The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (in French : '), also called The Large Glass (in French : '), is an artwork by Marcel Duchamp over tall and almost 6 feet (1.76m) wide. Duchamp worked on the piece from 1915 to 1923 in New York City, creating two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. Duchamp's ideas for The Large Glass began in 1912, and he made numerous notes and studies, as well as preliminary works for the piece. The notes reflect the creation of unique rules of physics and myth which describe the work.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is also the title given to The Green Box notes (1934), as Duchamp intended The Large Glass to be accompanied by a book in order to prevent purely visual responses to it. The notes describe that his "hilarious picture" is intended to depict the erotic encounter between the "Bride", in the upper panel, and her nine "Bachelors" gathered timidly below in an abundance of mysterious mechanical apparatus in the lower panel. The Large Glass was exhibited in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum before it was broken during transport and intentionally left broken by Duchamp. He decided not to change the glass but to glue the pieces back together. It is now part of the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp sanctioned replicas of The Large Glass, the first in 1961 for an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and another in 1966 for the Tate Gallery in London. The third replica is in Komaba Museum, University of Tokyo.

Visual analysis

The Large Glass consists of two glass panels, suspended vertically and measuring . The entire composition is shattered, but rests sandwiched between two pieces of intact glass set in a metal frame with wooden base. The top rectangle of glass is known as the Bride's Domain; the bottom piece is the Bachelors' Apparatus. It consists of many geometric shapes melding together to create a large mechanical assemblage. All forms on the glass are outlined with lead wire and filled in with earth tone oil paint. The colors range from pale grey to gold to dark brown and black. Some figures are bumpy and cloudy, and contain the dust left on them during the time which the unfinished work lay dormant, which seems to be an attempt at capturing the dynamic passage of time in a sedate work.

The Bride is a mechanical, almost insect-like, group of monochrome shaded geometric forms located along the left-hand side of the glass. She is connected to her halo, a cloudy form stretching across the top. Its outline and grey shading are starkly offset by the three undulating squares of unpainted glass evenly spaced over the central part of the composition. The Bride's solid, main rectangular form branches out into slender, tentacle-like projections. These include an inverted funnel capped by a half-moon shape, a series of shapes resembling a skull with two misplaced ears, and a long, proboscis-like extension stretching down almost as far as the horizon line between her domain and that of the bachelors. Her top-located domain is almost completely monochrome, with a wash of beige comparable to the cool colors of a cloudy sky. It stands in front of a window, from which natural light creates a varying atmosphere depending on the time of day, the weather, and the season. It is also surrounded by his other works – both paintings and readymades

Linda Dalrymple Henderson picks up on Duchamp's idea of inventing a "playful physics" and traces a quirky Victorian physics out of the notes and The Large Glass itself; numerous mathematical and philosophical systems have been read out of (or perhaps into) its structures.

Most critics, however, read the piece as an exploration of male and female desire as they complicate each other. One critic, for example, describes the basic layout as follows: "The Large Glass has been called a love machine, but it is actually a machine of suffering. Its upper and lower realms are separated from each other forever by a horizon designated as the 'bride's clothes'. The bride is hanging, perhaps from a rope, in an isolated cage, or crucified. The bachelors remain below, left only with the possibility of churning, agonized masturbation."

Boxes

Over the course of his life, Duchamp released three boxes related to The Large Glass, containing facsimiles of notes, photographs, and drawings.

The Box of 1914

The Box of 1914 brings together facsimiles of the first sketches and preparatory notes for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, reproduced on 13 silver glass plates; there are three copies, five copies according to others. The container for the box was a commercial cardboard box for photographic plates.

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The 1914 box contains facsimile notes and three photographs of a piece of string mounted on canvas and a note that led to the work: 3 Standard Stoppages. It also contains a single drawing of a cyclist riding uphill titled Avoir l'apprenti du soleil (To Have the Apprentice in the Sun).

One of the notes in the box makes an early reference to Duchamp's last work: Étant donnés, "Étant donné que ....; si je suppose que je sois souffrant beaucoup ...."

Copies of the box are held by the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Musee Maillol in Paris, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Each of those was lithographed and printed on paper that was similar to the paper he used in his preparations. Printed in an edition of 320 (with 20 containing an original work numbered I to XX; a series called the "luxury edition"), the final work was nicknamed La Boîte verte (The Green Box) and bears the inscription "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" in punched-out caps. The publisher is listed as Rrose Sélavy (Duchamp's alter ego whose name is a pun on "Eros, c'est la vie" (Eros is life)). Through André Breton, Duchamp explained in 1932 that he intended to give the notes a public reading.

Copies of The Green Box are held by museums including Tate Britain, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum.

The White Box

In 1966, Cordier & Ekstrom edited a new edition, À l'infinitif (In the infinitive) also called The White Box, gathering new unpublished notes from the period 19121920 in an edition of 150. The box contains 79 facsimiles of notes from 191423 in a Plexiglas case of 33.3 x 29 x 3.8&nbsp;cm.

See also

  • List of works by Marcel Duchamp

Video

  • Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass (video) | Khan Academy

Notes

References

Sources

Further reading

  • Golding, John, Fleming/Honour Ed.: Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. London, The Penguin Press, 1973
  • Hamilton, Richard: Typo/Topography of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, 2001–02.
  • John A. Walker on Duchamp In Context: Science And Technology In The Large Glass And Related Works - Academia.edu
  • The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
  • Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp by Andrew Stafford. Includes animation of The Large Glass