Every story has a back story— Duchamp's Pipe has a smoking one.
A chance meeting in San Francisco's North Beach at a counterculture conference was the opening move in the discovery of Duchamp's pipe.
Above Enrico's restaurant on Broadway and Columbus in San Francisco's North Beach, I met Nikki Lastreto. She had worked with the blindfold chess champion George Koltanowski at the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly a decade. Her lasting friendship with Koltanowski—a terrific showman who wrote books describing his famed chess partners—was sealed with an unusual gift.
When Nikki left the Chronicle for northern California, George presented her with a pipe signed by his friend Marcel Duchamp. Hidden in a manila envelope for over forty years, the rough burlwood pipe evoked the sensations and images of George's friendship with the Dadaist artist.
I sought the significance of the pipe in the relationship between these two men, uncovering their ideas and whimsical ventures in the bohemian underground of coffeehouse chess.
The pipe contained the story of Duchamp and Koltanowski, and their friends in audacious bohemia - the vivid associations that created early twentieth-century culture.
Following my investigation, the Association Marcel Duchamp authenticated the Duchamp pipe in 2015. At Christie’s New York auction of modern art on May 21, 2016, the pipe sold for $87,500. This was its value—as a commodity—at that moment. The story of Duchamp’s pipe, however, is much more than this number, for it is the personal exchange that endows an object with its power. Duchamp and Koltanowski, and their friends, created personal exchanges that cannot be measured—that are beyond measure.
“The airiest flights of spatial logic and artistic creativity meet in the fascinating relationship between the chess master George Koltanowski and the artist Marcel Duchamp that Duchamp’s Pipe so beautifully portrays ...with absorbing story-telling that in the end conveys a tale that is mythic and larger than life.”
—DENNIS McNALLY author of Desolate Angel, a biography of Jack Kerouac. A Long Strange Trip, the history of the Grateful Dead. and On Highway 61, a study of music and race.