Kitchen Sink

The hundredth anniversary of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp’s name for the common manufactured objects that he converted into works of art by choosing and inscribing them, was celebrated on January 15th at the Museum of Modern Art. About forty invited guests met in a gallery of paintings by Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, and other contemporaries, where they were outnumbered by swarms of uninvited visitors—it was Free Friday, with no admission charge after 4 P.M. Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, welcomed everyone in her brief remarks. Standing near Duchamp’s bicycle wheel mounted on a kitchen stool (“Bicycle Wheel”), and under his snow shovel hanging from a wire (“In Advance of the Broken Arm”), Temkin recalled the letter that Duchamp had written from New York in mid-January, 1916, to his sister Suzanne, in Paris, describing these endlessly subversive art works and identifying them, for the first time, with the English word “readymades.” Duchamp told her to go to his old studio, on the Rue Saint-Hippolyte, where she would find a galvanized-iron bottle rack; he wanted her to paint a title on the bottom in silver-white paint, and to sign it “(d’après) Marcel Duchamp,” thereby creating an original readymade at a distance. The title he wanted her to paint is missing from the letter, and afterward Duchamp couldn’t remember what it was, but in any case Suzanne couldn’t do what he asked. She had already cleaned out the studio and thrown away everything in it, including the bottle rack.