Marcel Duchamp and the Arensbergs

Jaime Tsai

Lecture given to the Art Gallery Society at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on
the 27th and 28th of July (Duchamp’s birthday) 2016.

Walter and Louise Arensberg’s contribution to the early twentieth century reception
of avant-garde art in America is still underappreciated and relatively unknown.
Although they had amassed over 800 exceptional works of art in their lifetime, they
were notoriously unforthcoming, and interviews and photographs with the couple
were exceptionally rare. They frequently insisted that nothing personal be written
about them, and wished instead, that their public persona be known through their
collection, which, it must be said, is very much the result of an equal partnership. This
lecture seeks to bring their contributions to light, especially in regards to the legacy of
Marcel Duchamp, whose works were the most prized of their collection, and whose
friendship was integral to the art they obtained, the avant-garde social circle they
entertained, and where their collection was eventually bequeathed.

First, a little bit about the collectors. Walter and Louise were a very unusual couple,
and many people described them as being entirely mismatched. She was a
conservative introvert, and he was a charming exhibitionist. Walter was a third
generation German-American. Born in 1878, his father was an industrial magnate and
a member of the Freemasons. Walter graduated from Harvard in 1900 with a Bachelor
of Arts with Honours in English and Philosophy, and although he began a postgrad in
English, he never completed it. He had a wide-ranging intellect, which was sometimes
described as “undisciplined”, and was made the editor of the Harvard monthly after
writing a notable essay on Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Durer’s Melancholia.1 In
addition to being a formidable chess player, and the vice president of the Harvard
team, Walter was also strangely lauded for his ability to play women’s roles in the
Elizabethan comedies produced by his fraternity.

While Walter’s family fortune from steel left him considerably wealthy, Louise’s
fortune from textiles was even greater. She was born in Dresden, but the family later
moved to Massachusetts. As was befitting for a 19th century lady, Louise maintained
the household after her mother’s institutionalisation and death, and was proficient in
music, literature, and languages. She was exceptionally well travelled, could speak
French, German and Russian, and was a talented pianist and soprano. A period at a
finishing school in Dresden also furnished her with art skills.

The couple met through her brother who was a Harvard classmate of Walter’s, and
they became secretly engaged in 1905, finally marrying in 1907. He was 29, and she
was 28. They never had children, but were constantly surrounded by their beloved
terriers. After a failed attempt at being an art critic in New York2, Walter started
writing his own poems, translating those of others, and translating Dante. His great
passion was French Symbolist poetry, and this was certainly reflected in his first
published collection of poems from 1914, suitably titled ‘Poems’. Critics considered

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his poetry too anachronistic and elitist. While the world was experiencing dramatic
industrial and social upheavals, and with the war on the horizon, Walter’s poems
came off as old-fashioned and romantic, and unfortunately not in an engaging way;
they tended to be intellectual and a little esoteric, leaving the reader “cold”.3 It was
perhaps the harsh criticism of his Harvard-esque anachronism that lead Walter to seek
out a more avant-garde climate in New York. The couple moved from Cambridge to
New York in 1914, to 33 West 67th street, where Walter remade himself as an
“advanced poet” through his geography and his financial backing of journals of avant-
garde poetry such as Others and the radical little magazine Rogue.4

The image of New York as the site of advanced art and poetry in the early twentieth
century had a great deal to do with the Armory Show from the year before. Walter
and Louise had visited the infamous exhibition, which introduced European avant-
garde art to a stunned American audience. The international exhibition of modern art
was unlike anything Americans’ had seen before; they were shocked, appalled, and
some Chicago art students even threatened to burn an effigy of Henri Matisse.5 The
show opened in New York’s 69th Regiment Armory on the evening of March the 17th,
1913. Walter saw the show towards the end of its New York stay, but when it
travelled to Boston in April, he went and saw it again and again and again. He was
immediately moved by the bold works on display, in his words, it “hit him between
wind and water”6, and set him on his career as an “impassioned, daring and astute
collector of advanced modern art.” And although Louise at first found the Armory
works “weird and grotesque and simply frightful,”7 she would soon change her mind.

Among the works on show were Matisse’s Red Studio (1911) and Blue Nude (1907),
which he would later own for a period, Picabia’s The Dance at Spring (1912),
Braque’s Violin (1912), Kandinsky’s Improvisation 27 (1912), Gauguin’s Words of
the Devil (1892) and Van Gogh’s Mountains at Saint-Rémy (1889). There were also
works by Cezanne, Picasso, Redon, Munch, and many others. The American
paintings on display unfortunately looked quite dull and parochial in comparison to
their vibrant European counterparts. One of the paintings that received the most
critical attention was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912).
To an American audience, Duchamp’s painting was symptomatic of everything wrong
with modern European art: it was a messy spectacle of irrationality. Duchamp’s
biographer Calvin Tompkins explained that the attacks on Duchamp were good-
natured in comparison to the extreme condemnations of Matisse.8 Julian Street’s
“explosion in a shingle factory”, for example, and J. F. Griswold’s cartoon parody in
the Evening Sun called “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)”
suggest a playful ridicule.9

Walter was hooked. Although he only managed to buy a small Vuillard lithograph
print for $12, as everything he liked had sold by the time the show got to Boston, he
eventually managed to buy seven of the paintings in the show from their original
owners. On the closing day of the exhibition he exchanged the Vuillard for prints by
Gauguin and Cezanne, and bought the last painting by Duchamp’s brother Jacques
Villon –Sketch for Puteaux Smoke and Trees in Bloom (1912). Walter’s “addiction to
modern art and his wide-open hospitality to some of its more lively practitioners, both
European and American, would eventually consume his own inheritance and a good
part of his wife’s.”10 Feeling himself an amateur in the modern art stakes, Walter
sought out an insider to discuss the works with, and this is how he met Walter Pach,

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an up-and-coming art critic and historian, and importantly, a member and spruiker for
the organisation that mounted the Armory Show.11 Not only was it Pach’s role to sell
the works on display, but also to defend them from the “rotters and gapers” who
wished to destroy them. Pach spent many evenings with the Arensbergs talking them
through modern art, and it was Pach that introduced the Arensberg’s to Duchamp.

Duchamp, who had famously “stopped painting” after the Cubist’s rejection of his
Nude Descending, decided he needed a change, and arrived in the United States from
Paris on the S. S. Rochambeau on June the 15th, 1915. The Pach’s put him up for the
first few days in their apartment, then he moved in to Walter and Louise’s large
duplex at 33 West 67th street. They were on holidays at their house in Connecticut,
and having heard about Duchamp from Pach, and of course through his notorious
Nude Descending at the Armory show, the couple were more than happy for the artist
to stay at their place without having met him. And when they eventually did, Walter
and Duchamp took to each other instantly. Walter found an opportunity to finally own
an original Duchamp by offering to pay Duchamp’s rent for one of their studios, and
in return Duchamp promised him his now-famous The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even, (the Large Glass, 1915-1923) on its completion.12 Duchamp became
a permanent fixture in the lives of Walter and Louise Arensberg, and over the years
would fill a variety of roles in their lives, from confidante and friend, to art advisor
and dealer, to institutional negotiator and curator.

It was around the same time that Duchamp moved in to the Arensberg’s studio that
their social ‘salons’ were getting to full swing. The ‘Arensberg Salon’ as it is now
known, was a loose social affair held at their apartment that started sometime after
dinner and finished in the early hours of the morning. There were no set days, and
sometimes the salon would be on for a string of nights in a row. Drinks were served
all evening and light food provided a cushion for the alcohol. The invitations were
open to all, and for two years a lively and diverse set of locals and foreigners would
attend one or many of these evenings. The Arensbergs were in their thirties by this
stage and had managed to ingratiate themselves with the most advanced of the artistic,
literary and musical communities flourishing in the city. There were two other salons
in New York at the time: Alfred Stieglitz’s salon and Mabel Dodge’s ‘evenings’. The
tone of the Stieglitz salon was a little militant, directed as it was by the earnest and
stubborn photographer, and primarily included people associated with his gallery 291.
Mabel Dodge’s famous Wednesday evenings were held in four rooms at 23 Fifth
Avenue, and were social and political in tone. Duchamp, who hadn’t a political bone
in his body, found the evenings trying.13 In reality, the influence of Stieglitz in avant-
garde circles was declining, and Dodge’s evenings were wrapping up just as the
Arensbergs’ began. In an almost child-like indifference to the war raging on outside,
the salon discussions were broad ranging but primarily aesthetic in nature. Games and
excessive drinking were de rigueur, and relationships – sexual and otherwise – were
casual and fluid.14 In an atmosphere without prejudice, all opinions were encouraged,
and four languages were frequently spoken by its international guests. The Arensberg
salon thus became the dada salon of New York.15 It accurately reflected the spirit of
irreverence, intellectualism and political indifference of New York dada, and its
primary target was the art establishment.

Walter became known for his bohemian look – often carelessly unshaven, and
wearing dishevelled clothes despite his abundant wealth. Louise, on the other hand,

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was very prim and proper, and often wore elaborate upper-class ensembles. Both had
achieved by the mid-1910s a type of social masquerade, or parody, befitting of their
avant-garde milieu. Walter was a hard drinker and smoker who sometimes cut people
down with sharp sarcasm, but was more often than not charming and gracious. Louise
was painfully shy and withdrawn, and didn’t drink or smoke.16 Her witty and
vivacious side only appeared amongst her closest circle of friends. Everyone else
regarded her as reticent and aloof. Beatrice Wood, one of her closest friends, and a
salon frequenter, recalled in her autobiography that they would frequently sit together
on a sofa away from the party and watch from a distance.17 Walter’s infidelities were
frequent and unapologetic; hers were more limited, but perhaps also more serious. At
one time she almost left Walter for Duchamp’s friend Henri-Pierre Roché, who had
proposed marriage.

Surprisingly not a single photograph was ever taken of the salons.18 We know,
however, that the apartment was full of oriental rugs and tasteful early American
furniture, and that the walls were hung with Cubist paintings by Braque and Gleizes,
and that in keeping with early twentieth century primitivism, African carvings were
also scattered around.19 Attendees would gather around the grand piano as Louise
played and sung, or participate in intellectual discussions, play parlour games or chess.
A huge range of people attended: the actress Fania Marinoff, dancer Isadora Duncan,
composer Edgard Varèse and the intense boxer-poet Arthur Cravan. Frequenters were
Beatrice Wood, Henri-Pierre Roché and Walter’s Cambridge friends, then there were
the American artists: Charles Sheerer, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Man Ray,
Morton Schamberg, Joseph Stella, Frances Simpson Stevens, Clara Tice and John
Covert; a literary crowd including those involved with the magazines Others and
Rogue, and William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Carl Van Vechten, Louise Norton,
Sophie Treadwell and Alfred Kreymborg, and of course there were the European
émigrés: Duchamp, the Picabias, Gleizes, Marius de Zayas, Yvonne Chastel and Jean
Crotti and the irrepressible Baroness Elsa von Fretag Loringhoven.20

Like many patrons before them, the Arensbergs stood out from their dada guests,
because unlike them they were wealthy, and had the built in elitism and sense of pride
that came with it. In a way they were flaneurs of the dada salon: looking over the
scene that was of their own making, and some might say for their own entertainment,
and yet maintaining a careful distance, immune as they were from the banal
responsibilities and obligations of everyday life. Some astute observers, like Gabrièle
Picabia, noted that the couple were certainly not immune to shock when it came to
new ideas.21 But she recalled the salons fondly: “[we] became part of the motley
international band which turned night into day, [where] conscientious objectors of all
nationalities and walks of life [were] living in an inconceivable orgy of sexuality, jazz
and alcohol.”22

One of the concerns of the Arensberg salon was what should follow the Armory show
in New York. There was now an appetite for Modern art in America but no planned
exhibitions to sate it. From the salon discussions emerged the Society of Independent
Artists. There were three groups on the Societies board of directors: the American
Realist painters, known collectively as The Eight, or the Ash-Can School, represented
by George Bellows and Rockwell Kent; Stieglitz’s group was represented by John
Marin; and of course the Arensberg circle, that included Walter, Man Ray, John
Covert, Joseph Stella, Morton Schamberg and Marcel Duchamp.23 Based on the

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French society of the same name, the radically democratic exhibitions would be
annual, avant-garde, and have the motto: “no jury, no prizes”. By paying a small fee,
any artist could be included in the exhibition – the point was that the artist him or
herself could choose what is art, and what is valuable. To ensure the desires of the
board didn’t guide the theme or the popularity of certain artists, Duchamp, as the
director of the hanging committee – organised the first exhibition alphabetically. Ten
prominent New Yorkers put up the $10,000 in expenses for the Society’s first
exhibition, which was held on the 10th of April, 1917, at Grand Central Palace on
Lexington Avenue. It was a giant exhibition, the largest ever held in the United States
with a whopping 2125 works included.24 It opened, coincidently, only a few days
after America declared war on Germany.

It was at this first exhibition that Duchamp had attempted to submit a piece of
plumbing as a work of art. Before the opening of the first exhibition, he, Walter
Arensberg and Joseph Stella visited J. L. Mott Iron Works, a major manufacturer of
bathroom fixtures, with the idea of testing the principles of the Society. Duchamp paid
the required $6 submission, anonymously signed the urinal with ‘R. Mutt’, titled it
appropriately ‘Fountain,’ and entered it in for exhibition. Fountain was unsurprisingly
rejected by the more conservative half of the committee. George Bellows in particular,
was scandalised. Walter, who was of course in on the joke suggested to Bellows that
“A lovely form has been revealed, freed from it’s functional purpose, therefore a man
has clearly made an aesthetic contribution.” A furious Bellows replied: “you mean to
say, if a man sent in horse manure glued to a canvas that we would have to accept it?”
“I’m afraid we would.”25 Duchamp promptly resigned his position with the Society of
Independent Artists.26 After the close of the exhibition, an article entitled ‘The
Richard Mutt Case’ appeared in Duchamp’s satirical review The Blind Man,
defending the urinal as original because Mr Mutt CHOSE the object and
recontextualised it: “He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful
significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – [he] created a new
thought for that object.”27 And that is how the ‘title’ readymade came to be: Fountain
was not made by the artist, but was given new meaning through its recontextualisation.
So Walter and Duchamp’s relationship was integral to the greatest twentieth century
challenge to the art establishment, and now as a direct result of this coup, originality,
craftsmanship, authenticity and singularity are no longer the determining factors in
what is considered art.

Over the period of the Arensberg salon, “Walter and Duchamp worked closely
together … seeking to find a substitute language by which the constructs of verbal
and visual models could be broken by avoiding any “echo of the physical world”.28
Their intellects met most productively in language: its limits and its potentials.
Talking in French and English, Walter was challenged by Duchamp’s love of chance
and indifference, and Duchamp was inspired by Walter’s keen grasp of cryptography
and the puzzles of language. From the Cubists and his time as a librarian, Duchamp
had inherited an interest in the fourth dimension, and had even developed a language
that exposed the limits of the known world; infraslim for example, was a word he had
invented around this time to have both scientific and human traits – it could be used,
he suggested, to measure infinitesimal shifts in things, such as the smell of a mouth
carried in exhaled cigarette smoke, the sound made when walking in corduroy pants,
or the difference between the weight of a clean and a dirty shirt. Duchamp also
challenged Walter’s poetry, and encouraged him to use a more Mallaméan approach

5
to limit the excess of ego in his writing. Together they played language-based parlour
games, and two works developed directly out of them: Comb (1916) and With Hidden
Noise (1916).29 Both works are readymades engraved with nonsensical sentences –
made absurd through the use of ciphers and chance. Duchamp described the result as
being something like “a neon sign when one letter is not lit and makes the word
unintelligible.”30 With Hidden Noise also alludes to Duchamp’s interest in the
infraslim, the in-between and the invisible. He explained in a 1956 interview,
“Before I finished it Arensberg put something inside the ball of twine, and
never told me what it was, and I didn't want to know. It was a sort of secret
between us, and it makes noise [when you shake it], so we called this a Ready-
made with a hidden noise. Listen to it. I don't know; I will never know
whether it is a diamond or a coin.”31
In addition to their intellectual pursuits, and far from the realities of the war, they had
all night adventures in New York that included fistfights, binge drinking, and an
infinite number of flirtations with women.

The salon nights eventually subsided, however, and the war began to dampen the
spirits of the New York avant-gardes. Duchamp disappeared to Buenos Aires and
Paris in 1919 where most of his time was consumed by chess. He did, however, have
time to send the Arensbergs a readymade gift: he had asked a chemist to seal a glass
ampoule of captured Paris air – it was his Dada version of a souvenir. Back in New
York the Arensbergs, after years of luxurious spending, found themselves in financial
dire straits. Walter had made several bad investments, he loaned money to anyone
who asked, and his backing of avant-garde journals, films and galleries had brought
them near to bankruptcy. His addiction to modern art had also started eating into
Louise’s money. So by 1921 the Arensbergs decided to sell their collection.32 Their
furniture and clothes were auctioned off and their art was consigned to Charles
Sheerer to sell through de Zayas’s gallery. They kept all their most precious works,
including Duchamp’s. However, because they wished to leave New York for Los
Angeles, they decided to sell the Large Glass – which could easily break in transit. It
was bought by Duchamp’s next biggest collector – Katherine Dreier.

While Duchamp had moved back to New York and was cross dressing under the
watchful camera of Man Ray, the Arensbergs found Los Angeles just the change they
needed. Far from the social and intellectual frenzy of New York, California was
sunny, peaceful and culturally backward.33 Having given up on poetry, Walter
immersed himself in the full time cryptographic study of Shakespeare. He believed,
controversially, that he could prove that Francis Bacon in fact wrote Shakespeare’s
plays, by decoding hidden signatures within the texts. He took this research so
seriously that he even hired a secretary and three Chicago Institute of Technology
faculty members (all mathematicians) to assist in his codification and cryptographic
studies. But like his poetry and his work on Dante, his ‘Cryptography of Shakespeare’
was roundly condemned by the literary world, and even Baconians found little merit
in his research. Walter became a bit paranoid and obsessive, and his friends worried
about his growing ‘persecution complex’.34 Their financial woes subsided by 1925,
however, with the New York sell-off, and two family deaths that left substantial
inheritances.35 Returning to New York for a year, the couple were able to attend an
important Brancusi exhibition and through Duchamp, meet the artist. They also saw
the collection of another important New York patron - John Quinn, and a huge
international exhibition of modern art put on by Duchamp, Man Ray and Dreier’s

6
organisation the Société Anonyme at the Brooklyn Museum 1926. Duchamp’s Large
Glass broke in transit after the show, but as a person who cherished chance
interventions and the marks of invisible processes, Duchamp was happy with the
effect the shattered glass had on the work.

Due to Walter’s past failures with money and his poor negotiating skills when it came
to buying art, Louise took over the finances and the art purchases, especially as most
of it was now with her money. She became very adept at negotiating prices down, and
it eventually rubbed off on Walter.36 During the 1930s the Depression had brought the
prices of art right down, and the Arensbergs shrewdly bought a great deal from
collectors and dealers.37 They also privately lent money to struggling artists and art
dealers, and backed their political beliefs by sending money to the anti-fascist
Republicans fighting the Spanish Civil War.38

In 1927 they had moved to Hillside Avenue in Hollywood.39 It was a moderately

sized house surrounded by dense foliage and trees, the tranquil location a striking
contrast to the interior, with Brancusi’s Arch and Princess X at the entrance, and a
dizzying array of modern art and pre-Columbian artefacts crammed inside, salon-
hung floor-to-ceiling. The interior was so overwhelmed, in fact, that the Arensbergs
eventually renovated the house to include a new gallery room in the 30s.40 By the end
of the 1930s, they had over 600 art objects and furniture pieces.41 Their collection
included works by Arp, Kandinsky, Feininger, de Chirico, Léger, Modigliani,
Mondrian, Rouault, Ernst, Calder, Klee, Jawlensky, Dali, Tanguy, Masson, Miro and
Magritte. They had collected the work of some Mexican muralists including Orozco
and Rivera, and they continued accumulating their already-strong collection of works
by Duchamp, Brancusi, Picabia, Metzinger, Braque, and Duchamp’s brothers Villon
and Duchamp-Villon. Their collection had earned them some renown, and they
enjoyed entertaining guests in their live-in gallery; but the wild, debaucherous salons
of New York were long gone. In the 30s, the Arensbergs held more low-key salons,
and these were by invitation only. Their L.A. acquaintances and guests included the
photographer Edward Weston, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the actor Aline
MacMahon, and musicians Louis and Annette Kaufman.42 Instead of critical aesthetic
ideas, conversation usually revolved around Walter’s obsession: Francis Bacon.

When the war came, Duchamp got stuck in occupied Paris. The Arensbergs had sent
him a letter and some funds in May of 1940, and were frantic when they hadn’t heard
back from him. They made enquires about getting him an American visa – but unlike
the first world war, the bureaucratic system had changed and the process moved at a
snail’s pace, taking two years. In the end getting Duchamp out of Paris was only
possible through the combined efforts of the Arensbergs, Katherine Dreier, Mary
Reynolds, and Peggy Guggenheim (who I will be giving a lecture on in October).43
Following his return to New York, Duchamp continued a conversation with the
Arensbergs that had begun during his first visit to their L.A. home in 1936; what
should be done with their collection after their deaths? They had determined that
Duchamp should be, in Walter’s words, the “curator of his own living memorial”.44
Duchamp couldn’t have been more aligned with their way of thinking. In truth, he
was obsessed with keeping track of all his work.45 He had always been meticulous in
organising which collection or owner his works went to, and as you can see from this
diagram that I came across in the Philadelphia archives, he meticulously documented
the location and owner of each art object, even detailing the specifics of their

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provenance. Note in particular the concentration of works owned by Dreier and the
Arensbergs in the far right columns.

Duchamp’s unusual relationship to his art objects shows that he never understood
them as commodities. Duchamp refused to sell his artworks through dealers in the art
market. Instead he gave his work as gifts, negotiated low prices when his works were
resold, and exchanged art for rent and sometimes even dental work.46 He found
selling distasteful and believed that art should never be bound to commerce, although
he did, in times of hardship, give French lessons and buy and sell his work as a means
to survive.47

Due to his assiduous records, Duchamp was able to negotiate the sale of most of his
art to the Arensbergs in order to keep his collection “a coherent whole” and avoid it
“being scattered about.”48 He held numerous discussions with collectors and dealers
arranging to get all his work into their collection. In a letter to Walter Pach, for
example, Duchamp attempted to secure the painting Sad Young Man on a Train,
which Pach had bought at the Armory show. Duchamp wrote:
“I told you why I would like this painting (if it leaves you) to go and join its
brothers and sisters in California. I am convinced that my production because
it is on a small scale has no right to be speculated upon, that is, to travel from
one collection to another and get dispersed and I am certain that Arensberg,
much like myself, intends to keep it as a coherent whole.”49
It is this investment in the ‘totality of the corpus’ that lead Duchamp to lament that:
“exhibiting one thing here and another there feels like amputating a finger or leg each
time.”50 This anxiety Duchamp displays about keeping his work together suggests a
psychological investment in the objects beyond their commodity value. It implies that
perhaps this anthropomorphised collection may offer some security against the war’s
threat of geographical, physical and psychological dispersion. “I wanted the whole
body of work to stay together,” Duchamp repeatedly stressed.

At first the Arensbergs were committed to bequeathing their work in Los Angeles,
their new home. For tax purposes they created a non-profit foundation as the
beneficiary of their collection called the Francis Bacon Foundation.51 The Los
Angeles County Museum was the only option, however, and at this point it had three
divisions (history, science and art) that were all vying for exhibition space, money and
staff. There were several people including the collector William Preston Harrison that
had attempted to get a museum building dedicated to art without luck. In 1937
Harrison had even recommended Walter’s election to the board of Trustees of the Los
Angeles Art Association whose goal it was to establish an art museum, but he
resigned the post finding the board both incompetent and amateurish in their
knowledge of art. Walter was also made a member of the County Museum’s Board of
Governors with the hope that giving his collection to the museum (as well as that of
Katherine Dreier’s) might compel them to build a museum of art, but nothing ever
came of it, and besides, the museum was considered a national laughing stock in art
circles; it’s history focus earned it a reputation for being vacuous and full of fossils.52

The Arensbergs also investigated the possibility of building a separate structure to

house their art collection. Frederick Kiesler, who designed Guggenheim’s Art of This
Century’ gallery was promoted as the best architect for the job, but word travelled fast,
and following the depression, architects were lining up for the rare opportunity to

8
design a public art gallery. Le Corbusier, for example, wrote to the Arensbergs from
Paris expressing his desire to be involved. Sadly Walter turned Le Corbusier down,
saying that his concept was, unsurprisingly, far too ambitious for what they had in
mind.53 They thought about the possibility of a joint home and place of exhibition to
be kept as a public building in the future, like other European models such as the
Gustave Moreau gallery in Paris. Walter toyed with the idea of asking Mies van der
Rohe, who he much admired, to execute the plan, but once again it never came to
fruition.

While Katherine Dreier eventually found a permanent home for the Société Anonyme
collection at Yale University in 1941, the Arensbergs were struggling to find a home
for theirs. The primary reason that institutions were hesitating to take the collection
was because Walter insisted that they also take over the direction of his research into
the Shakespeare-Bacon problem. Stanford University, for example, bulked at the idea,
and the cost – as Walter had been spending approximately $10,000 per annum on the
project, a huge sum at the time. The Bacon problem had ostracised the Arensbergs
and their collection. He had come to believe that the collection and Bacon were
inextricable, even telling one interviewer that the Baconian method of interpretation
was applicable to the interpretation of art. After two decades of research, however,
Walter realised that it had all been a waste. One number in his calculations was in
error, and therefore most of his proof, if not his whole premise was invalidated. He
had to start again, and thankfully because of this, the collection became his top
priority.54 Both Louise and Walter’s heath was ailing, so a deed of gift was drawn up
with the University of California in 1944 after they promised to build a new art
museum to hold their 832 artworks and other possessions. Walter wrote to Duchamp
in January 1945 that “the museum [at UCLA] will be a monument to you, and the
presence of all the other things will serve as a means of defining how completely
individual is your contribution to the art of the twentieth century.”55 But after the war
had ended the art museum was number 46 on the university’s wish list, and there just
wasn’t the money, so on October the 1, 1947 the UCLA agreement was annulled.56

Everything they had tried in California eventually fell through, so Walter and Louise
conceded that their collection must find its home elsewhere. They were anxious to
consider any alternative, so between Spring 1948 and Winter 1950, their collection
was pursued, and over 20 institutions were proposed as possible candidates. It must be
said that by this stage both Louise and Walter had developed ruthless negotiating
skills, and tended to play the institutions off against each other. It was a manipulative
game that they hoped would ensure the best possible outcome for the collection.57 In
1950 Duchamp was placed on the Board of the Arensbergs’ Francis Bacon
Foundation, demonstrating the trust the Arensberg’s placed in him. He was integral to
the process of finding a home for their collection, as he had a more sophisticated
understanding of the museum world, and as their health failed, he acted as their
emissary in negotiations with museum directors in his role as the “curator” of his own
living memorial.

Even though the Art Institute of Chicago had attempted to secure the Arenberg
collection by organising an exhibition of their collection the previous year, there were
really only three serious contenders for the collection: The Philadelphia Museum, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Washington National Gallery of Art. The most
important questions were the accessibility and visibility of their collection. The

9
National Gallery had strange policies around display, for example, they required
artists to have been dead for twenty years to be interred within the walls of the
museum. The Metropolitan Museum was not much better, it had a terrible track
record of purchasing and displaying modern art and shortly after the failed
negotiations, the famous Irascibles group (who we now know as the New York
School) boycotted the Met’s backward and conservative exhibition that was
incongruously titled ‘American Painting Today’. Together the Irascibles signed an
angry letter to the Metropolitan Museum’s president Roland Redmond accusing the
institution of a continued “hostility to advanced art.” In addition to these factors,
neither the Met nor the National Gallery would have been able to exhibit the
collection as a unit, and certainly not permanently.58

The Philadelphia Museum of Art emerged as the clear winner. The museum’s director
Fiske Kimball was a Harvard trained architectural historian and was a charming and
affable man, but beyond this, he was able to meet all the Arensberg’s conditions bar
one – funding the Bacon/Shakespeare research project.59 But by this stage Walter had
given up on convincing museums to take it on. Kimball offered to exhibit their
collection together as a unit, and for an extended period. He also agreed to let
Duchamp have a major say in the curation of the collection in the new South-East
wing that would be designed to accommodate the collection. The formal deed of gift
was signed by Walter, Louise and Duchamp on December 27, 1950. The collection
was officially opened four years later, after their deaths.60

In line with his desire to preside over his work and his posterity, Duchamp was also
the trustee of Dreier’s estate. When she died in 1952, Duchamp made sure that his
most important work, the Large Glass, was at last reunited with its brothers and
sisters in Philadelphia. Duchamp also altered Kimball’s original curation of the
collection in early 1960, and assisted in redesigning the Arensberg galleries while the
collection was lent out to the Guggenheim in New York. It’s final display that endures
to this day is a large light-filled room of Duchamp’s works that form a constellation
around the Large Glass, and can also be seen through it. His final gift to the
Philadelphia Museum was Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage . . .
(Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas . . . 1946-66), an elaborate peep-
show diorama that was installed in an adjoining room after his death in 1968.

Walter and Louise refused to ever explain why they chose the works they did. With
Duchamp’s mediation, they hoped the collection would speak for itself. Revealingly,
Walter once described himself as a facilitator and protector, “the silent guard” of
Duchamp, who was the “Unknown soldier of the cubist movement.”61 Like the
Arensbergs, Duchamp never believed that his personality or intention should
determine how the collection would be understood. He described himself as an
intermediary, and believed that every time a spectator passes through the Arensberg’s
collection, they rehabilitate it, and alter its meaning and value through their own,
individual interpretation. As the posthumous exhibition and popularity of Given
proves: death is only the beginning of an infinite exchange.62

10
1
Important note: without the key primary research of Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, this lecture would not have been possible. Naomi
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, Doctor of Philosophy
dissertation in Art History, December 1994, The University of California, Santa Barbara, 17-20
2
He was a stringer reporter and did reviews for Burlington magazine. The trial was brief and he only had limited success –
perhaps due to his overly-critical perspective. Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and
Walter Arensberg, 33
3
Ibid., 70-75
4
Nontheless his poetry was still limited in subject, individual tone and symbolist arcane imagery. Perhaps the presence of
Duchamp (through their meetings at this time) were also present. Ibid., 80-83
5
Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: a biography, (New York: Henry Holt, 1998) 117
6
Walter Arensberg, cited in Tomkins, Duchamp: a biography, 143
7
Ibid.,178
8
Ibid., 117
9
Ibid., 116-117
10
Ibid., 144
11
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 98. Other contemporary
patrons (who were far ahead of the Arensbergs): John Quinn, Arthur Jerome Eddy and Lillie Bliss (Sawelson-Gorse, 101).
Duchamp’s relationship with Quinn (Sawelson-Gorse, 152), Duchamp’s relationship with the Stettheimers (Sawelson-Gorse,
155).
12
Tomkins, Duchamp: a biography,146
13
Ibid., 147
14
Ibid., 198-99
15
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 107-8
16
Tomkins, Duchamp: a biography, 176-8
17
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 116
18
Ibid., 118
19
Beatrice wood in Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 108
20
Ibid., 125
21
Ibid., 110
22
Gabriele Buffet-Picabia, cited in Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter
Arensberg, 121
23
Walter Pach the treasurer and Dreier on board too. Tomkins, Duchamp: a biography, 179-80
24
Wood did a nude with soap attached to the pubic area. Men tucked their calling cards into its frame. Ibid., 181
25
Ibid., 182
26
Duchamp, letter to Suzanne Duchamp, April 11, 1917, in Affect Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp,
Francis M. Naumann, Hector Obalk (eds.), (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000) 47
27
Duchamp, ‘The Richard Mutt Case,’ The Blind Man, New York, 1917, reproduced in Art in Theory, ed. Charles Harrison and
Paul Wood, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) 248
28
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 160
29
Also see Duchamp’s Rendez-vous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916.
30
Anne D'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (eds.), Marcel Duchamp, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989) 280
31
Michel Sanouillet, Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (London, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1975)
135
32
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 195
33
They rented in 1922 residence A, 1645 vermont avenue, in Aline Barnsdall’s Olive Hill complex by Frank Lloyd Wright who
had picked up the project from where Rudolph Schinler left off. The roof leaked. Then they moved to a californian bungalow at
1820 Whitley avenue in Hollywood. Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter
Arensberg, 203-204
34
Ibid., 210
35
Ibid., 212
36
Ibid., 244
37
Ibid., 250
38
Ibid., 244
39
7065 Hillside Avenue – relateively unpopulated Outpost area of Hollywood.
40
Ibid., 251
41
Ibid., 349
42
Ibid., 253
43
Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950 (New York, London:
Thames and Hudson, 2001) 204
44
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 296-7
45
“I ‘work’ at home, classifying, compiling,” Duchamp wrote to Man Ray in 1922. Duchamp, letter to Man Ray, April/May
1922, in Affect Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, 108
46
Arensberg’s paid rent on 67th street in exchange for completed Glass, Duchamp paid Daniel Tzank, his dentist with a signed
fake cheque.
47
For a list of gifted works, see Tomkins, Duchamp: a biography, 129
48
See Duchamp’s letter to Walter Pach, Sept. 1937, in Affect Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, 216
49
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 260
50
Duchamp, cited in, T. J. Demos, ‘Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise: Between Institutional Acculturation and Geopolitical
Displacement,’ Grey Room, no. 8 (Summer 2002): 24
51
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg,,261-2
52
Ibid.,271-2
53
Ibid., 268-9
54
Ibid., 302
55
Ibid., 307

11
56
Ibid., 309
57
Ibid., 316
58
Ibid., 352
59
Tomkins, Duchamp: a biography, 373
60
Sawelson-Gorse, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘silent guard’: a critical study of Louise and Walter Arensberg, 359
61
Ibid., 306
62
Duchamp, ‘The Creative Act,’ in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 140

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