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“The interview is a very particular form as a text, in that it promises many things’’

Making What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with art critics

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, 

 offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.

Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.

Can you outline your relationship to Duchamp’s work and legacy?

My story with Duchamp goes back to high school, like a lot of people. It was in 1968 in Advanced Physics class, which I really had no interest in whatsoever. The professor was getting old and he really had no control over the class. I found a book about Duchamp that had been published by Time Life in about ’64. This book just sort of came out of this Time Life series on art, and the general public didn’t really have any idea what it was about. I got this book from the school library and I was looking at it under my desk. Mr. Rosen came round and he looked at it, and I clearly remember him saying, “I have no idea what this is, but I’m sure it’s good for you, so keep reading.”

So, that was the first encounter. In college, I studied philosophy, then I became a painter. There was a time in my senior year when I had a collection of catalogues for graduate schools in my drawer and I was thinking of Duchamp again and asking questions—how it is that someone like me, who is so into Duchamp, happens to become a figurative painter. I think it really has to do with his example of following what compels you, and which isn’t necessarily something other people are doing. I studied Duchamp’s 

—that painting does something that paintings aren’t supposed to do, namely move. It seemed impossible. As I wrote to a friend, “I write about Duchamp. And he helps me with painting. My painting in 2019 gets an inspirational and conceptual shove from 

 from 1912. Painted nudes don’t move. Painted heads don’t think. They sit inert on a flat surface. Then again …”

Why did you decide to focus on Duchamp’s last day?

I was interested in his last days and at first it seemed to me that he might have terminated his own life at a certain point. For example, he talks a lot about fifty years—the fifty-year delay that it takes for a painting to turn from nothing to a masterpiece or back again. That’s a recurrent thing. And the day before his death in 1968, he went from Paris to Rouen for the unveiling of a giant bronze sculpture called

(The Large Horse)—that was roughly fifty years after his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon had conceived the original work in 1914, and exactly one week shy of the fiftieth anniversary of Raymond’s death at the end of the first World War. Man Ray also wrote a statement published in Art in America in 1969—which I have included in the book—saying of Duchamp, “His heart obeyed him and it stopped.” So I was investigating this—which turned out to not be correct, by the way—and it felt like that was the first part of the process. Then, in 2012, I was visiting Francis Naumann, whose gallery shows Duchamp’s work in New York, and he said, “Donald, come out back, sit down, I have to tell you something.” He had received an email with a sort of grainy image of this postmortem photograph from someone working at Getty Research Institute. The picture was unlabeled, unmarked, and no one had ever seen it before. So, I kept working. And it wasn’t until maybe a year later that I focused on the fact that Georges Herbiet and Robert Lebel—two writers who visited Duchamp on his final day—had also written detailed accounts that were published within months of Duchamp’s death.

Does it not strike you as unusual that people were compelled to write these accounts?

I think it is unusual. Publishing an image of a dead person is very unusual—and in 1968, after the horror of two world wars, perhaps even more so. I talked with Carlos Basualdo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about this, and he described images of death as a form of “toxic pornography” in our culture.

But the thing is that, based on these accounts, Duchamp’s death was kind of an ironically joyful occasion. Duchamp even seemed to convey to his friends that he wouldn’t see them again. There was a sadness to it and that was in the air in their discussions, but there is also an excitement for Duchamp.

I think that this kind of conflict and darkly joyful attitude interested both of these writers as something to explore. Herbiet’s wife had died a few months earlier, and they talked about that. They just found something interesting and enduring and very Duchampian in their friend’s passing. The idea of play and death, which I mention at the end of the book, to most people is incomprehensible. How could those two things come together? But that’s what’s going on in this case.

This image is not something that Duchamp had anything to do with, as I conclude. I really did struggle with it, but basically, the epitaph he wrote says, “Besides, it is always the others who die.” The suggestion is that there is no transition. It’s the world that disappears, and it’s really no big deal. And that’s the way he lived: it’s good if you’ve done your work, and in his case, it’s good if your final work that no one knows about [the installation of Étant donnés (1946–1966) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art] is complete except for the Spanish bricks, which I mention in the book. This is an account of the end of someone’s life that people enjoy reading and that isn’t sad. I think that there’s an interest, and maybe a need, for something of that type, and I’d like to reach some of those readers. It’s not pontificating, it’s not telling you how to do it. And perhaps, within this culture we live in where death is controlled by medicine and that wants to keep you alive forever and ever and ever, it’s a story that might have some use—even for people who have never heard of Duchamp. He wanted it that way, in a sense. He wanted the effect of what he did to function in the wider culture.

In hindsight, has this project influenced your own sense of mortality or infiltrated your thinking in unexpected ways?

Well, in the course of writing, I explored a long list of books on photography and death. There’s Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and in the postmodern phase, there is an academic consideration of photography and death. A central question is whether freezing an image of someone is the same thing as killing them. It’s a discussion that goes back to the nineteenth century when photography was first invented; it was striking to people that you could capture a moment, and one of the major functions of photography was to serve as a remembrance, a way to memorialize someone.

At the end of 1998, my late wife gave me a bunch of books about writing. I had already delved way into the Duchamp thing, and she wanted to get me to write. It was our last Christmas together. She had a terminal illness, and it was the year I was starting to write about Duchamp. We spent a lot of time together and talked about it. It’s become important to me for death not to be taboo. But I think in the final version of this book, I really pulled back from that because I don’t want to be agitating anything one way or the other. I just want to present as good a story as I can.

, 2018. Photo by Kyle Knodell; spreads from 

 On Duchamp’s Last Day

Donald Shambroom

"Dumas is driven by gesture and serendipity alike"

Image With Caption

Required Reading for Fall

A photograph of books in the David Zwirner Books Ekphrasis series.

Find the whole collection at David Zwirner Books

On the making of the series

Ekphrasis on ekphrasis

"A tiny, highbrow volume for the beach, or reveries of it: poems in the nostalgic, laconic manner of novelist Modiano, 2014 Nobel laureate..."

June 13, 2019–April 12, 2020

Dan Flavin

At the Museum of Modern Art

Donald Judd

June 15–September 22, 2019

Bridget Riley

 presents more than sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. It is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and bestselling 

 (2016). This book will be published on November 12, 2019, and distributed through David Zwirner Books’s partnership with Simon & Schuster.

This collection of interviews engages a diverse range of topics, from philosophy and politics to Judd’s insightful critiques of his own work and the work of others such as Mark di Suvero, Edward Hopper, Yayoi Kusama, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. The opening discussion of the volume between Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella provides the foundation for many of the succeeding conversations, focusing on the nature and material conditions of the new art developing in the 1960s. The publication also gathers a substantial body of unpublished material across a range of mediums including extensive interviews with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Barbara Rose.

Judd’s contributions in interviews, panels, and extemporaneous conversations are marked by his forthright manner and rigorous thinking, whether in dialogue with art critics, art historians, or his contemporaries. In one of the last interviews, he observed, “Generally, expensive art is in expensive, chic circumstances; it’s a falsification. The society is basically not interested in art. And most people who are artists do that because they like the work; they like to do that [make art]. Art has an integrity of its own and a purpose of its own, and it’s not to serve the society. That’s been tried now in the Soviet Union and lots of places, and it doesn’t work. The only role I can think of, in a very general way, for the artist is that it [art] tends to shake up the society a little bit just by its existence, in which case it helps undermine the general political stagnation and, perhaps by providing a little freedom, supports science, which requires freedom. If the artist isn’t free, you won’t have any art.”

. The interviews expand upon the artist’s thinking present in 

 (Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).

November 2019

Donald Judd Interviews

 is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel-prize winning author Patrick Modiano and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss. 

 is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, the book captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts—visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss’s brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano.

Dominique, what inspired the paintings in 

The inspiration for these paradises came one August. Patrick [Modiano] and I felt a bit lost, abandoned in the empty city of Paris, with only pigeons around. We had received very sad news that a young man we knew had comitted suicide. One afternoon, without really thinking, I began to paint a small paradise, perhaps to imagine that somewhere there was a world where one could be happy, and safe, surrounded by seas and forests...

Having seen me painting these twenty-eight paradise miniatures, Patrick suggested he write a poem. I was thrilled—we had done two children’s books together before, about a labrador called Choura, and had hoped they would be a success, like Barbar. But after two books, the series ended. Patrick looked at my paradises in his hypnotic way, and after a few days, he brought me a poem which I took for a love letter.

Why did you decide to paint in miniature?

I have always been obsessed with small things, small worlds, where one could hide easily. This is probably why I once made a miniature museum, with all the tiniest things I could find; it’s also why, in parallel to my drawings, I chose to become a jewelry designer. Since I was a child, I’ve been inspired by imagery that is disturbing and strange. I’m drawn to the work of Hieronymous Bosch and enchanted by Henri Rousseau’s paintings.

Since our twenties, Patrick and I have worked side by side. At that time he worked at night, and I was always drawing beside him—we had a desk and a drawing table in the same room. Nobody talked, and in the silent night we would do our work, each of us in their own world. We remember these times in Montmartre with emotion. Naturally, when you start making miniatures, you can’t stop.

 sit with the rest of your work? Does it suggest new realms of possibility to you?

After the 28 paradises, I painted 28 hells, and I was honored when our daughter Marie—a poet, songwriter and singer—agreed to write a poem about my hells, which was harder for her than paradises! Then, in 2017, I painted 28 miniature landscapes with 28 animals, and asked my friend, the novelist Marie N’Diaye, if she would write about them. The poem she wrote is called 

. Now, I’m working on a new “28” series, and we’ll see what happens.

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“The inspiration for these paradises came one August...in the empty city of Paris”

Dominique Zehrfuss on 28 Paradises

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.