Live Auction 7570Old Master, Modern and Contemporary Prints
Marcel Duchamp (1875-1963)
Lot 155

Marcel Duchamp (1875-1963)

de ou Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (La boîte), Paris, 1958 (Schwarz 484)

Closed2 April 2008

Price Realised

GBP 103,700

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Marcel Duchamp (1875-1963)
de ou Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (La boîte), Paris, 1958 (Schwarz 484)
the portfolio, 1958, containing 67 miniature replicas and reproductions in black and white and in colours, mounted on and contained in the original cardboard, paper, wood and linen box, plus the folder with the Arsenserg Collection label, 1958, Series C (of G), missing No.48 Handmade Stereopticon Slide (S. 380), from the edition of thirty, some general fading and wear and tear as is usual, otherwise in very good condition, within the original grey cloth-covered wood valise
400 x 375 x 90 mm. (overall)

Specialist note

Duchamp considered this his very own 'Portable Museum' - a compendium 'of approximately all the things I produced' which had preoccupied him during much of the 1930s and which he continued to reproduce in a series of differing versions until his death in 1968. Consisting of sixty-eight miniature replicas of his most important works, all painstakingly reproduced and carefully assembled into a briefcase-sized box, La boîte expresses a typically whimsical and Duchampian take on the nature and comparative value of the work of art, the museum and the multiple all rolled into one.