Artist, Marcel Duchamp: I tried, in that big glass, to find some way of expressing myself without being a painter, without being a writer, without taking one of these labels.
Curator, Ann Temkin: He titled this work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). The upper pane is the realm of the bride, and the lower pane is the realm of the bachelors. Duchamp made this complicated story about all of the ways in which the bachelors become this machine yearning to get up to the bride, but they’re unable to reach her. And the story is told in the notes which he made as he was working on The Large Glass and ultimately published.
The Large Glass is on view permanently in the Philadelphia Art Museum. The British artist Richard Hamilton made his own Large Glass so that it could be accessible to a wider public. And that’s what we’re looking at here.
Artist, Richard Hamilton: I spent a year making The Large Glass itself. Instead of copying it photographically, I looked at Marcel’s Green Box notes, and I found that all the information was there, numbers, the distance from the vanishing points, the distance for every perspective feature that was required.
When Marcel saw it, and a journalist said, what do you think of Richard Hamilton’s version of your Large Glass? And Marcel said, “I like it very much. It’s like The Large Glass when it was young.”
Archival audio from: Richard Hamilton in the Reflection of Marcel Duchamp. 2014. Paris. Directed by Pascal Goblot. © 2014 Le Miroir / Vosges Télévisions