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• 1 2023-05-04T04:12:55-07:00 Feuilles Libres 8 plain 2023-06-20T14:12:45-07:00 Stashed in the bottom tray, beneath a panel bearing a pochoir-colored reproduction of Duchamp’s 1911 painting Sonata (a depiction of his mother and sisters)—yet displayed in this photograph from the Smart Museum’s website as fanning exuberantly outward from the box—the feuilles libres (Bonk glosses the French expression as “free, detached, or loose leaves or folios”) provide a point of contrast to the Boîte’s upright display of fixed elements.¹ These black folders, each bearing between two and six black-and-white or pochoir-colored collotypes—accompanied, like those on the “walls,” by identifying labels—invite the beholder/handler to leaf through them.
  
  One must open a folder’s flap, as if turning the page of a book, to see the two reproductions lining its inner surfaces, and one cannot see all the reproductions on a given folder at once. The distribution of reproductions among these folders reflects distinctions within Duchamp’s body of work; for instance, folder 1 gathers pochoir-colored reproductions of paintings, whereas folder 7 groups photographs of readymades. Whereas the first five series of the Boîte contained thirteen loose folders featuring a total of fifty-one reproductions, Duchamp added three more loose folders featuring a total of twelve reproductions to the last two series, those of 1966 and 1968.² Given the threat posed to these paper materials by the fumes that the Boîte’s degenerating plastic items release, the Smart Museum has removed them from its 1963 Boîte and stores them separately.³
  
  The white label affixed to the outer flap of the loose folder visible in the picture of the Smart's 1963 Boîte reads (translated from the original French): "The works from the Arensberg Collection are now the property of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to which Louise and Walter Arensberg bequeathed it [their collection] in 1954."