The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture.

By J. SEIGEL. University of California Press. 1995, pp. 291. No price given.

These two works form part of a wave of Duchamp scholarship emanating from the USA in recent years, and attempt a partial revision of the canonical interpretations established during the artist's lifetime or soon after. Judovitz seeks to interpret Duchamp's oeuvre using the central notion of `transition' and emphasizing Duchamp's interests in reproduction processes and ideas of value. In this way she works in the light of J.-F. Lyotard's highly thematic and speculative essays on Duchamp (les TRANS formateurs Duchamp, Paris, 1977), and, indeed, Lyotard was enlisted to produce the opening (and racy) jacket blurb. Seigel, on the other hand, is the inheritor and revisionist (see his remarks on p. 14) of the older psycho-biographical approach of Robert Lebel, Arturo Schwarz, and Alice Goldfarb Marquis.

Cabanne's interviews with Duchamp and the artist's own writings are key resources for both authors, although Duchamp's voice is more keenly felt in Unpacking Duchamp. This greater emphasis is perhaps because Judovitz seeks to defend or valorize Duchamp's achievement whilst Seigel wishes to situate the artist in a historical moment, a task which entails both interest in Duchamp's career and a wish to demythologize it. Seigel's opening words describe his …