Marcel Duchamp

Mimi Parent, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1959)
Jean Benoit, Paris (husband of the above)
Acquired from the above

Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, London, 1997, no. 356, an example of the edition of 20 illustrated p. 53

This work is in excellent original condition. The two oven gloves have been affixed in recent times to the mount with thin strings that are taped to the back of the board.
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Duchamp purchased the original tartan oven gloves for this Imitated Rectified Readymade in a New York novelty shop and assembled this prototype himself to send to Paris for the show André Breton was organising at the Galerie Daniel Cordier: Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (known as EROS). This event, which ran from December 15th 1959 to February 15^th 1960, would prove to be the last Surrealist exhibition:  a final statement of transgression by the artists of the movement, rallying against the political, social and moral order of their era. Centred on the theme of the erotic, specifically the sexualised female, every aspect of the exhibition was designed to shock and provoke.

The catalogue that accompanied this exhibition was conceived by Duchamp in collaboration with the Canadian-born Surrealist artist Mimi Parent. Entitled Boite Alerte – Missives Lascives, the catalogue was presented as a green box into which ideas could be 'posted' . As he explains in his letter to Breton, Duchamp chose to sign the work on silk ribbon labels that could then be sewn by Parent onto each example of the edition of twenty. One such ribbon is visible on the backing mount of this prototype, with one on the back of each of the oven gloves.

Perhaps inspired by eighteenth-century erotic purses, with these anthropomorphic, sexualised domestic items, rectified with sewn fabric to look like male and female genitalia, Duchamp playfully alludes to the “hot” reputation of laundresses in French cultural mythology. The provocative choice of tartan, recalling male military uniforms, juxtaposed with the fur that dominates the “female” of the pair, is in keeping with the themes of gender and sexuality explored in the course of the collaborative EROS exhibition, and recalls the object that Parent created for its poster: a man’s white shirt and jacket with a tie made of her own real hair, entitled Masculin/Feminin.

These original prototypes were conserved in the private collection of Mimi Parent and her husband Jean Benoit, also a Surrealist sculptor.