You Can Hire an Artist

Half-Naked Thursday: Eve Babitz with Marcel Duchamp

Posted by Kathleen Benton on Sep 17, 2009

At the end of my first Elegantly Dressed Wednesday post (see EWD: Georgia O’Keeffe) I considered the possibility of adding  the feature, Half-Naked Thursday, using art and artists as my consortium.  This feature is inspired by yet  not to be confused with Half-Nekkid Thursday, a practice of exposure which has been going on at other sites for years.  The rules there request that  subject be of the participants themselves or someone known to them.  Since my purposes here are to highlight art and artists, I’m going to borrow the theme and do just that.

Since I chose Marcel Duchamp as my subject for yesterday’s Elegantly Dressed Wednesday article I thought I would follow it with this example which includes Duchamp for my first installment. 

The photograph’s subject is a fully clothed Marcel Duchamp and a naked Eve Babitz sitting at a table playing chess in a gallery filled with Duchamp’s artwork.  The room is a gallery at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1963. 

The concept is attributed to the photographer Julian Wasser, although it seems inspired by the Dada  playfulness and incongruity of Marcel Duchamp’s own work.  As the title states, the subjects were posed.  This means it was not presented as a performance, nor was the photography session open to the public.  So, in line with many of Duchamp’s pieces, what seems to be documentation is actually fiction.  As a photograph, the juxtaposition of fully-clothed and nude figures still shocks even today,  as did Édouard Manet’s composition Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), painted one hundred years prior in 1863.

A little bit on Eve Babitz:  She is an author, artist, and former model.  She has several book titles to her credit-  Eve’s Hollywood, Slow days, fast company and Fiorucci, the book. 

In an interview conducted in the year 2000 with Paul Karlstrom, Babitz seems intent on making the claim that the set-up was her idea.  You can judge that for yourself.  Here is a link to the transcript of that interview:  Oral history interview with Eve Babitz, 2000 Jun 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Kathleen Benton

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Julian Wasser (American), Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz posing for the photographer Julian Wasser during the Duchamp Retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, 1963, © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris