Half-Naked Thursday: Eve Babitz with Marcel Duchamp
Posted by Kathleen Benton on Sep 17, 2009
Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz posing for the photographer Julian Wasser during the Duchamp Retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, 1963
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
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Are you certain that’s the Pasadena Museum, and not the Norton Simon Museum? It looks to my novice eye like the Norton Simon, plus the Pasadena focuses on California art.
And, if I’m not mistaken, the mobile on display in the middle of the photograph is part of the Norton Simon’s collection.
Well, Ed, you are clever to know the Norton Simon collection, but before it was the Norton Simon Museum it was the Pasadean Art Museum. This event which featured Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp predates Norton Simon’s aassuming control of the Pasadena Art Museum in 1974 by ten years. Simon added PAM’s art to his collection of European and Asian art and changed the museums’s name as well.
Thanks for recognizing the art and the building, Ed. Not knowing much about California museums, I learned more about the history of the institutions.
For more information click go to:
http://www.nortonsimon.org/about
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Simon_Museum
[...] “Half-naked Thursday: Eve Babitz with Marcel Duchamp,” at You Can Hire An Artist. Is it safe for work or school? The photo shows Duchamp in a gallery filled with his works at in 1963, playing chess with Eve Babitz, who is nude. (The museum is identified as the “Pasadena Art Museum,” which would be the Pasadena Museum of Art of California; I think it more likely that the museum is the Norton Simon Museum, also in Pasadena, but showing much more modern art and European art.(The Pasadena Art Museum is wonderful, by the way — an oustanding place to spend an afternoon.) [...]
A pingback to another reader’s article who comments mistakenly about the location of this performance/photo.
My reply:
Thanks for linking to my blog post. All notes about the article are correct.
My previous comment to another reader questioning the location explains the history, giving links.
The photo was taken in 1963 at what was then called the Pasadena Art Museum. Ten years later Norton Simon assumed control of the Pasadena Art Museum, changing the name to his own, and installing his European and Asian art collection in the plant, which he also expanded. The Pasadena Museum of Art of California opened its doors in 2002, almost forty years later.