Duchamp//Brancusi//Scheiwiller//Sunami
08 February – 28 March 2013

LIST OF WORKS

Brummer gallery, 16 November 1933
photograph Soichi Sunami
150 x 195 mm

Brummer gallery, 16 November 1933 
photograph Soichi Sunami
190 x 215 mm

Brummer gallery, 16 November 1933
photograph Soichi Sunami
178 x 209 mm

Brummer gallery, 16 November 1933
photograph Soichi Sunami
241 x 190 mm

Brummer gallery, 16 November 1933
photograph Soichi Sunami
242 x 190 mm

Duchamp sent five installation shots of the 1933 exhibition of Brancusi’s work at Brummer Gallery, New York, to the Italian publisher Giovanni Scheiwiller. Scheiwiller was collecting material for a publication on Brancusi to be featured between one on Pablo Picasso and one on Henri Matisse and had sent a letter to this effect to Brummer Gallery around the time of the opening of the show. Photographs of individual works would have been more apt for the pub lisher’s purpose and, indeed, there is record that Duchamp carried copies of these with him from Paris. However, Duchamp preferred to send five photographs of the installation he had devised, ignoring Brancusi’s directions. The photographs were shot by the Japanese painter and photographer Soichi Sunami, under Duchamp’s supervision. A further intervention of Duchamp’s is an occasional cropping of the images and the invariable marking on their backs with a series of numbers, which connect the images on the front with the numbers appearing in the catalogue. This was also the work of Duchamp, a page folded in four with only numbers and captions. These five photographs are documents and an artwork. As documents they also exist in the archive of the Musée national d’ art modern – Centre de creation industrielle in Paris, as prints without cropping or numbers. In the exhibition they exist in both capacities, indistinctly.





  Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Giovanni Scheiwiller, Soichi Sunami, Dan Gunn, Berlin
   http://dangunn.de/images/