Artistic independence and freedom, an innovative treatment of materials and media, and a broad artistic range that defies classification: These are the main characteristics of the oeuvre of Suzanne Duchamp.

The SCHIRN is dedicating this world’s first comprehensive solo exhibition to the pioneer of the Dada movement, Suzanne Duchamp (1889–1963) and her oeuvre, which extended over a period of fifty years. The show will present the creative works of Duchamp, who contributed in no small manner to the development of Dadaism during the 1910s and 1920s. Although Duchamp’s works are represented in world-famous collections and she enjoyed excellent connections within the art world during her lifetime, her artistic significance long remained overshadowed by her brothers Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon, as well as by her husband Jean Crotti. In this Digitorial you can discover Duchamp’s works, which included experimental collages, figurative representations, abstract paintings, photographs, and prints.

From 1916, Suzanne Duchamp created works with a unique, subtle imagery through the combination of found, ready-made objects, poetical inscriptions, and geometric forms.

During the mid-1910s, Duchamp maintained close links with New York artists via her brother, Marcel Duchamp. They experimented with unconventional artistic materials and found objects, and hence with the notions of what defines an artwork. The transatlantic exchange served to inspire and motivate Duchamp to explore new possibilities in painting.

Glass beads, pieces of string, and crumpled tin foil—Suzanne Duchamp’s works fascinate us because of their characteristic fusion of painting, poetry, and collage, as well as her use of unusual artistic materials.

Before long, in her artworks she was also combining unorthodox and found objects such as clock movements, beads, metallic paper and foil as well as string, questioning as she did so the conventions of painting and expanding the potential of this apparently traditional medium. She inserted poetic language into her pictorial compositions, especially in the titles of her works, where the painted inscriptions became part of the work itself. This hybrid form of painting was Duchamp’s most important contribution to Dadaism.

Scaffolding structures of steel and iron, machine parts, and other set pieces of modern industrial society play an important role in Duchamp’s Dadaist material collages between 1916 and 1922.

It is certainly also possible to find parallels to her motifs in other avant-garde movements. Many other artists celebrated—sometimes euphorically—the technical innovations of the early twentieth century. However, in the works of the Dadaists the belief of the time in progress and the myth of the machine were treated with irony and deconstructed: Instead of «painters» and «geniuses», they now wanted to be «mechanics» and «assemblers», to depersonalize the artistic process and question the fundamental nature of the artist as an individual.

Duchamp’s work «Multiplication brisée et rétablie» (Broken and Restored Multiplication) is actually a collage, but it is the image space full of «cosmic» circles and stars that dominates. This work in particular makes us think of Russian Constructivism rather than Dadaism. It is a characteristic feature of Duchamp’s and Crotti’s almost mystical interpretation of Dada, which they called «Tabu Dada» in order to distinguish themselves.

The works «Usine de mes pensées» and «Fabrique de joie»”—translated as «Factory of my Thoughts» and «Factory of Joy»—show a sort of architectural utopia. The artist’s powers of imagination and emotional world thus assume an architectural form symbolically—as a production location in an industrial building. Soon afterwards, the particular concept of the link between humans and industry would also preoccupy Jean Crotti in the watercolor «Laboratoire d’idées» (Laboratory of Ideas). These works are some examples that clearly show the mutual influence of the artist duo Duchamp-Crotti. «After he had created the machine after his own image, he made the human ideal mechanic-morphic,» was how Jean Crotti and Suzanne Duchamp finally formulated the concept with Paul Haviland for Tabu Dada.

The profile image of her husband, a bow and arrow and two fingers drawing the bow—a combination of elements which present us with a riddle.

In an autobiographical text from the 1930s, Suzanne Duchamp wrote: «In 1916 she gave up representational painting in favor of subjective painting […]». «Ariette d’oubli de la chapelle étourdie» is a typical work from this period. The unusual materials which Duchamp uses, including a wood relief into which a glass eye has been inserted, and the mysterious title, which can be interpreted as «Ariette of Oblivion of the Dazed Chapel», encourage us to guess at a hidden symbolic content and meaning, which however we viewers are unable to decipher.