MARCEL DUCHAMP | À L'INFINITIF (THE WHITE BOX)

Cleve Gray, Connecticut

Sale: Christie's East, New York, May 9, 1989, lot 142 

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. II, London, 1997, no. 637, illustration of another example p. 867

The present lot is the third and final volume in a series of portfolio’s Duchamp created related to his seminal work The Large Glass, which he worked on from 1915 to 1923, and is currently in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The work consists of two glass panels, suspended vertically and contacting geometric shapes and mechanical objects. To accompany The Large Glass, Duchamp assembled the scraps of paper used in creating the work, and notes on how to interpret it into a box. This work (dubbed The Green Box) in true Duchampian fashion, further complicates the piece by describing elements that aren’t present and “explaining” the work in difficult stream-of-consciousness prose.

In 1964, Duchamp recovered a group of 79 unpublished notes (dating from 1914-23) concerning his work The Large Glass that had been excluded from his original selection of notes for The Green Box, 1934. As most of the notes were written in the infinitive, he titled this publication À L'Infinitif (The White Box). The facsimile notes, along with a translation of the facsimiles by Cleve Gray, are housed in a white box with clear plexiglass and cloth-covered back cover were published in an edition of 150.