A groundbreaking retrospective exhibition is finally giving Suzanne Duchamp, often overshadowed by her famous brothers Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon, the recognition she deserves as a pioneering artist of the early 20th century avant-garde movement. Born into an artistic family in northern France in 1889, Suzanne Duchamp developed her own highly individual painterly practice while being exposed early to key movements including Cubism and Dada.
The exhibition "Suzanne Duchamp: Retrospective," recently displayed at Kunsthaus Zurich and now heading to Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, continues an important trend of monographic shows dedicated to underrepresented female artists. The show reveals how Duchamp, nicknamed "the Mama of Dada," made absurdism sparkle and shine through her unique artistic vision and innovative techniques.
Duchamp's Dada work represents the main attraction for most visitors to the exhibition. The absurdist movement, which began in Zurich but spread rapidly across a Europe devastated by the horrors of World War I, challenged traditional notions of reason and order. Duchamp participated in the Paris iteration of Dada, and her contributions fully embraced the freedoms the movement offered to artists.
Dada artists pioneered the move away from the pretensions of fine art, embracing collage, photomontage, bricolage, and other techniques that incorporated materials from everyday life. For Duchamp, these materials were particularly glamorous and eye-catching: gold paint, silver tinfoil, brass clock gears, and glass beads gave her machinic diagrams a proto-Art Deco quality that set her work apart from her contemporaries.
One of her most significant works, "Radiation of Two Solitary Separates Apart" (1916-20), demonstrates her innovative approach to abstract art. The piece takes the hard-edged form of a gilded grid as a field for mapping relationships between geometric shapes. The two shapes referenced in the title are rendered three-dimensional with beads and bits of plastic, both linked and separated by looped thread, creating a compelling push-pull effect that is subtly balanced by a thin, wavering purple line floating to the right.
The exhibition catalog features a new commission by contemporary painter Amy Sillman, who drew inspiration from Duchamp's dynamic formal relationships to create her own digital drawings. Sillman combined gestural shapes with textual overlays to emphasize how Duchamp's abstract mark-making was deeply connected to human sentiments including love, joy, and glory.
Such positive sentiments were far from evident in the postwar period when Duchamp was working, and in other pieces she posed pointed questions about humanity's place in an increasingly industrial world. Her drawings titled "Factory of My Thoughts" (1920) and "Workshop of Joy" (1920) make ample use of blank space on the page, floating stereotypically modernist architectural forms against textual allusions to thought and feeling.
While these works might initially appear ironic, pointing to the loss of individual identity in the face of modern industry, Duchamp specifically described her Dada period as her turn to "subjective painting." This suggests she found a way to insert her personal voice into this emerging artistic language, despite the movement's often impersonal tendencies.
Despite Dada's emphasis on mixed media approaches, painting held particular significance for Duchamp as an endlessly adaptable mode of representation. This is most clearly demonstrated in her work "Marcel's Unhappy Readymade" (1920). When Duchamp married fellow artist Jean Crotti, her brother Marcel gifted the newlyweds a readymade artwork with specific instructions: purchase a geometry textbook and hang it by string on their balcony, allowing the wind to rifle through its pages.
Although the wind eventually destroyed the original work, a photograph survived, which Duchamp then transformed into an oil painting. In her painted version, a crumple of ice-blue paper sits delicately against the rigid metal bars of the balcony. The painted bits of string remind viewers of the precarity of the original gesture, with the painted representation proving more enduring than the physical object itself.
The act of painting a readymade—a form of art that deliberately rejected the artisanal labor of painting—raises fascinating questions about artistic interpretation and ownership. More importantly, it demonstrates that Duchamp was unwilling to live in her brother's shadow, boldly reappropriating his work for her own creative purposes and making a powerful statement about artistic independence.
Many of Duchamp's Dada works, including "Radiation of Two Solitary Separates Apart," explore themes of solitude and isolation. Despite maintaining a lively circle of artist friends and collaborators including Crotti and Francis Picabia, in 1922 she made a significant shift, returning to a more solitary practice focused on representational painting.
In a style that could be described as naive for its directness, distorted perspective, and playful approach to scale, she repopulated her artistic world with musicians, brides, wanderers, children, and even created a lush Garden of Eden where Eve takes center stage while Adam poses bashfully behind her. These later works were executed in bold colors and simple strokes, perpetuating the playfulness of Dada while abandoning its often wry and cold emotional distance.
Duchamp's artistic evolution suggests an important truth about the limitations of pure critique. While criticism—including the Dadaists' systematic lampooning of the old guard—can be a powerful force for change, it can only take an artist so far. Her later body of work demonstrates that once you've finished tearing something down, you need to build something meaningful for yourself.
The exhibition concludes with a sketch bearing an inscription that captures Duchamp's ultimate philosophy and approach to life and art: "Work and smile!" This simple maxim encapsulates the joy and determination that characterized her entire artistic journey, from her early experiments with Dada absurdism to her later embrace of representational painting filled with human warmth and optimism.
