Marcel Duchamp and Jean Cocteau seem so dissimilar and so far removed from one another that it is difficult, at first, to imagine any bond between them. Cocteau has even been described as Duchamp’s exact opposite: one decided to touch nothing, while the other decided to touch everything. Yet the improbable did occur. Both artists used the same motif, the man with raised arms, and this choice was neither incidental nor devoid of meaning. On the contrary, it reveals two personalities who ultimately prove surprisingly close.
Each employed the motif at a decisive moment. Duchamp used it very early, when he was preparing to leave retinal painting for the readymade; Cocteau used it near the end of his life. What Duchamp experienced as a rupture in 1911 with Young Man and Girl in Spring, Cocteau experienced almost fifty years later. In 1962, the axial window of the apse at Saint-Maximin Church in Metz marked an equally new and testamentary direction. This disciple of Orpheus died the following year.
Young Man and Girl in Spring
Duchamp’s painting dates from early 1911 and is the first work he considered truly personal, freed from the influence of Impressionism, Fauvism and even Cézanne. Arturo Schwarz regarded 1911 as a crucial year in the flowering of Duchamp’s personality and his process of individuation. He also saw the painting as an anticipation of The Large Glass: the young man foreshadows the Bachelor and the young woman the Bride.
The two figures are almost identical and androgynous. Sexually drawn towards one another, they may embody a process of individuation. Duchamp was deeply attached to his sister Suzanne. He sought to transform incestuous impulses that might have paralysed or destroyed him into a mythical brother-and-sister relationship. In Jung’s words, individuation is the process by which a person becomes a psychological individual: an autonomous unity and a whole.
Duchamp thus envisaged incest as a means of resolving the masculine-feminine duality and reconstructing the androgynous unity of the primordial being, endowed with eternal youth and immortality. Although the title speaks of a young man and a young woman, they are scarcely differentiated sexually. Both raise their arms towards the sky in the shape of a Y.
Mircea Eliade associates this posture with the shaman who, during ritual, exclaims: “I have reached the sky. I am immortal.” The cosmic being with raised arms therefore embodies both immortality and a doubled, androgynous personality. The same doubling appears in the Egyptian Ka hieroglyph, which evokes the male and female dimensions through which a human being becomes complete and gains immortality.
The two figures rise from semicircles that may represent separate worlds or opposing celestial bodies. Yellow light associates the young man with the sun; the darker light of the young woman suggests the moon. Their conjunction recalls the incestuous solar and lunar couple. In alchemical tradition the Rebis, the immortal hermetic androgyne, restores the original unity of the primordial being through the union of these two stars.
Schwarz also noted that, when the painting is turned upside down, the meeting of the semicircles suggests the buttocks, regarded in Kabbalistic interpretation as a seat of immortality. This irrational viewpoint introduces a homosexual reading and reinforces the connection with immortality through the androgynous structure of the psyche.
Duchamp did not share André Breton’s rejection of homosexuality, particularly Breton’s hostility towards fashionable homosexuals among whom Cocteau occupied a prominent place. For Duchamp, homosexuality was not a sign of degeneration. Georg Groddeck went further, believing that all individuals were in some sense homosexual because self-love precedes every other form of desire.
Narcissism consequently becomes an important link. Duchamp felt close to Narcissus in his double aspect: self-contemplation, but also differentiation and creation. He preferred the individual to the group, yet insisted that he tried to invent rather than merely express himself. His art became a game between the “I” and the “me”.
Suzanne, two years younger than Marcel, was his companion in age and play. His work contains many allusions to her. When she divorced her first husband, a pharmacist, in 1914, Duchamp named his first rectified readymade Pharmacy. Suzanne later married the painter Jean Crotti, who bore a vague resemblance to Duchamp. Through Crotti, Duchamp may have met Cocteau.
Crotti invented the technique of gemmail by layering pieces of coloured glass. Cocteau, fascinated by it, coined the name from gemme, or precious stone, and vitrail, stained glass. Their active collaboration may have provided a natural connection between Cocteau and Crotti’s brother-in-law, Marcel Duchamp.
The axial window at Saint-Maximin
The window created in 1962 for Saint-Maximin Church also shows a man with raised arms, clearly visible in the lowest compartment. As in Duchamp’s painting, the motif is universal rather than anecdotal. In my book I Trace the Invisible, devoted to Cocteau’s windows, I likewise referred to Eliade’s shaman proclaiming: “I have reached the sky. I am immortal.”
Cocteau’s figure is close to the arts of the first peoples and recalls Dogon masks. Once treated with surprise or contempt, such objects were rehabilitated in the early twentieth century by modern artists including Picasso, Braque and Matisse. Cocteau, Picasso’s friend, felt the same attraction.
Two doubled figures appear in the window. One is shown in full in the upper part, while the lower figure is truncated, with only the head, raised arms and part of the torso visible. This image again recalls the Ka and its double male and female personality, through which humanity becomes complete and immortal.
The upper figure is probably male. A dove extends from his lower body. The bird, often an attribute of Venus, may join him to the paredros, the companion of the opposite sex; in a more Freudian interpretation it may also evoke the sexual attributes of the double. The figure’s crown, resembling the twin towers of a cathedral, may denote divinity, while the feathered cross on his torso need not be Christian. It can instead recall Quetzalcoatl, the legendary Aztec god associated with fertility, death and resurrection.
Duchamp’s painting contained two spheres recalling the sun and moon. In Cocteau’s axial window, the sun itself is not directly visible, but its rays irradiate the centre. In the neighbouring apse window, however, sun and moon are clearly joined, restoring the original unity of the primordial being. Duchamp and Cocteau therefore meet in the belief that the fusion of two beings has a special relationship with immortality.
In a letter to Louise and Walter Arensberg dated 6 May 1952, Duchamp wrote that we all possess a curious animal belief in eternity, as though time might stop in our own case. The Large Glass was a kind of autobiography; since no one can write the ending of an autobiography, Duchamp chose never to finish it.
The artists also converge in their treatment of homosexuality. Turned upside down, Young Man and Girl in Spring can be read as a homosexual relationship. Duchamp was interested in homosexuality for its androgynous psychological structure. Cocteau never concealed his own sexuality. The truncated figure in his axial window may be of the same sex as the upper figure, especially since it is a double.
Narcissism, one of the links between homosexuality and immortality, also recurs throughout Cocteau’s work. It appears with particular intensity in the two windows of the “self-portrait bay” in Saint-Maximin’s winter chapel.
The self-portrait bay
In the left lancet, two successive faces in profile lean in the same direction, looking beyond the frame. They are two aspects of the same person: a doubled Cocteau. The twin motif recurs throughout his graphic and literary work, notably in Les Enfants terribles.
Why this continual doubling? Cocteau seems to work through the opposition of two forces that confront one another while forming a single personality: one dark, unpredictable and lunar; the other radiant, joyful and solar. Both celestial bodies appear in the window.
In the right lancet, Cocteau faces us with a flaming head and the costume of an Academician. Above him are two similar profiles facing one another. Are they his two loves, Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, presented as doubles?
Duchamp and Cocteau thus meet in a common quest: to reconstruct the androgynous unity of the primordial being endowed with eternal youth and immortality. Beginning respectively with incest and homosexuality, they follow converging paths through the intermediary figure of Narcissus towards an ideal being that promises eternity.
Most remarkably, each gave material form to this aspiration through a work made of glass: Duchamp through The Large Glass and Cocteau through the stained glass of Saint-Maximin. They are united at last, despite André Breton’s enduring hostility towards Cocteau.