Marcel Duchamp: una collezione italiana. Disegni, grafiche, fotografie e multipli del padre dell'arte contemporanea

Marcel Duchamp: an Italian collection presents the Luisella Zignone collection for the first time: 150 works, drawings. graphics, photographs and readymades which provide a well-rounded documentation of the conceptual activity of this French artist, an essential reference point for all contemporary art from the outset of the twentieth century to today. Marcel Duchamp brought a new way of conceiving art, and life, to the modern age.

Two important themes run parallel in the work of Duchamp. Both date from 1911: from that moment they continued to develop more or less independently. Though these themes share the same origin, the quest for art forms that are more conceptual than visual, the first was conveyed through a series of non-conventional works which led Duchamp to explore many diverse creative possibilities: the Readymades, optical works, engravings, word games, chess, the layout of books and catalogues, the conception of book covers, magazines and posters, bookbinding etc.

The second theme - both central to and a source of all his future work - is La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme (the Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even), a work also known as Grand Verre (The Great Glass) (1915-1923), a visual poem and e secular cosmogony, the epic quality of which was to reach its conclusion in Etant donné, a piece on which he worked for the last twenty years of his life (1946-1968).
Between 1915, the beginning of Grand Verre, and 1946, the outset of Etant donné, a series of preparatory works came into being which were to find their location in this final work, considered to be the artist's spiritual testament. The Luisa Zignone collection, containing a good portion of these, constitutes a documentation of the greatest importance.
Most significant among these works, apart from seven Readymades (Fountain, Bottle Dryer, Why not sneeze Rose Sélavy, In Advance of Broken Arm, Fresh Widow, Underwood and 3 Standard Stoppages in the box), is the celebrated Boîte verte from 1934 and a corpus of engravings. Alongside these are five portraits of the artist executed by Nicky Ekstrom in 1964, photographs by Man Ray (including some and two portraits of Duchamp) and some portraits by Ugo Mulas executed in New York during his first stay in 1964 and the same year in Milan for the exhibition "Homage to Duchamp" at the Galleria Schwarz. Photographs and other documents are conserved in the Black Book created by Duchamp for a retrospective at the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery, New York, in 1964.

This volume, published for the Genoese exhibition conceived by Massimiliano Fuksas and Doriana O. Mandrelli, includes texts by Arturo Schwarz (Marcel Duchamp sempre attuale, anche), Sandra Solimano (Duchamp come Che Guevara, se la mitologia prevale sulla conoscenza), Edoardo Sanguineti (Rotorilievi) and a drawing by Massimiliano Fuksas.