ITP 52: Chocolate Grinder, by Marcel Duchamp
On a day when it is traditional to consume large quantities of chocolate, this week’s painting depicts a principal part of the apparatus used in its preparation. Chocolate Grinder No 1, painted by Marcel Duchamp in January 1913, was based on the artist’s recollections of a particular chocolate shop in Rouen, where he went to school. Chocolate is still a speciality of the town, as it was in the time of Duchamp, whose way home from the Lycee Corneille took him past the doors of an establishment founded by the prince of Rouen chocolatiers: Maison Gamelin. In those days one side of the double-fronted shop in the cobbled Rue Beauvoisine, just north of the cathedral, was reserved for the chocolate-making process. Driven by a steam engine in the basement at the back of the shop, a mill would grind cocoa beans to a paste. Following the addition of sugar, the mixture was then turned into smooth and highly concentrated chocolate by three heavy, drum-like rollers set into the circular basin the machine. All this was visible through the shop window. Meanwhile, a burner set underneath the basin sent the aroma of pure hot chocolate wafting into the street outside.
Twenty years later, in reverent remembrance of things past, Duchamp set his painted chocolate grinder on the plinth of a low Louis XV table with three delicately carved legs. This was, perhaps, his way of mildly aggrandising his subject. An ordinary object has been turned into an odd little monument to thwarted yearnings. There are one or two other intriguing touches. Above the chocolate rollers, Duchamp has added an old-fashioned circular necktie, out of which sprouts the phallically suggestive protrusion of a bayonet. The background is a shadowy void. The image presents itself as a riddle wrapped inside an enigma.
Duchamp, the founding father of what has come to be known as Conceptual Art, was fond of riddles and games. A keen chess player, he enjoyed the challenge of intellectual problem-setting and –solving. In many respects he preferred thinking about art to making it. He disliked the mess and manual labour of the studio, and by the time he created Chocolate Grinder No 1 he had become heartily sick of painting especially. It is not hard to deduce as much from the cursory handling, schematic design and murky palette of the work. It is arresting as an idea but its facture – to use the French word for pictorial craftsmanship – seems a little dull. This turned out to be Duchamp’s last pure oil painting.
So Chocolate Grinder No 1 can be said to have put a full stop to the first part of the artist’s career, during which he painted variations on most of the leading styles of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, working in the brightly coloured manner of the Fauve painters and subsequently developing his own version of Cubism. But the picture also inaugurated a second phase of work, in which Duchamp was to move outside the conventional categories of painting and sculpture altogether, and develop a new form of art. The epitome of this was to be that strange and complicated object made of glass, lead, paint, dust and other unusual materials, known as The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even – a work which would occupy Duchamp for many years, and for which Chocolate Grinder No 1 was his first sketch or outline.
Its immediate origins lay in a trip that the artist made with friends, travelling through the Jura mountain range in a very fast car in the summer of 1912. Duchamp was inspired by the journey to write a prose fantasy about a mythical creature, part animal, part machine, which devours the road that it travels. This fantasy, in turn, inspired him to dream up a work of art that would itself take the form of an odd and semi-anthropomorphised machine, in which a chocolate grinder was to play an important role.
The Large Glass was a highbrow equivalent of the zany, improbable mechanisms sketched by Duchamp’s exact contemporary, the cartoonist William Heath Robinson. The work took the form of a blueprint for the construction of a mad device: a set of drawings or designs with a parodic relationship to those of architects or engineers, sandwiched between two sheets of glass, one placed above the other. In the upper panel Duchamp placed his so-called “Bride”, a creature simultaneously resembling machinery, insects, flowers and clouds; in the lower panel, he placed several empty sets of clothes said to personify the “Bachelors”, yoked up to a bicycle-like device which was attached in turn to a chocolate grinder. In numerous notes and jottings written to accompany the work over a period of 20 years and more, Duchamp encouraged his audience to read into this curious mise-en-scene a kind of modern, machine-age myth of sexual frustration. The bachelors below, furiously grinding away, were powered by “Love Gasoline”. The product of all their efforts was described as a sort of vaporous, imaginary semen-like stuff. But this was destined never to reach the Bride, who was to remain suspended, forever, in a condition of inviolable virginity.
Reams of psycho-analytically inspired criticism have been written in the attempt to unlock the mystery of the Large Glass. Some commentators have seen it as a literal illustration of Sigmund Freud’s remark, in The Interpretation of Dreams, that “The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus lends itself to symbolisation by every sort of indescribably complicated machinery.” Others have seen it as Duchamp’s way of channelling the illicit sexual attraction he apparently felt for his own sister, Suzanne, into a work of art that was both sublimation and prophylactic.
But these are only ingenious hypotheses. We can follow the trail of personal meanings and associations only as far as Chocolate Grinder No 1 allows us to; and stand, with the young Duchamp, peering through the large glass of Maison Gamelin’s window. From the memory of his own unfulfilled longings, the artist created a bittersweet but ultimately impenetrable allegory of desire and its frustration - a chocolate, so to speak, that can never be unwrapped.
Date: 15-04-2001
Owning Institution: Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
20th Century
On a day when it is traditional to consume large quantities of chocolate, this week’s painting depicts a principal part of the apparatus used in its preparation. Chocolate Grinder No 1, painted by Marcel Duchamp in January 1913, was based on the artist’s recollections of a particular chocolate shop in Rouen, where he went to school. Chocolate is still a speciality of the town, as it was in the time of Duchamp, whose way home from the Lycee Corneille took him past the doors of an establishment founded by the prince of Rouen chocolatiers: Maison Gamelin. In those days one side of the double-fronted shop in the cobbled Rue Beauvoisine, just north of the cathedral, was reserved for the chocolate-making process. Driven by a steam engine in the basement at the back of the shop, a mill would grind cocoa beans to a paste. Following the addition of sugar, the mixture was then turned into smooth and highly concentrated chocolate by three heavy, drum-like rollers set into the circular basin the machine. All this was visible through the shop window. Meanwhile, a burner set underneath the basin sent the aroma of pure hot chocolate wafting into the street outside.Twenty years later, in reverent remembrance of things past, Duchamp set his painted chocolate grinder on the plinth of a low Louis XV table with three delicately carved legs. This was, perhaps, his way of mildly aggrandising his subject. An ordinary object has been turned into an odd little monument to thwarted yearnings. There are one or two other intriguing touches. Above the chocolate rollers, Duchamp has added an old-fashioned circular necktie, out of which sprouts the phallically suggestive protrusion of a bayonet. The background is a shadowy void. The image presents itself as a riddle wrapped inside an enigma.
Duchamp, the founding father of what has come to be known as Conceptual Art, was fond of riddles and games. A keen chess player, he enjoyed the challenge of intellectual problem-setting and –solving. In many respects he preferred thinking about art to making it. He disliked the mess and manual labour of the studio, and by the time he created Chocolate Grinder No 1 he had become heartily sick of painting especially. It is not hard to deduce as much from the cursory handling, schematic design and murky palette of the work. It is arresting as an idea but its facture – to use the French word for pictorial craftsmanship – seems a little dull. This turned out to be Duchamp’s last pure oil painting.
So Chocolate Grinder No 1 can be said to have put a full stop to the first part of the artist’s career, during which he painted variations on most of the leading styles of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, working in the brightly coloured manner of the Fauve painters and subsequently developing his own version of Cubism. But the picture also inaugurated a second phase of work, in which Duchamp was to move outside the conventional categories of painting and sculpture altogether, and develop a new form of art. The epitome of this was to be that strange and complicated object made of glass, lead, paint, dust and other unusual materials, known as The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even – a work which would occupy Duchamp for many years, and for which Chocolate Grinder No 1 was his first sketch or outline.
Its immediate origins lay in a trip that the artist made with friends, travelling through the Jura mountain range in a very fast car in the summer of 1912. Duchamp was inspired by the journey to write a prose fantasy about a mythical creature, part animal, part machine, which devours the road that it travels. This fantasy, in turn, inspired him to dream up a work of art that would itself take the form of an odd and semi-anthropomorphised machine, in which a chocolate grinder was to play an important role.
The Large Glass was a highbrow equivalent of the zany, improbable mechanisms sketched by Duchamp’s exact contemporary, the cartoonist William Heath Robinson. The work took the form of a blueprint for the construction of a mad device: a set of drawings or designs with a parodic relationship to those of architects or engineers, sandwiched between two sheets of glass, one placed above the other. In the upper panel Duchamp placed his so-called “Bride”, a creature simultaneously resembling machinery, insects, flowers and clouds; in the lower panel, he placed several empty sets of clothes said to personify the “Bachelors”, yoked up to a bicycle-like device which was attached in turn to a chocolate grinder. In numerous notes and jottings written to accompany the work over a period of 20 years and more, Duchamp encouraged his audience to read into this curious mise-en-scene a kind of modern, machine-age myth of sexual frustration. The bachelors below, furiously grinding away, were powered by “Love Gasoline”. The product of all their efforts was described as a sort of vaporous, imaginary semen-like stuff. But this was destined never to reach the Bride, who was to remain suspended, forever, in a condition of inviolable virginity.
Reams of psycho-analytically inspired criticism have been written in the attempt to unlock the mystery of the Large Glass. Some commentators have seen it as a literal illustration of Sigmund Freud’s remark, in The Interpretation of Dreams, that “The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus lends itself to symbolisation by every sort of indescribably complicated machinery.” Others have seen it as Duchamp’s way of channelling the illicit sexual attraction he apparently felt for his own sister, Suzanne, into a work of art that was both sublimation and prophylactic.
But these are only ingenious hypotheses. We can follow the trail of personal meanings and associations only as far as Chocolate Grinder No 1 allows us to; and stand, with the young Duchamp, peering through the large glass of Maison Gamelin’s window. From the memory of his own unfulfilled longings, the artist created a bittersweet but ultimately impenetrable allegory of desire and its frustration - a chocolate, so to speak, that can never be unwrapped.
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