New Book Traces Marcel Duchamp's 'Impossible' Love for Maria Martins

Francis M. Naumann's new monograph Impossible argues that Marcel Duchamp's late work was driven by his love for the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins. The 192-page illustrated volume, published by Abbeville Press on 31 March at $30 (hb), reconstructs a relationship that began at their first meeting in March 1943 and sustained an emotional connection until their deaths, five years apart.

Duchamp (1887-1968) is usually described as glacial, calculated, distant and sly—the "godfather of conceptual art." Naumann, a prominent Duchamp scholar with nearly five decades of writing on the artist, opens his book with that familiar reticent introvert. Over the course of the monograph, that spectral figure becomes tender, wistful and romantic. Duchamp falls in love.

The account unfolds through speculative scenes that draw, at times uneasily, on the conventions of the romance novel, interwoven with formal analysis demonstrating reciprocal artistic influence. Rigorous notes and a chronology at the back of the volume help temper initial scepticism about the balance between projection and documentation. The most intense—and presumably physical—phase of the relationship lasted less than a decade. Despite Duchamp's evident longing, Martins never left her three children or her husband, a Brazilian ambassador to the US.

What changed in Duchamp's work?

What first attracted the two artists intellectually is not fully known. But early evidence shows Duchamp was no longer indifferent. Asked to design an announcement for an exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery in December 1943, he placed a cupid figure atop a chessboard depicting an endgame problem with no way to win. "There is no solution," the artist had famously said, "because there is no problem." Now, however, there was a problem.

Despite a previous marriage and a long-term relationship with the American artist Mary Reynolds, Duchamp had never been in love before. At that point, 26 years had passed since he made Fountain and 20 since he declared The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) definitively unfinished. Naumann suggests the problem of Martins reanimated Duchamp's interest in making, turning the affair from a biographical detail into a lens through which to view his late work.

As the relationship develops, Naumann focuses on the lovers' sculptures, exchanged or produced in parallel, as a metonym for the physical encounters he is otherwise obliged to omit. In 1946 Duchamp gave Martins Paysage fautif (faulty landscape), an intimate piece made with his own seminal fluid on plastic and backed with black satin. In the same year she cast The Impossible, III, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which two creatures, their heads ringed in tendrils, reach toward one another in a gesture that is at once an embrace and a devouring. Martins was, Naumann writes, "unquestionably referring to the impossibility of her relationship with Duchamp."

The goddess figures borrowed from Brazilian folklore that populated her second show at the Valentine Gallery in New York became increasingly abstract and psychologically charged as her career progressed, perhaps reflecting Duchamp's own preference for the cerebral over the real, the concept over the image.

How does the affair reframe Étant donnés?

There is no shortage of confusion surrounding Duchamp's final work, Étant donnés: 1º La chute d'eau, 2º Le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. the waterfall, 2. the illuminating gas, 1946-66). Why, after decades of apparent withdrawal, would the celebrated Modernist devote 20 years to a highly illusionistic installation of a nude woman posed in a landscape recalling Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World (1866)—the very tradition of "retinal art" he had long disavowed?

Naumann's retelling frames the work as the culmination of their coupling. Martins emerges not merely as muse or model but as collaborator. She lends her body to be cast, but also choreographs its position and advises on process and technique. There is no precedent in Duchamp's oeuvre for the imagery, yet echoes of Martins's prints and sculptures persist in both the figure and the vegetal setting. Even after she returned to Brazil and their contact waned, Duchamp retained, through work on the diorama, a means of beholding her body and sustaining their artistic exchange.

Passages from Duchamp's letters reveal the force of his affections, making it difficult to regard Étant donnés as anything other than an act of devotion, however strange it may appear from the outside. "At heart, my little one, I am profoundly sad, for I can see all our days passing rapidly and fading away," he writes. Elsewhere: "I feel totally lost now that we are cut off from each other… This isolation hurts." A reproduced notebook page carries the typed words "Please do not throw this on the floor" above a hand-drawn heart filled in with red crayon, and scrawled below: "that is for Maria."

Whose voice is missing?

Martins's letters to Duchamp are not available to the public. It is said she kept a photograph of him in her studio and another on her charm bracelet, alongside a lock of his hair—observations that complicate Naumann's repeated casting of her as a "femme fatale" who "did whatever she needed to get a man to fall in love with her." The absence of her subjectivity creates an asymmetry the text acknowledges yet cannot quite overcome. What she truly made of Duchamp and their relationship remains largely unknown.

After her husband's death in 1965, Martins returned to New York and visited Duchamp, by then married to Alexina "Teeny" Duchamp. As Naumann notes, it is possible Duchamp signed and dated Étant donnés then and there, unable to complete it until, at long last, they were together again.

Impossible: The Love Affair between Marcel Duchamp & Maria Martins, and the Artwork It Inspired, by Francis M. Naumann, Abbeville Press, 192pp, illustrated, $30 (hb), published 31 March.