Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp in the library at The Haven, West Redding, Connecticut, late summer. 1936. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2010.131.1.116 by guest on 02 October 2021 Leather and Lace 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” OCTOBER 131, Winter 2010, pp. 116–149. © 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2010.131.1.116 by guest on 02 October 2021 118 OCTOBER 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2010.131.1.116 by guest on 02 October 2021 Leather and Lace 119 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).