“While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
—Marcel DuchampMade after Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting of the same name, La Mariée (The Bride) was printed by Duchamp and his brother Jacques Villon, a superb printmaker who produced remarkable color aquatints after the work of many other modern masters, including Georges Braque, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. La Mariée (The Bride) was one of some forty plates after modernist paintings Villon executed for the publisher Bernheim-Jeune; none of these renditions used photomechanical processes, making these etchings – and Villon’s process – technically phenomenal. The influence of Villon’s skillfulness as a printer would earn him the title of a “father of modern printmaking” by master printmaker Stanley William Hayter.
Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, ca. 1913. Image: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Illustrating Duchamp’s own skillfulness in reworking and developing new renditions of his iconic imagery, La Mariée (The Bride)'s machine-like figure is the same titular Bride that appears in the upper left of Duchamp’s seminal The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923), wherein she disrobes and exudes an erotic perfume. In the present print, she is further isolated from her admiring bachelors, trading the translucence of her glass panel for a dark, more Cubist backdrop.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952, 1952-98-1, Artwork: © 2024 Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York This rare impression of La Mariée (The Bride) additionally emphasizes Duchamp’s history with chess – this aquatint is distinguished by the addition at the lower right margin of a gray knight chess piece, a stamp given to impressions from the print’s special edition of twenty, aside from the regular edition of 200. An avid and premier player of the game throughout his life, Duchamp’s passion for chess became even greater during his stay in Buenos Aires in 1918, wherein the artist would use self-designed rubber stamps to record moves in games. The knight stamp that indicates the special edition of La Mariée (The Bride) is reminiscent of these stamps, a more refined silhouette of the knight’s form. Knight imagery had a certain importance to Duchamp, also adopting the knight for the letterhead for the Société Anonyme, an American-based arts organization he co-founded in 1920.
Société Anonyme membership card for Marcel Duchamp, 1923. Image: Yale University, Deinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Gift of Katherine S. Dreier, with additional gifts from Theodore and Barbara Dreier, 2006-2008. In his personal life, chess interfered with Duchamp’s relationship with his own bride, Lydie Sarazin-Levassor. His nightly, often multi-hour chess games with fellow Société Anonyme co-founder Man Ray strained the couple’s short-lived marriage in 1927; Man Ray would recollect that Lydie eventually glued down Duchamp’s chess pieces to the board in frustration at her husband’s misplaced attention. While their marriage lasted not even a year, this special impression of La Mariée (The Bride) cements the connection between Duchamp’s two greatest lifelong loves: art and chess.
Provenance
Josephine Rossler Morris
To Stephen Arkin, Executor Wright Morris Estate
By descent to the present ownerLiterature
Arturo Schwarz 433 (additionally, see no. 377 Designs for Chessmen, 1920, pen and ink, for original Knight design)
Colette de Ginestet and Catherine Pouillon 672
164
La Mariée (The Bride), by Jacques Villon (S. 433, G. & P. 672)
1934
Aquatint in colors, on Japan paper, with full margins.
I. 19 1/2 x 12 1/8 in. (49.5 x 30.8 cm)
S. 25 3/4 x 19 3/4 in. (65.4 x 50.2 cm)
Signed by Duchamp and Villon, titled and numbered 4/20 in pencil, with the profile of a Chess Knight stenciled in graphite (from the special edition, the regular edition was 200 without the Chess Knight stencil), published by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, framed.
Estimate
$15,000 - 25,000
Sold for $30,480
editions@phillips.com
212-940-1220
Editions & Works on Paper
New York Auction 16 - 17 April
