Construction of the Month — Marcel Duchamp: Door: 11, rue Larrey
A tall, thin door stands ajar – but it is also closed. In 1927 a carpenter, working to Marcel Duchamp’s specifications, installed a door in a corner of Duchamp’s studio at 11, rue Larrey, Paris. The apartment was small, and Duchamp wanted to solve the problem of not being able to close off the bathroom and bedroom from the main space. This was achieved by a clever design which proposed that a single door be inserted into the cramped corner where the two doorways were juxtaposed at a ninety degree angle. This deployment of a single door for an area that seemed to require two meant that when the opening to the bedroom was fully closed, that to the bathroom remained open, and vice versa, thus countering the French saying that a door cannot be open and shut at the same time. Arturo Schwarz, in his The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Thames and Hudson, 1969) described this structure as a “Three-dimensional pun: a door which is permanently opened and shut at the same time” (p. 496).
Door: 11, rue Larrey also seems to address one of the 93 notes and documents Duchamp collected together in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Batchelors, Even of 1934 (also known as the Green Box), an unpaginated English version of which was assembled by Richard Hamilton and published by Hansjorg Mayer in 1960: “Perhaps make a hinge picture…find an automatic description of the hinge”. A door and its frame conventionally involve hinges in its construction and is itself a large-scale (and “readymade”) instance of this device. Furthermore, the adjacent doorways, notwithstanding the fact that Duchamp had nothing to do with their specific positioning within the layout of the apartment, hint at another of his recurring interests or tropes, that of mirroring or doubling. Sharing its title with the notes to which it is related, Duchamp’s complex physical construction The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) is often referred to, including by Duchamp himself, as the Large Glass. This expression might just as well designate a mirror, as in the phrase “looking glass”, rather than merely be a reference to the use of transparent glass as the primary medium of this work.
A number of Duchamp scholars regard Door: 11, rue Larrey as referring to the idea of sexual ambivalence of, as it were, “swinging both ways”, and link the piece to Duchamp’s well-known female alter ego Rrose Selavy, in whose guise he had himself photographed by Man Ray in the early 1920s.
In terms of the broader context, the bathroom/bedroom door constitutes one of series of works made by the artist involving passages or portals, though egress is usually implied rather than actual, when it is not deliberately frustrated. These include, as well as the Large Glass, Fresh Widow (1920), a fake, miniature French window, The Brawl at Austerlitz, 1921, an again small-scale fenetre), and Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas (1946-66), the mysterious installation Duchamp worked on in almost total secrecy for 20 years.
A second strand of connections exist between Door: 11, rue Larrey and a small number of objects either made or commissioned by Duchamp to fulfil particular everyday functions. Most prominent among these are the Pocket Chess Set from 1943, the Sink-Stopper (1964), and the chimney hood and windbreak constructed shortly before Duchamp’s death in 1968. These last three items were made for Duchamp’s holiday home in Cadaques, Spain, and although regarded as artworks clearly also address practical concerns.
The final image in Alexander Roob’s Alchemy and Mysticism (Taschen, 1997) is of Door: 11, rue Larrey.
Text © Peter Suchin, 2020
