Artists, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, took an increasing interest in beliefs outside established and accredited systems. Just as the century seemed definitively won over by scientific progress and dominant rationalism, a remarkable return to the sacred and to myth took place. Occult and esoteric disciplines such as alchemy and Kabbalah, previously regarded as unacceptable, began to command respect.
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp, always at the forefront of the avant-garde, became a herald of these long-marginalised beliefs. In Marcel Duchamp, Androgynous Artist (Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2013), Yiannis Toumazis sees the union of male and female as the hard core of Duchamp’s work, both in The Large Glass and in his final work, Étant donnés. It is therefore unsurprising that these major works, as well as his earliest paintings, refer to the androgyne.
Duchamp drew both on the philosophical androgyne of sixteenth-century alchemical engravings and on Adam Kadmon, the primordial human of Kabbalah: the celestial archetype after which Adam was fashioned. Among his early works, Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911) deserves particular attention. It was Duchamp’s wedding gift to his sister Suzanne, who had just married a pharmacist from Rouen. The artist portrayed himself and Suzanne as two nude, almost sexless beings.
According to Arturo Schwarz, the two barely sexually differentiated figures raise their arms towards the sky in the shape of a Y, denoting “their common aspiration to immortality and the fundamentally androgynous structure of their psyche” (The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 1974, p. 112). I discussed this painting at length in an earlier article, “Marcel Duchamp and Jean Cocteau: the same theme of the man with raised arms”. Duchamp was deeply attached to Suzanne. He sought to transform potentially paralysing or destructive incestuous impulses into a mythical relationship between brother and sister.
The painting marks a stage resembling the process Carl Gustav Jung called individuation: the process by which a person becomes a psychological individual, an autonomous unity and a whole. Duchamp envisaged incest as a means of resolving the contradiction between masculine and feminine and reconstructing the androgynous unity of the primordial being endowed with eternal youth and immortality.
The two figures rise from two semicircles that may symbolise separate worlds or opposing stars. A yellowish light associates the young man with the sun, while the darker light of the young woman suggests the moon. Their pairing evokes the incestuous solar-lunar couple. In alchemical tradition, the Rebis — the immortal hermetic androgyne — is the original unity reconstituted by the union of these two celestial bodies.
The androgyne thus became a central axis of Duchamp’s creative process, enabling him to attempt a union of opposites, the coniunctio oppositorum that underlies many philosophical systems. Most surprisingly, the same theme influenced artists apparently far removed from the creator of the readymade, including Marc Chagall.
Marc Chagall
Apollinaire awakened Chagall’s interest in the androgyne as symbol. Chagall acknowledged this intervention in Homage to Apollinaire (1911–1912). More than anyone, the poet cultivated the fantasy of physical metamorphosis. In The Murdered Poet, he explored the reversal of masculine and feminine identities and revealed his attraction to the androgynous figure, setting out in search of new territories and experiences where imagination might become reality.
Homage to Apollinaire belongs to the great paintings of Chagall’s first stay in Paris and expresses his enthusiasm after meeting the poet. Chagall approached the androgyne through his biblical knowledge, especially the creation of Eve. God creates the sexes by drawing woman from Adam’s side (Genesis 2:21), and Chagall associates their separation with the Fall.
The universe he depicts is complex and scarcely paradisal. The androgyne is enclosed in geometric forms, within a clockwise spiral that opens, after four turns, into an outer circle. That circle resembles a clock face. With the Fall and the separation of the sexes, time begins to flow. Chagall usually painted pairs of lovers, but the couple here is different: at once the primordial androgyne and the first couple. It is difficult to identify one person or two, for they are two while remaining one.
Hasidism, the Jewish religious tradition to which Chagall often referred, offers keys to this image. Kabbalistic theosophy and the circle of the Zohar illuminate its background. Religious life aims to restore the mystical unity broken by the Fall. For the painter, this also becomes a metaphor for aesthetic unity. Reality must be translated through its own polarities and contrasts, hence the importance of colour in recreating both diversity and harmony.
Jean Cocteau
Cocteau’s treatment of the androgyne differs from Chagall’s because its inspiration is quite distinct. His work is not rooted in Scripture in the way the Russian painter’s is. Although Cocteau continually invoked the angel — his androgynous being par excellence — it remained far removed from traditional religious representation.
In Diary of an Unknown, he described humanity’s need to give the absolute a human face through angelic forms: “Graceful, cruel, terribly male and androgynous monsters: such was my idea of angels” (Grasset, 1953, pp. 47–48). Calling himself “religious without a precise religion”, Cocteau used the angel in a personal and subversive way, closer to mythology and to the archetypal, idolatrous figures of Narcissus and Pygmalion.
The androgyne reflects his vision of sexual love: the reconciliation of human duality and an eventual sexual undifferentiation, as two bodies reunite to form the original unity. It was also a means of accepting and reconciling himself with his homosexuality. Beyond his personal situation, however, the androgyne supported a wider project: the assertion of his desire for eternity. His stained glass for Saint-Maximin in Metz gave concrete form to this final ambition.
In the central window of the apse, the man with raised arms immortalises the shaman’s quest to return to primordial time and recover the paradisal state — the eternity of androgynous Adam — lost in our profane world. The androgyne appears as an ideal being whose body has preserved the primordial unity preceding the original separation. It lives in completeness, while modern humanity wanders in search of the half from which it has been divided.
The window actually reveals two bodies: a partial one in the lower section, consisting only of a head, torso and two arms, and a complete body in the upper parts. They appear respectively female below and male above. Most probably, these two beings are united by the dove to become one entity and regain the state of the ancestral androgyne.
Cocteau therefore uses the androgyne above all to turn back time and establish the principle of eternity for ever. He remains faithful here to esoteric traditions: the androgyne represents the ancestral body before the Fall, primordial Adam before the separation of the sexes.
In conclusion, Cocteau joins Duchamp and Chagall through the same prism of the androgyne, ultimately understood as a quest for the absolute. Yet their paths differ. Cocteau emphasises eternity in recovered unity; Duchamp and Chagall appear more concerned with harmony and with a humanity freed from incomprehensible dualism. For Duchamp this takes the form of the sacred alliance of male and female in The Large Glass. For Chagall it appears in the loving couples throughout his work: all refer to that “one and yet two”, the reunion of what was separated, and the triumph of love over the ancient division.