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Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise: The Museum of Metamorphosis

Boîte-en-valise IX/XX, for MoMA: Museum Tombstone Information:

Marcel Duchamp, Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy), 1935-41, Leather valise containing miniature replicas, photographs, color reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one “original” drawing [Large Glass, collotype on celluloid, 7 ½ x 9 ½” (19 x 23.5 cm)], 16 x 15 x 4” (40.7 x 38.1 x 10.2 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Contents of this annotation:

In 1942, Duchamp inscribed this Boîte-en-valise to the Museum of Modern Art, which had opened in New York in November 1929, nine years after the founding of the Société Anonyme, subtitled “Museum of Modern Art,” by Duchamp, Man Ray, and Katherine Dreier. While Dreier took exception to what she regarded as the later (and better funded) institution’s co-opting of her ideas, Duchamp entertained friendlier relations with the MoMA. Acting as an executor of Dreier’s estate after her death in 1952, he bequeathed three of his works from her collection to the museum: 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close To, for Almost an Hour (1918), and Fresh Widow (1920). This Boîte-en-valise contains a color guide for the reproduction of the top half of the Large Glass as its original. Click to see tombstone.