Marcel Duchamp and Alison Knowles | Color Swatch

Marcel Duchamp and Alison Knowles

Color Swatch

19 x 14.6 cm.

Unique

Last month this work sold at Christie’s auction house for $50,800 US, more than twice its high estimate of between $15,000 and $ 20,000. 

The Association Marcel Duchamp confirmed the authenticity, and the following ‘essay’ accompanied the sale: 

"Executed in 1968, Color Swatch belongs to the final, quietly subversive chapter of Marcel Duchamp’s career, when the artist distilled his lifelong interrogation of authorship and choice into gestures of striking economy. At first glance, the composition—two overlapping discs, one red, one blue, suspended against a black ground—appears almost disarmingly simple. Yet its origins lie in a moment of selection rather than invention: Duchamp chose the configuration from a group of color swatches, elevating it through the act of designation.

The present work relates to a small silkscreen project conceived in dialogue with the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, whose close association with Duchamp underscores the collaborative and process-oriented spirit of the piece. What emerges is less a conventional work than a meditation on perception and authorship: an image that hovers between design, experiment, and readymade."

Knowles’ account from her website contradicts at least the “close association”: 

"Through Daniel Spoerri, the Something Else Press arranged to meet Marcel Duchamp. [The] screen print was preceded by a four by five colour swatch showing two circles one red, one blue. He selected this color swatch one day while we are having tea at his tenth street apartment in New York. There were eleven color swatches, each showing blue and red circles but in different intensities. He selected one and left it out on table saying "Oh, that's it." I put the others in my brief case and we kept talking. Teeny Duchamp walked by the table, saw the color swatch and said "MARCEL, when did you do this?" He asked for a pencil, smiled and signed the color swatch. This color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp's last readymade! I kept this little swatch for about a year and then sold it to a collecter in Remsheid. Richard Hamilton, to whom I gave a copy of the final print, called this work a piece of memorabilia, not a readymade. Duchamp died the following year but I am sure he would have agreed. I like the story very much because it describes the process as important as the product according to a master."

The Something Else Press (which Knowles co-founded with her husband Dick Higgins) had arranged to use Duchamp’s Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts) graphic as the cover to Emmett Williams long-form Concrete Poem Sweethearts [below, top]. The image is a proto-Op-Art collage Duchamp made in 1936 for the cover of an issue of Cahiers d’art [see below, centre] which featured an essay by Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (ex-wife of Francis Picabia) on Duchamp’s optical machines and experiments. It is composed of a blue heart inside a red heart, inside a blue. If the viewer squints, or looks away slightly, the vibrant colours cause the work to throb, pulse or flutter.1

According to Peter Frank’s Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography, Higgins and Williams decided to capitalize on “Duchamp’s assent” by publishing a silkscreen poster, which would be produced by Knowles. Reportedly only twenty-two copies turned out satisfactorily. 

The collector in Remsheid that Knowles sold the signed swatch to was Vice-Versand publisher Wolfgang Feelisch. 

Calling this a work a ‘readymade’ by Duchamp takes his notion of an artistic exploration of authorship and repurposes it to one of finance and provenance. It brings to mind the phrase "an angry nihilism”,

which conservative writer Robert Fulford used to describe all of Duchamp’s readymades.2 

1. One of my favourite works by General Idea appropriates, infects and deactivates Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts), see below, bottom, and next post. 

2. Writing for the right-wing National Post in 2015, Fulford went on to say that "Duchamp must have imagined it would soon be forgotten, but critics and journalists put it in books that established it as a historic breakthrough”, suggesting that the result is all art has become "hopelessly debased”. However, later in life Duchamp told his biographer Calvin Tompkins: "I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work."

"Which, a lot going on here, starting with Richard Hamilton of all people being kind of a bitch about Duchamp memorabilia, especially after getting a copy of the print. But they’re both not wrong, and I’m sure Duchamp would have approved of the mess.

I don’t think I’m so into Knowles’ takeaway from the story, though I am very interested in what she took away from the meeting, namely the other ten other color swatches that she made, and Duchamp touched but didn’t sign. That Duchamp memorabilia sets my heart aflutter.

But let’s put all that aside and conjure up in our minds the world inside the sentence, “the color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp’s last readymade!””

- Greg Allen, greg.org