Duchamp, Marcel

15 pages, black and blue ink on paper, signed "Monsieur Duchamp", "Marcel Duchamp," "Rrose" or "Ducreux." One envelope and one autograph postcard by Alexina "Teeny" Duchamp to Monique Fong. 

Monique Fong Wust

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Fascinating correspondence between Duchamp and his young friend Monique Fong about his art and shows, his relationship with André Breton, and the Collège de 'Pataphysique.

Monique Fong is a writer, translator and interpreter. She met André Breton, whose work she admired enormously, at a dinner party hosted by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Breton introduced her to the Surrealists. After severing ties with the Paris Surrealist group in March 1951, she moved to Washington, D.C. having been hired as an interpreter for the Marshall Plan. Fong met Duchamp during one of her first visits to in New York  and they remained friends until his death in October 1968. 

In his first letters, Marcel is quickly familiar with his new friend, asking about a boyfriend and including playful innuendo. But the text always returned to the interests they shared, with Duchamp expressing his concern with André Breton, in spite of Fong's admiration for him: "Aussi désolé que vous des nouvelles A.B. [...] cela n'aboutit pas au normal au contraire c'est l'exasperation qui pour resultat une usure precoce [...] Seule la grande gloire genre Panthéon ou la dénomination d'une avenue le rassérèneront mais il sera mort" 

Monique Fong sent him her writings and he asked for the news from Paris. After she had lent him publications of the Collège de 'Pataphysique: "Auriez-vous la gentillesse de me donner l'adresse du Collège de pata [...] croyez-vous que Marcel Jean puisse être un des 'rédacteurs'?" (Duchamp contributed to the Collège de 'Pataphysique publications). 

In 1967, Claude Givaudan organised an exhibition of Duchamp's ready-mades to coincide with the exhibition Raymond Duchamp-Villon at the Musée d'Art Moderne.  Duchamp had received from  Octavio Paz his first essay on his work and Monique had translated it from Spanish into French. Givaudan eventually published it as a book at the time of the show. 

When Monique traveled to Sydney, M. Duchamp asked her to make inquiries for a possible exhibition in Australia: "Je vous demande [...] de vous informer auprès du Musée d'art (s'il y en a un) ou auprès des galeries importantes s'il y a eu une exposition de la Coll. Sisler (avec une trentaine de mes choses)." 

As Duchamp’s letters to Fong attest, theirs was a close and loyal friendship over decades, despite the 40 year age difference.  When Duchamp first took Fong to the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, she bravely admitted that she did not understand his work. Reassuring her, he replied: “That doesn’t matter. What counts is that we’re friends.”