Marcel Duchamp

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Marcel Duchamp. *From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (Box in a Valise)*. 1935–41. Brown leather valise with handle containing sixty-nine miniature replicas and printed reproductions and one original, Virgin (No. 2), 1938, hand-colored collotype. Valise (closed): 16 × 14 3/4 × 4 1/4" (40.6 × 37.5 × 10.8 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950

War and the Box in a Valise 6152

Marcel Duchamp. From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (Box in a Valise). 1935–41. Brown leather valise with handle containing sixty-nine miniature replicas and printed reproductions and one original, Virgin (No. 2), 1938, hand-colored collotype. Valise (closed): 16 × 14 3/4 × 4 1/4" (40.6 × 37.5 × 10.8 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950

Curator, Michelle Kuo:  Duchamp started making the Box in a Valise during the outbreak of World War II.

Curator, Ann Temkin: He had to leave Paris when it was occupied by the Germans. He tried for over a year to get a visa to leave France for New York.

Michelle Kuo:  He is able to get a license from his friend, who’s a cheesemonger, to get a kind of sticker of like, this is the bill of goods for these weird suitcases, and that’s how he’s able to get them out of the country.  So it is a story of the artist as refugee, but also as a kind of traveling salesman.

Ann Temkin: He ultimately joined the countless numbers of people who were living in exile during World War II in the United States. The first work of art that he showed here, when he came in 1942, was this Box in a Valise, it’s almost like, “Here I am. Here’s all I’ve got with me.” It’s, at least in part, a statement on displacement at that awful moment in history.

Michelle Kuo: This becomes, to my eye, a kind of manic recapitulation of his own work as a retrospective at a time when no museum was giving him a retrospective.