁcally as a sign of mourning would be supported by many other of the works that Duchamp produced at this point in time, from Tu m’ to Fresh Widow . 18. Conversely, the snakeskin frame for Picabia’s Midi in 1926 evokes the holes of lace given its prominent and three-dimensional pattern of regularized scales.

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Picabia with Danse de Saint-Guy (St. Vitus’s Dance). From The Little Review , Spring 1922.

the trappings of fashion rather than the materials of art. By prioritizing the frame, Fresh Widow , then, is an object suspended illegibly between the social space of architecture, the discursive world of the book, and the desiring realm of fashion. While more obviously remaining within the medium of painting, it is clear that Picabia’s Midi has a frame that suspends the work in precisely the same way. (It is clear, in other words, that “framing” in the Duchamp–Picabia dialogue serves less to isolate and define an object than to suspend its ontologi - cal fixity, to make it paradoxically porous and open.) Midi ’s frame draws from the materials of fashion. It points to the architectural fragment of the window— which is, significantly, a modern, horizontal window rather than the traditional French window that was Duchamp’s concern. And, as we will see, it bears a secret or metaphoric connection to the book. If a Duchampian “resonance” lurks behind the form of Legrain’s frame for Midi in 1926, it must be admitted that Picabia had long been involved in a simi - lar reflection upon framing, one that can also be dated to the year 1920. For, in that year, Picabia was called upon to create a series of “set designs” for the public Dada manifestations beginning then in Paris, the most important of which

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involved suspending in front of the stage a “transparent” set composed of ropes and text placards (and, by some accounts, a bicycle wheel), establishing thereby an ambivalent dialogue with the transparency of Duchamp’s The Large Glass and the mate - rials of his readymades. No photographs survive of this construction, but from this point dates a painterly ver - sion (and perhaps a precursor) of Picabia’s set, a simple eviscerated frame strung with rope and text as opposed to canvas and paint and depicted lines—the very paradigm of the frame as an “opening” or unfixing device—a work Picabia called Danse de Saint-Guy (or Décaveuse (Fleecer) 19 Picabia. . 1922. “St. Vitus’s dance”). We Frame by Legrain. © 2010 Artists Rights know from correspondence Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. between Picabia and André Breton that some version of this object existed by 1920 in Picabia’s home, but it would not be until 1922 that he presented the object publicly, at that year’s Salon des Indépendents. The work is crucial for our consideration of Midi , for from this earlier provocation stems the replacement of oil paint with string and other real objects that Picabia explored in the later, post-Dada collages to which Midi belongs, a series that used toothpicks, buttons, pasta, feathers, string, coins, wire, and a menagerie of other readymade objects to create form. But also from this moment—of Picabia’s exhibiting an eviscerated frame in the 1922 Salon—dates the artist’s first recorded collaborations with Pierre Legrain, who began to make frames for Picabia later that year, in the wake of this event. To my knowledge, no one has ever really tried to account fully for the frames Legrain made for Picabia. William Camfield speculates at one point in his great monograph on Picabia that there were around twenty to thirty such frames, although

19. St. Vitus, also known as St. Vito or St. Guy, was a Sicilian martyr boiled in oil around 303 AD. He is the patron saint to both dancers and to those (usually children) stricken with rheumatic chorea, a disorder like epilepsy that causes uncontrollable spasms of the face, arms, and legs (known colloquially as “St. Vitus’s Dance”). Given the later concerns of my essay, it should be noted that St. Vitus was also the patron saint against animal attacks, dog bites, wild beasts, and snake bites.

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it is unclear from where this accounting comes. Most, we can assume, did not survive. Before Midi , I had only seen two in per - son: the well-known frame, perhaps Picabia’s first collabora - tion with Legrain, on the parodic abstract mechanomorph Décaveuse from late 1922; and an almost contemporary frame for Lampe of 1922–23, which survives but is never photographed with the work because of its imperfect condition. The turn to the Legrain-designed frames, then, emerges for Picabia at a time of purposeful contradiction, if not incoherence: the moment, in 1922 to 1923, when Picabia’s work seemed more abstract than it had in perhaps a decade, and yet was interrupted at the very same time by the most fraudu - Picabia. Lampe. c. 1923. Frame by Legrain. © 2010 lent of figurative works, or even Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. ludicrously combined the two incompatible pictorial lan - guages. Picabia in 1922 to 1923 was thus not long for any continued adherence to the modernist or even the avant-garde project. It is at this moment in Picabia’s practice that the designer Legrain enters the picture (no pun intended). The frame for Décaveuse projects violently into the viewer’s space, as the designer surrounded the work with serial lines of identical nails driven through the back of the frame like spikes aggressing the viewer. This element turns Décaveuse into something like a fetish object, an aping of the African forms for which Legrain became famous in his furniture designs—which, with its rampant primitivism, became a hallmark of Art Deco (or “Black Deco,” as it has been called)—and that brings a further layer of formal incompatibility to Picabia’s false abstractions and fraudulent figurations. 20 According to Camfield, Lampe sports a

20. Camfield notes that Simone Collinet, Breton’s first wife and someone close to Picabia in the moment of 1922, insisted to him in the 1970s that this frame was made by a M. Faucheux. See Camfield, p. 190. However the closeness of the frame to African art argues for an attribution to Legrain, as does the consistency of the rest of the frames being made by or attributed to Legrain. Legrain’s furniture for the residences of Jacques Doucet were among his most Africanizing designs. There could also be a further confusion here on Collinet’s part. The only Faucheux of note in this con - nection that I know is the graphic designer Pierre Faucheux, who collaborated with the Surrealists and

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frame that is com posed of wood “covered with aluminum paper and black cloth . . . and fitted across the top and bottom with three glass tubes filled with colored liquids that bubbled when the work was moved.” 21 It is this last element—resembling a car - penter’s level, a neon lighting tube, or the chemistry experiment of a mad scientist—that does not survive intact today. 22 And yet even in its now incomplete form, Lampe shows one of the first of Picabia’s Legrain frames to be as extraordinary and as bizarre as the snakeskin design four years later for Midi , and not unrelated to its form, given its angled exterior elements. Indeed, this frame shares the same cul - tural evocations of Midi ’s later design, as Picabia and Legrain suspended Lampe between the architectural fragment and the book, between spectacle (the idea of a frame with neon lights) and the body (a frame with “fluids”). And, we note, this last suspension is internal to Picabia’s representation as well, bringing the frame and the painting into the closest of conceptual collaborations. 23 The next step: the more heterogeneous Picabia’s pictorial languages became in the wake of his turn away from Dada by 1924–1926, the more it seems the artist turned to designs by Legrain. Of the so-called “collages” from which Midi emerges, we can point to a series of more self-reflexively entitled works such as Straws and Toothpicks , “enclosed [but actually ‘floated’] by Pierre Legrain in a wood frame painted aluminum and studded with buttons.” 24 There is the wonderfully ludicrous Feathers (Plumes) (c. 1923–25), with its surrounding dowels turning the whole into a volumetric object like a washboard or a recessed architectural ele - ment. And there is the now-lost frame for Portrait (of Poincaré?) —part of the Tate collection and known after it was reworked by Picabia as Le Beau Charcutier (The Beautiful Pork Butcher) —accompanying its original combs, cord, curtain rings, toothpicks, erasers, pen points, and Ripolin paint with a rough and ready Legrain border in sandpaper and corrugated cardboard. 25 None of these frames, it bears

major French presses on book design in the postwar period (he was only born in 1924). For example, the cover of the memoirs of Picabia’s partner during the Dada years, Germaine Everling, was designed by Faucheux (it is “signed” as such on the back cover). See Everling, L’Anneau de Saturne (Paris: Fayard, 1970). Perhaps Collinet simply confused her prominent book designers, as Legrain too was primarily known for his designs for books. On Faucheux, see Marie-Christine Marquat, Pierre Faucheux: Le Magicien du Livre (Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librarie, 1995). 21. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 202. 22. This frame is attributed to Legrain in contemporary press accounts of the work, see Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 202, who cites Charensol, “Au Salon des Indépendents, Découvertes,” Paris-Journal (February 15, 1924), p. 4. 23. Given this fact, one could argue that the work should in fact not be reproduced without its frame; in this case the frame is very much part of the entire piece and magnifies its concerns. The challenge, it begins to seem, is to see how this is in fact the case for every one of the Picabia- Legrain collaborations. 24. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 218. 25. The tape measure used for the “nose” in Portrait reappears in Picabia’s Centimeters (c. 1924–25), which, Camfield notes, has probably lost “a Legrain frame that once went with it.” See Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 220. As an aside, it seems that Picabia’s use of Ripolin paint begins or at least intensifies at the moment of 1922 as well, climaxing in the various paintings of the Monster series. Ripolin is a brand of French decorator’s or house paint, and this provides another connection to Picabia’s turn to the Art Deco frames of Legrain at this point.

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noting, actually functions as a border, for each work extends into or onto its frame—in Feathers , Picabia completely disregards the boundary between painting and frame, extending his areas of color over both—and the frame extends the work into the surrounding world. In each case, too, the materials of Picabia’s painting-collage and the formal language of Legrain’s design seem in deep corre - spondence or communication, raising again the issue of their collaboration, as well as the potential collapse of the distance separating the two arenas of cultural activity that they perhaps represent—modernism and design, for example; or, more generally, what would later come to be called “art and objecthood.” And Picabia’s Legrain frames do not stop here. Produced simultaneously with the 1924–1926 “collages,” several of the so-called Monster series, such as Le Baiser and

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Idyll , carry Legrain-designed frames, often in colorful, shaped wood fragments, like Surrealist found objects suggesting tactile combinations of heterogeneous materials. A climax of sorts seems to have been reached at the end of the Monster period, when, around 1928, Picabia began the series called the Transparencies, which explored formal incompatibility and layering in a different way. Legrain, in fact, died quite young, at the age of 40, in 1929. The last of the designer frames he is known to have made for Picabia were created for a one-man show arranged (signiﬁcantly, I think) by Duchamp in New York at Alfred Stieglitz’s The Intimate Gallery (April 10 to May 11, 1928), for which supposedly all eleven paintings were framed by Legrain in what seem to be something like display cases, frames deep enough to accommo - date the real butterﬂy specimens that were pinned at random around these works. 26

26. In this, Picabia precedes one of contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s most common (and lucra - tive) formats—his “Butterfly Paintings”—by some sixty years. Legrain died of a heart attack early in 1929, which explains in part the end of Picabia’s designed frames at this point. Of these late Legrain frames, I have only seen two: one, Butterfly , reproduced in the 1976 Paris retrospective catalogue of Picabia’s work and Camfield’s Picabia monograph, and another, Machaon , in Carole Boulbès’s more recent Picabia, le saint masqué (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1998). See the description in Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 227: “Marcel Duchamp promoted an exhibition of Picabia’s work at Alfred Stieglitz’s new gallery (The Intimate Gallery, New York, Picabia Exhibition, April 19–May 11, 1928) which included works described by one critic as ‘strange pictures set in frames so deep as to accommodate real butterflies pinned here and there’ . . . According to Duchamp, all eleven paintings sent to Stieglitz were framed by Pierre Legrain . . . and Stieglitz kept three of them.” Photographs of Doucet’s home in Neuilly potentially contradict my conclusion that these butterfly frames were Legrain’s last for Picabia; I will reproduce one of these photographs at my essay’s end.

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And once again, Legrain’s designs amplified Picabia’s representations—which in this last case were often of butterflies themselves—transforming paintings into or fusing paintings with their corresponding objects. Of course, these 1928 paintings-as-taxidermic-specimens might be said to share a lot with the earlier Midi and its snakeskin, leather, and feathers. For Midi constitutes at least a three-pronged parody of the avant-garde on Picabia’s part, tackling early Surrealism, avant-garde uses of collage, and the liberated color and landscapes associated with Fauvism and post-Impressionism. The Monster series participates in this parodic emptying out of recent avant-garde strategies, and specifically that of Fauvism, the “wild beasts” to which Picabia’s “monsters” respond and step beyond. This parody had begun for Picabia by 1923 in his Salon machine Dresseur d’Animaux (The animal trainer), a painting that stated clearly the recuperation of the avant-garde status of the former “wild beasts,” who domi - nated, for example, the so-called “avant-garde” but increasingly pompier Salons that Picabia lampooned with works such as this. 27 To frame a painting in animal skin, to ornament it with feathers, continues, in the zombie mode of taxidermy, the desiccation of the avant-garde that Picabia’s work at that moment seemed ded - icated to registering. And yet this painting-as-taxidermy, from Midi to the Legrain butterfly displays, returns our account of these Legrain frames to an interest in forms of the collection , which also returns us to what now appears as the shared concerns of Picabia and Duchamp. The display of Midi in the 1926 Société Anonyme exhibition in Brooklyn, and Duchamp’s potential role in arranging for the series of Legrain frames in that exhi - bition, takes us far beyond the more general conclusions that this collision of Art Deco and the Brooklyn exhibition might suggest. After all, the Brooklyn show hap - pened only one year after the 1925 decorative-art exhibition in Paris that gave its name to Art Deco, and the kinds of forms associated with Art Deco had a prominent role to play in the Société Anonyme exhibition—one could point to the skyscraper- like work by John Storrs that graced the catalogue cover, or the “modern style” architectural forms in the unusual work by Max Ernst that was included in the show, Paris-Rêve (1924–25). In addition, Dreier evidently included in this exhibition furni - ture from the Brooklyn store Abraham & Straus to create homely living spaces—including a “Parlor,” a “Library,” a “Dining Room,” and a “Bed Room”— around some of the works. 28 Different destinations again were being imagined for

27. The speciﬁc parody of Fauvism and the Salons that this work broaches was suggested to me by Didier Ottinger during a scholar’s day at the Dada exhibition organized by Leah Dickerman at the National Gallery in 2006. I had always conversely understood the work as a parodic assault on André Breton and his leadership of the emerging Surrealists, as well as a more general comment on the “return to order” in France. 28. See the catalogue of the Brooklyn exhibit, International Exhibition of Modern Art, Assembled by Société Anonyme , which on its last page lists the domestic spaces and those works hung in them (mostly paintings by Eilshemius and the etched copies of modern “masterpieces” for which Jacques Villon was well known, although the “Library” contained Dada works by Schwitters and Arp). On this aspect of the Brooklyn show, see the essay by Kristina Wilson, “‘One Big Painting’: A New View of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum,” in The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America , pp. 75–95.

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avant-garde works of art. But the choice of Legrain to do the Picabia frame brought with it a series of speciﬁc, but today mostly forgotten, associations. Pierre Legrain was not just an Art Deco designer known for his African- inspired furniture and interior designs, he was also a book binder—by some accounts, the most important book binder of the modern age. 29 From the late ‘teens until his death in 1929, he created more than 1,200 book designs, many of the best of which were done for the fashion designer Jacques Doucet, who had liq - uidated an extensive collection of eighteenth-century art in 1912 and proceeded to dedicate himself to collecting modern art and literature. Like Dreier, he would become a major patron of the avant-garde and a friend to both Picabia and Duchamp. It was Doucet who convinced the initially reluctant Legrain to begin to design for books, and one wonders if it wasn’t the fashion designer who encour - aged Legrain to work with Picabia and Duchamp on frames as well. (It seems that Doucet, at André Breton’s urging, began to collect Picabia’s work in 1922, pre - cisely the moment that Picabia’s collaborations with Legrain began. It should also be noted that the vast majority of the Legrain-framed Picabias were initially part of the couturier’s collection.) 30 Characteristic of Legrain’s book designs was his use of rare and contrasting

29. For a recent account, see Yves Peyré and H. George Fletcher, Art Deco Bookbindings: The Work of Pierre Legrain and Rose Adler (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). Peyré is the current direc - tor of the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, which also houses Picabia’s archives. See also Alastair Duncan and Georges de Bartha, Art Nouveau and Art Nouveau Bookbinding: French Masterpieces, 1880 –1940 (New York: Abrams, 1989), and the Société de la reliure originale, Pierre Legrain, relieur: Répertoire descriptif et bibliographique de mille deux cent trent-six reliures (Paris: A. Blaizot, 1965). 30. Doucet, for example, was the ﬁrst owner of Lampe , one of the ﬁrst of the Picabia paintings to have a Legrain frame.

Legrain. Binding for André Gide, Les Cahiers d’André Walter. 1917.

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Legrain. Binding for Paul Morand, Les Amis nouveaux . 1927.

materials and leathers. In his treatment of Midi , he thus extends to a painting the material that he would normally use to bind a book. His designs share many other characteristics with the evocations of Midi . As beﬁts the moment of Art Deco, for example, both the painting and some of the designs tend toward the architectural, articulating their construction as if they were buildings. Others intersect with the world of fashion, evoking mirrors and clasps, or bodies and body parts—like breasts and eyes—as well as engaging in a characteristic Art Deco fetishism of materials that evoke the body through a series of subtle dis - placements. In a telling maquette (for Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol ), Legrain describes one of his designs as a “ décor à froid ” (a “cold decor”) that turns into a self-reﬂexive but vaguely sadomasochistic image—evocative of so many chains, bars, and constraints—of the “binding” in which Legrain was involved. In a related but opposed turn, many of his book designs evoke specta - cle, luminosity, and distraction; indeed, one of his characteristic innovations was to overcome the distinction between the book’s covers and its spine, treating the entire binding as a single surface, transforming each book as an object into a dematerialized image, just as in his frames for Picabia he reversed this strategy, seeming to bind painterly images into resolutely three-dimensional and stub - born objects. It is this painting-book comparison that one imagines was so exciting to Duchamp, and so relevant to his participation in the Société Anonyme. For, in Legrain’s hands, Midi became something like a book, bound in snakeskin, and yet opened up in space like so many pages, or covers, parting before our eyes.

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These two activities related to the book—both to open and to bind—resonate through many other activities of Duchamp and the Société Anonyme. On the one hand, we can point to a consistent (Dada) practice of the spatial - ization of painting that replaces an idolatry of the visual image with a concern for real space and real objects, constituting what we might call an “expanded ﬁeld” for painting rather than an attempt to kill off the medium altogether, as more conven - tional accounts of Dada would have it. Such expansions within the Société Anonyme might include the bizarre, forgotten, and sublime camp of Dreier’s enthusiasm for the choreographer Ted Shawn and his “Group of Men Dancers,” which performed dances based on Dreier’s painted images (she in turn devoted an entire book to Shawn’s work). And they would lead to the embrace of Man Ray’s series Revolving Doors , suspended by its curious rotating display apparatus (or “frame”) precisely between the book and the cinema, by its title between painting and architecture. Signiﬁcantly, though Revolving Doors was conceived as a project in 1919, it was only published as a multiple in 1926 (and with Dreier’s aid). From just one year later dates Duchamp’s long-enigmatic Door: 11, rue Larrey , which, among other things, opened up the actual architecture of Duchamp’s living space so that it was balanced between the painting and the book. But, with its apparatus of notes and “boxes,” Duchamp’s The Large Glass —the centerpiece of the 1926 Brooklyn exhibition—had already begun the process of conceiving painting in analogy to the book, a concern

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that would reach its apogee in relation to Dreier when Duchamp designed the painting Tu m’ speciﬁcally to be surrounded by books in her personal library. Tu m’ reaches from the architectural frame in which it is embedded toward the metaphor of the book; the paint - ing amounts to a collection of traces and imprints, and it seems structured to be read from left to right. And yet the collision of painting and book opens up both sides of their divide, as Tu m’ also seems to represent a series of “pages in liberty” (to use a term recently coined by David Joselit) that enter illusionistically into our physical space. It is a connection of painting and its surround initiated as well by the work’s title, Tu m’ , or “You–Me,” a relation - ality punctuated by the faux-virile pipe cleaner that extends into our space from the surface of the work (and which Picabia in Midi seems to recast in the mode of utter camp and frivolity, the painter’s brush transformed Duchamp. Door: 11, rue Larrey. 1927. into an industrial object on the one hand, and into buca - © 2010 Artists Rights tini and ostrich feathers on the other, an object of Society (ARS), New York / consumption and display). ADAGP, Paris / Succession For in addition to his notion of “pages in liberty,” Marcel Duchamp. Joselit has also described how during the Dada years, Duchamp was involved not only in creating loose agglomerations of textual notes but also in designing a series of de-hierarchized “books in the round,” such as the Société Anonyme publication Some French Moderns Says McBride . These would be books without coherent beginnings or ends, books that exceeded the architecture of the book-as-object, overcoming their bindings— through spiral rings, or through a structure of endless circulation and unfolding—to expand into the activated reader’s or viewer’s space. 31 To literalize physically this practice of expansion seems to have been the shared motivation of all the Legrain frames for the Brooklyn exhibit of 1926. Witness the frame that Legrain produced for Duchamp’s brother Jacques Villon and his painting Chanson . This frame, I have discovered, is now deﬁnitively lost, but a few poor photographs survive, and the work with its border was reproduced in Dreier’s 1926 book Modern Art .32 It is the most liter - ally book-like of Legrain’s frames, with its painted plywood “wings” and silver holders turning the painting into an evident analogue for a three-dimensional open book. Later, in 1950, Katherine Dreier herself described this frame in a passage that

31. See David Joselit, “Dada’s Diagrams,” in The Dada Seminars , pp. 221–39, for this discussion of Duchamp and the book, which Joselit contextualizes as responding to a larger bifurcation between the discursive regime of the book and the visual regime of cinema within modernity. 32. After Dreier’s death in 1953, the painting was bequeathed not to Yale but to the Guggenheim Museum. In correspondence with me, the Guggenheim claims that the frame was lost before its arrival at the museum, and the painting was subsequently de-accessioned in 1988 (e-mail correspondence, Ted Mann, Assistant Curator for Collections, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, May 17, 2006).

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also connects Midi ’s snakeskin border to a specific Legrain book design. I want to cite it in full here. The book Dreier mentions is Apollinaire’s Bestiary , a Legrain design that I have been unable to locate, but in its stead, one might think of related designs created by binders influenced by Legrain, such as Rose Adler’s gray snakeskin bind - ing of 1927 for Paul Valéry’s La Soirée avec M. Teste .33 One might also think of other Doucet and Legrain connections to the idea of a bestiary, such as Legrain’s “trade - mark” for Doucet’s library that represented the books’ owner as a cat (this was based on a line from the fables of La Fontaine: “‘My son,’ said the mouse, ‘this demure creature [ ce doucet ] is a cat’”). 34 Dreier’s is an extraordinary statement, and it appears in the 1950 catalogue of the Yale collection next to a reproduction of Midi itself, one of the only explanations from the director of the Société Anonyme of the presence of Legrain’s work there: Pierre Legrain was one of the finest French bookbinders of the first half of this century. Jacques Doucet, famous for his remarkable library, discovered him and entrusted his valuable books to him for rebind - ing. Legrain was constantly looking for new materials to work with, seeking new forms and new ways and means of treating leather. It was he who was inspired to bind Apollinaire’s Bestiaire in snakeskin which caused a sensation. Through Apollinaire he became interested in

However a catalogue of the Guggenheim collection from the 1970s maintains that the Legrain frame was still on the Villon as late as 1952, when it was exhibited at Yale. See Angela Zirker Rudenstine, The Guggenheim Museum Collection: Paintings, 1880 –1945 , vol. II (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1976), p. 684. I would like to thank Ted Mann for this information. 33. The authorship of this binding however may be in question; it is identiﬁed as a 1922 work of Pierre Legrain in Duncan and De Bartha, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding , p. 113. 34. Yves Peyré, “Jacques Doucet and the Art of Bookbinding,” Art Deco Bookbindings , pp. 19–20.

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Rose Adler. Binding for Paul Valéry, La Soirée avec M. Teste . 1927.

modern art and felt mod ern pictures needed new types of frames to bring out their new forms of beauty. Among his most successful frames were ones he designed for Marie Laurencin’s delicate, fragile paintings, a combination of mirror and silver. He was most enthusiastic and eager to cooperate with the French group who were sending to the International Exhibition arranged by the Société Anonyme for the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. Of these his three most successful frames were the snakeskin one he made for Picabia’s Midi where the panels of wood covered with snake - skin overlapped each other, increasing the depth of the picture. The one for Villon’s La Chanson of 1926 took the unusual form of wings of ply - wood, again causing the picture to recede, and bound with fluted silver metal at the top and bottom to hold the picture and the wings in place. This frame enables the picture to stand on the floor, thereby creating a new space in a room for paintings. The third was for Max Ernst’s Forest , which he set in a frame of wood which is an extension of the painting. Pierre Legrain’s work is so individual, whether in his bookbinding, frames or furniture that it can as easily be recognized as the individual painting and sculpture of any artist. His influence, especially among bookbinders, was very great, and his early death was a great loss to the art world. 35

35. The statement is signed “KSD, 1949.” See The Collection of the Société Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art 1920 , p. 5. Dreier’s other major statement on Legrain occurs in the moment of 1926, in the publi - cation Modern Art in a two-page spread on Legrain and Jacques Villon, where Villon’s Legrain-framed Chanson is reproduced. Dreier at that point stated: “For years the problem of framing modern paint - ings has upset every modern artist. The result has been to abandon frames on the whole, but there are always certain circumstances under which a frame is necessary in order to isolate a picture from its sur - roundings. With this in view Pierre Legrain, the famous French book binder, whose exhibition of bind - ings met with such distinction when held at the Seligman Galleries in New York in 1925, has devoted

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Although Chanson ’s whereabouts are unknown to me—not only was its frame lost, but it seems the painting was de-accessioned from the Guggenheim Museum in 1988—I have located a photograph of the work from around the time of Dreier’s statement, positioned in the 1940s on the ﬂoor of her library like a way station between Tu m’ and The Large Glass , creating, through the opening of the book, a “new space in a room for paintings.” I have also not been able to locate or identify the Ernst frame of 1926. But there is a last Legrain frame that we do know about and that Dreier seems to have repressed, a wood-grain frame for the collection’s Louis Marcoussis painting, Fish (1926), that still clings to the work, and was included in the recent Yale University Gallery/Hammer exhibition. While Duchamp always seemed to harbor interest in the artist, perhaps because of a series of works he made under glass, Marcoussis

his spare time to solving this problem and has met with the same distinguished success in many of his frames. Nothing can be more beautiful than some of the frames he designed for a Marie Laurencin, or for a Picasso. The frame reproduced here was designed specially for this picture and in its coating of light varnished wood and brilliant reﬂected silver blocks, he adds a new note to Villon’s picture called Song .” See Modern Art , p. 16.

Katherine Dreier’s library at The Haven in the 1940s, featuring Jacques Villon’s Chanson (1926; center) and Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915 –23; right) and Tu m’ (1918; back).

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was not long for Dreier’s attentions in 1926. His commercial interests led him further and further away from the modernist move - ment and toward a future where by 1931 he would be included in Objets d’art , a publica - tion on Art Deco designs for books, furniture, and objects such as cigarette cases that was authored posthumously by none other than Pierre Legrain himself. 36 But the 1926 Marcoussis frame continues the frame-as-book metaphor shared by the Picabia and the Villon works. It also compli - cates this metaphor. For while it is articulated like the open pages of a book, extending the work into space, the frame seems closer to the architectural than the textual. Indeed, its metaphorical resonance seems to have been taken beyond the open book to evoke some - thing like a decorative room divider or an articulated folding screen. Which is interesting. For Duchamp (one Louis Marcoussis. Fish. 1926. Frame by suspects) seems to have made explicit—seems Legrain. © 2010 Artists Rights Society to have made literal—precisely this metaphor (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. in the hanging of the 1926 Brooklyn show. In fact, while I cannot be absolutely sure from the few installation photographs that survive, it seems that the Marcoussis was actu - ally hung in the Brooklyn exhibition on the narrow edge of a wall divider constructed between exhibition spaces (and not on a wall itself), articulating like a screen the divide and the transition between spaces in the exhibit. Here was a painting literally pushed out into space, hanging in mid-air, a painting as divider and as frame, a painting literally given wings—perhaps not so much a painting in motion, but a painting producing motion through the articulation of space, its

36. See Pierre Legrain, Objets d’art (Paris: Charles Moreau, 1931). Kristina Wilson cites a statement by Dreier on decorative art and its difference from abstraction that may explain Dreier’s move away from Marcoussis. The statement is an utter inversion of the understanding of abstraction that Clement Greenberg would bequeath us shortly thereafter. However it also utterly inverts any understanding on Dreier’s part of the Legrain frames as simple Art Deco: “To many Abstract Modern Art is simply deco - rative art. But this is not the case. A decoration must always be flat to be good. A painting must always have depth to be good. This new Division of Color Space breaks up the wall and introduces a vibration which has hitherto not been taken into consideration.” Dreier, “Explaining Modern Art,” American Art Student (March 1927), cited in Wilson, “One Big Painting,” p. 88. One should note the insistence in Dreier’s statement on Legrain that I just cited in the body of my text, that the (decorative?) frames by Legrain gave “depth” to the Picabia and the Villon. We face an account of Art Deco design that insists, contra Dreier’s other pronouncements on the decorative, that it was not flat, and we face in the Marcoussis a moment when the avant-garde perhaps become flatter than it ever was meant to be, cross - ing a boundary separating art from décor and vice versa.

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vectors heading out at angles through the gallery. And Marcoussis’s Legrain-framed object was positioned to lead into the gallery space that contained Duchamp’s trans - parent Large Glass , with which it was thus hung in dialogue—however strange or even utterly inconceivable this may seem to us now. The Large Glass too was positioned to almost touch one of the exhibition’s wall dividers, with the work reaching out into space like a partition or an extension of the exhibition architecture itself, something reinforced by the fact that the original frame for The Large Glass and the exhibition design for the walls and partitions of the 1926 exhibit were identical in their con - struction. The original frame for Duchamp’s The Large Glass was an incongruous affair of pilasters and moldings and propped supports, a site-specific extension of the gallery, but angled away from and at cross purposes with the rigid architecture of the museum to frame a view of a similarly wayward Mondrian piece behind it. Here, the Duchamp object as frame became both screen and window at once, both an exten - sion of the museum or institutional frame and a movement beyond it, an opening up of it: the work of art and the museum became a vector, both object and architecture given wings, the museum’s frame opened onto a beyond. Seen in this way, the clear object evocations of the three 1926 Legrain frames that we know— Chanson and the book, Midi and the window, the Marcoussis Fish and the screen—become confused. For now, Midi begins to look screen-like as well, and Villon’s free-standing Chanson creates the precise media - tion point between the open book and the occluding screen. We face another modality, perhaps, in which the frame comes to operate as a dissolute rather than resolute boundary, less defining than ontologically unfixing. And more: the Large Glass —at least in its original (lost) frame and upon the occasion of its original dis - play—must be seen as intimately connected to the conceptual field of the Legrain frames designed for the French artists in the Société Anonyme. Duchamp and Picabia’s interest in the painting-book metaphor would continue for decades. In the 1940s, for example, in yet another forgotten gesture, Picabia would parallel Duchamp’s book-like and miniature architecture of the Boîte-en-Valise with his own proposal for what he called, after the French term livre de poche , or “pocket paperback,” his tableaux de poche , 8 x 6 cm “pocket paintings” shown in 1942 and imagined by Picabia as necessitating the construction of a “miniature museum.” 37 Evidently, then, for these artists the painting-book metaphor was not just the limited operation that art history has made of such comparisons, especially in the work of Duchamp: an opening of the craft basis of visual art to the conceptual world of discourse. Rather, objects were at stake in this comparison: different categories, different things, trading places or eroding each other’s boundaries. Moreover, as Picabia’s “miniature museum” later attested, boundaries between objects and spaces

37. See Camﬁeld, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times, p. 258. If Picabia’s miniature paintings, often of beast-like faces, remind the viewer of playing cards, the works should be compared to a project by Duchamp from a year later, running parallel to his Boîte -en-Valise : the Pocket Chess Set of 1943. This chess set is even more obviously book-like than the Boîte , which was made by a book designer. Indeed, the graphic design of the individual chess pieces (in celluloid) seem very close to the style of Picabia’s late covers for Littérature from twenty years earlier.

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Installation view of the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum. 1926 –27. Marcoussis’s Fish hangs on a pilaster in the left background.

were at stake as well; for the play with frames within the Société Anonyme was as much about the imagination of a kind of institutional space as the bounding of any given object—the invention, the shaping, and the expansion of the art object into the creation of a kind of artistic space, a spatial-institutional ﬁeld. Let me telescope what this might mean: in the 1926 Legrain frames, whether arranged by Duchamp or not, a dialectic crucial to the project of the Société Anonyme and to the dialogue between Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia was cre - ated—a dialectic between opening and binding, between the book and the screen, and between the activities, the opposed activities, of exhibition and collection. Think again of Duchamp’s 1927 work Door: 11, rue Larrey . I have always thought of it as part of another untold dialogue, that between Duchamp and André Breton, who was busy that same year writing his masterpiece Nadja , wherein the author would call for “books left ajar, like doors,” declaring that he would not go “looking for keys.” 38 But

38. André Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove, 1960), p. 18. For a linkage of this passage to a “porous” or open model of artwork and world within Surrealist painting, see Denis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October 69 (Summer 1994), pp. 111–32.

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Duchamp’s work was made in the immediate aftermath of the 1926 Brooklyn exhi - bition and the experiment with the Legrain frames, and his door, he always said, was made to disprove the French proverb that a door “must be either open or shut.” Duchamp’s door, of course, could be both at the same time. This double condition inhabits all of the Legrain-framed artworks of 1926: if the open book as a metaphor for the art object seems to involve a gesture of entrance, transparency, and expansion, the screen-as-metaphor cancels these gestures, producing secrecy, privacy, and effects of hiding and concealment. Complicating this opposition, the book as a private object seems dedicated in this twisted paradigm to effects of openness or publicity (exhibition). The screen, on the other hand, while architec - tural and perhaps social, seems concerned with closure and privacy (collection). We might say that this double condition or contradiction—between expansion and concealment—speaks reﬂexively to the very nature of the form of artistic dia - logue itself, as well as to the ambivalent nature of any deep exchange (along the lines of Marcel Mauss’s concept of the dual nature of “gift” exchange). Ultimately, I think, these crossed metaphors articulate within the Société Anonyme context something linked to the essential contradiction involved in the very creation of a “public collection,” the Société Anonyme’s project—Duchamp, Man Ray, and (from afar) Picabia’s project—of imagining the very ﬁrst “museum of modern art.” This is a contradiction that today we are in constant danger of forget - ting. For what the institution of the museum today wants us most to forget is that the art collection originates in an essentially private activity; we are to forget that the col - lection is in some essential way an institution of privacy . And yet, perhaps the contradiction involved early in the twentieth century in imagining a collection or a public space or even a museum for modern art would have us face precisely the fact that this activity would involve two dialectical moves, complicating both sides of the contradiction itself: a museum of modern art would involve both a making public of that which is private, and an inescapable privatizing of the public sphere itself. This contradiction, while repressed today in institutions like MoMA, is foundational to those institutions, and the activities of Duchamp around the Société Anonyme reveal this, or at least seem dedicated to exploring the contradiction itself. The very name of the organization, Société Anonyme, embeds this contradiction at the origins of its project, suspended as it is between Man Ray’s utopic “misunderstanding” of the term as simply referring to an “Anonymous Society,” and Duchamp’s knowing gambit that it was indeed the French term for a capitalist corporation.

I defy any amateur of painting to love a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.

So wrote Georges Bataille in 1930, and it is a challenge that provides me with one postscript to add to these ﬁnal speculations. For who would have thought that

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Picabia and Jacques Doucet in 1927 with Straws and Toothpicks . c. 1924. Frame by Legrain.

Bataille’s statement had a concrete prehistory in the Dada and Surrealist avant- gardes? Who would have thought his fetishist avant-garde had a lineage, forefathers, even followers, even adherents? Who would have thought that the shoe-lovers and the painting-lovers had already met, in the artistic practice cir - cling around the Société Anonyme in the 1920s, and in the under-explored dialogue between Duchamp and Picabia? For on the one hand, the contradictions around modern art and the museum—around collection and exhibition—might have been approached within the Société Anonyme analytically, mostly by Duchamp; and yet, on the other hand, we could read such contradictions as being suspended, or even exag - gerated, there, in a structure reminiscent of the fetish. “I know, but all the same”: the logic of fetishist disavowal seems somehow intimately tied to Picabia’s Midi and its material substitutions, as well as to the cultural connotations of its Legrain snakeskin frame. I have said much here about the metaphor of the frame and the painting as an open book, but little about the opposite Legrain interest in binding as a metaphor. Binding versus opening: we return to the opposition of leather and lace (as well as to the very heart of the dialectics of dialogue). Perhaps the most fascinating and troubling part of the story that I have been telling has to do with the connection of Midi , we might say, to the realm of fashion—to Jacques Doucet as a fashion designer, which the Legrain frame designs seem to want to express (witness the buttons on Legrain’s frame for Straws and Toothpicks ), but also to the

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Picabia. Plumes . c. 1923 –25. Frame by Legrain. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. logic of desire and perhaps the work of fetishism and transposition that is most intimately fashion’s own. I will simply point to the knowing play with fetishism, especially, it seems, Picabia’s personal favorite, namely foot fetishism—signaled already in the Dada moment with works like the Tableau Rastadada of 1920—in the later collage series from which Midi emerges. Here we face Picabia paintings made with or framed by snakeskin and leather, but things get much wilder than this. For we also face works literally covered in the discarded soles of shoes, and even, most incredibly, the little round corn plasters that one uses on ungainly, stricken feet (some ﬁve years at least before George Bataille’s notorious essay “The Big Toe”). Such is the material reality of the brown and yellowed circles dotting the rounded protrusions of Picabia’s painting Plumes . If one wanted to extend this fashion metaphor, or the metaphor of fetishism and perhaps of binding in all its senses, one would want to observe how the Villon frame looks like a belt buckle or a bow tie—a knot, a form of binding—as much as an open book, and the Marcoussis as a screen seems dedicated as well to fashion’s world of change and identity transformation (every fetish, too, we might say, amounts to a screen). And of course Midi and its snakeskin frame belong more comfortably in the world of fashion than in Pierre Legrain’s fantasia of the book, as here we face a painting encased in a material more commonly used for a woman’s purse or a rather wicked high heel shoe. To think Midi and its frame in this way is to enter into thinking of its relation to the museum in terms of

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fetishism, which is to say that instead of a “critique of institutions”—which before modern art museums existed would not have been possible to imagine anyway— we face here within the heart of the Dada dialogue that formed the Société Anonyme project something like the production of an “imaginary architecture” for the institution of the museum—a space opened up perhaps and then bound—a fantasmatic space fully infused in Midi ’s case with the transformational logic of the fetish and desire. 39 “I know, but all the same”: This last claim must immediately be restated. For the logic of the fetish is not only transformational, or substitutional; it is a logic of disavowal as well. David Joselit has written about Duchamp’s lace-strewn design for the 1920 inaugural exhibition of the Société Anonyme as creating a logic of “excorporation” within the artist’s work, a tactic for the “projection of bodily qual - ities into space.” 40 But Picabia’s Midi and the other Legrain frames of 1926 seem to ask already a slightly different question, or to pose an already altered dynamic: instead of the body, what would it mean to extend the fetish into space? What would it mean to extend a bodily substitute, a false or inauthentic body, into space? Or, perhaps more accurately: what would it mean to extend into space not the body and its desires, but the fetish as a structure that both exaggerates these desires, amplifying them hyperbolically, and yet does so by potentially denying the actuality of the body itself—negating the difference of sex and of the other? With this, it becomes clear that one of the critical gestures of the Société Anonyme was to acknowledge in its varied ways that the expansion of painting into a spatial construct was by 1926 no longer a utopian, revolutionary gesture. The space imagined and projected outward by Duchamp’s library-bound Tu m’ , for example, was a space of the book, of discourse, and of the collection, but it was also a melancholic space, a funereal expansion, retrospective already (and not utopian) in 1918. Picabia’s Midi extends its snakeskin binding into space to project outward a space of the fetish—a space that is potentially sadomasochistic or vio - lent, surely aristocratic, but one that also would partake of the fetish’s disavowals of difference and the space of otherness. Here, then, is another way to narrate the “leakage” of the Legrain frames of 1926: they contemplated what Douglas Crimp has recently called “the decorative unconscious of modern art,” but only by dis - avowing and thus collapsing difference—between art and fashion, between modernism and design, between the avant-garde and mass-culture. 41 Like all fetishes, the structure of Midi and its Legrain frame magniﬁes this collapse, pro - ducing a “monument” to the difference it disavows. We might wonder if we face a critical form of homeopathy, in fact, a taking into oneself of the larger cultural

39. The history of Dada is replete with such fantasmatic spaces, and the prime example would be the situation created by Duchamp’s Fountain controversy of 1917, with its collision of the salon and the bathroom, of public and private spaces. 40. Joselit, “The Artist Readymade,” p. 40. 41. “Leakage” is the term Joselit chooses to describe the excorporative action of Duchamp’s lace frames in 1920. See Joselit, “The Artist Readymade,” p. 40.

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Studio in Jacques Doucet’s home, Neuilly. Interior designed by Legrain and Paul Ruaud.

“disease” that would eradicate the spaces of cultural contestation and difference— a taking into oneself of this problematic willingly, in order perhaps to move beyond it, or to make its effects unmistakable and palpable. Exaggerating and performing (in a camp mode) the collapse of difference between art and décor, or art and fashion, Midi emerges as a form, not surprisingly, of cultural masquer - ade. As opposed to the normal narrative of Picabia’s post-Dada years, which is concerned with his ﬂight from the avant-garde, we may indeed here face in the artist’s work a deployment of the fetish that produces not a disavowal of the avant- garde, but an avant-garde of disavowal. And so, Picabia’s Midi and its

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Legrain-framed confreres produce a spatiality that collapses distinctions on all sides—wildly, excessively—between the visual and the textual, between painting and architecture, between the image and space. Perhaps the Société Anonyme’s “fantasia of the museum” is a space with more in common than we might otherwise realize with one last Legrain space and perhaps the most important if forgotten of this designer’s frames that I know. And here I will simply reproduce without too much comment Legrain’s outrageous interior design for Jacques Doucet’s studio in his house at Neuilly. As Doucet was its first (and only) private collector, we see the original home of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in this image, embedded architecturally like a mural in the private home (like Duchamp’s earlier Tu m’ for Katherine Dreier), surrounded by its original (and massive) Legrain frame, by 1920s Legrain-framed Picabias, and by the pale green walls and primitivist fantasia of Legrain’s overwhelming interior design—note the sly leopard or panther crouching at the Demoiselles feet, a favorite (ludicrous) detail. Like Tu m’ , and like Midi , and long before them, the Demoiselles had already become porous to its surrounding space, setting up the dynamic of “excorporation” as central to the very project of the avant-garde. As we have been aware since the work on the painting by Leo Steinberg, the space that the Demoiselles projects is a space of the brothel, another fantasmatic space of desire extended theatrically to the viewer and to the work’s surrounds. It is as if Legrain and Doucet understood this imperative, and amplified it, shifting the painting’s fantasy from the brothel to the jungle, from the sexual to the primitive. And in amplifying this extension, the painting became the focal point for a décor of excess, a spatial fantasia, almost to the point of disbelief (disavowal). Just a few years after this photograph was taken, after both Doucet’s and Legrain’s deaths in 1929, the interior was dismantled and the painting would sail for America to end up in the collection of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York by 1939. In this displacement, the Demoiselles lost its frame. Different destina - tions (different fantasies) for avant-garde art were being imagined, again. It was as if to enter the Museum of Modern Art, the Demoiselles had to be denuded of its frame—stripped bare, as Duchamp might put it. No one, it seems, knows what happened to it. Somehow, it says everything about the different paradigm of the Société Anonyme that the sleeping monster of Midi , hidden in the Yale University Art Gallery’s storage racks for some fifty years, kept its own. There are prisons from which some paintings should never be released.

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