“Everything important that I have done can be put into a small suitcase.”
— MARCEL DUCHAMP
When Marcel Duchamp arrived in New York in the summer of 1942, he reconnected with his friend André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement. Together they created an exhibition, the First Papers of Surrealism, opening on October 14, 1942 in Manhattan. Duchamp ran twine throughout this exhibition that forced the viewer to look through different angles and pathways, composing many different points of view. Seen below, Duchamp's mischievous installation of the exhibition - known as "his twine"- suggests the complexity of his escape from Europe as well as the many independent transatlantic crossings taken by both Marcel and George as they pursued their dreams or fled from wars.
Blow, blow them into air,
silky little rings
Oh little smoke rings I love
Please take me above with you.
- THE MILLS BROTHERS, lyrics 1933
Ocean journeys offered time to dream and invent. Battered or elegant, these ships became background characters in our protagonists' lives. Here are a few of the ships they took, expanding your understanding of Duchamp's Pipe.
Marcel Duchamp and George Koltanowski crossed the Atlantic for art exhibitions, chess games, and to relocate from wars and strife - moving from Paris or Antwerp to New York, Buenos Aires or Brussels. In the 1920s they traveled for tournaments and exhibitions. By the 1930s George voyaged to play in Barcelona, Madrid and Edinburgh, and then he embarked on a chess tour the Americas in 1938. The Nazi invasion of Belgium in early 1940 prevented his return.
In occupied France, where he was considered a degenerate artist, Duchamp often posed as a cheese dealer moving between Paris and the south of France. He escaped occupied France in May 1942, leaving from Marseilles to Casablanca on a battered frigate, the Maréchal Lyautey — and from Lisbon on the Portuguese ship the Serpa Pinto. While each of them traveled independently, onboard they played chess, smoked and imagined future journeys. Thus both men escaped World War II by transatlantic passage.
Where do they go?
The smoke rings I blow each night
Oh what do they do those circles of blue and white?
Duchamp left Paris for New York in 1915 on the SS Rochambeau, seen above. In New York, he was invited into the salon of art collector and critic Walter Arensberg and his wife, Louise. where he met poets Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. He became close friends with artists Man Ray and Beatrice Wood, and with Henri-Pierre Roché, a diplomat and writer (and the author of Jules et Jim, 1952, later the subject of a film by François Truffaut.)
In 1918 Duchamp left New York for Buenos Aires on the SS Crofton Hall, returning in the spring of 1919 for Brussels and Paris on the Holland America Line’s ship the Noordam. Duchamp's life compelled many transatlantic voyages - to arrange exhibitions of Brancusi and to study chess with Frank Marshall in New York, or with Edmond Lancel in Brussels. He returned to New York in 1919 on the ship La Touraine - the year that Koltanowski won the Belgian Chess Championship.
As a child, George stepped on a rusty nail while onboard ship with his family, while escaping to England from the German invasion of Belgium in World War I. He spent several years recovering from his injury— and honing his memory and math skills in a London hospital. Koltanowski was drafted into the Belgian army in 1919, but due to his status was allowed to play chess tournaments in Europe. Then, in 1938, he traveled to Québec City, moving across North America, winning games, teaching, and astounding the audience with his memory skills. When war broke out between Germany and Belgium in May 1940, he was in South America. He tried to leave to rejoin his family, but by then he could not return to Europe. He lost his father, Gabriel, his mother, Miriam, and three siblings to the Holocaust.
Where do they end, the smoke rings I send on high?
Oh where are they hurled, when they've kissed the world goodbye?
Let me tell you that I'd give my life to laugh at this strife down here below below below
— SAM COOKE, lyrics 1963
This abbreviated chronology of Duchamp and Koltanowski's ocean voyages combines their stories with images of the ships they took.
1921 - April 13: George Koltanowski plays his first first simultaneous blindfold exhibition in Ghent, playing two of his brothers (Jack and Harry); he wins both games.
1921 - June 9: Marcel Duchamp returns on the SS France leaving from New York to Le Havre; he arrives in France on June 16.
1923 - February 10: Marcel Duchamp departs from the US on the MS Noordam to Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He stays in Brussels to study with Edmond Lancel (above) at his chess club, Le Cygne.
1924 - January 28: Marcel Duchamp departs Paris for New York on the SS Aquitania: he arrives in February.
1926 - October 14: Marcel Duchamp takes the Art Deco ocean liner SS Paris from Le Havre to New York for the exhibition that he organized of Brâncuși sculptures.
1927 - February 26: Marcel Duchamp returns to France on the SS Paris with art historian and gallery owner Julien Levy (above), who watches Duchamp play chess en route.
1933 - July 12–23: Marcel Duchamp plays in the Fifth Chess Olympiad, in Folkestone, England, where he is photographed. October 25: He leaves for New York on the SS Ile de France returning the follow year on January 20, 1934, to France with Julien Levy aboard Le Champlain.
1935- Koltanowski playing against Salo Flohr in Barcelona, Spain, where he became the teacher for the Barcelona Chess Club.
1935 - July 17: The Spanish Civil War breaks out in Madrid, Spain. George Koltanowski escapes via the last train to Valencia, and from there by English warships to Marseilles, France.
1936 - May 20: Marcel Duchamp leaves for New York on the SS Normandie- also see above in the first image of the Voyages page. On September 2, he again boards the Normandie to return to Paris.
1938 - September 3: George Koltanowski and his first wife, Céline, arrive in Québec, Canada on the SS Duchess Atholl, having left Antwerp on July 26, for Québec via Liverpool. Thus began George's long North American tour.
1939 - George Koltanowski plays chess throughout North, Central and South America, including stops in New York, the Midwest, California and much of Canada. He travels by United Fruit banana boat from Florida to Cuba and the Caribbean.
1940 – May 6: Koltanowski's chess skills allied to his amazing recall attracted the attention of the US consul in Havana, who offered to seek a visa for George that would allow him to settle in the USA, so that he would be neither a refugee nor stateless. He journeys from Havana to Miami on the SS Florida, seen here.
1942 - May 14: Thanks to the efforts of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, Marcel Duchamp escapes to New York from Nazi-occupied France aboard a beat-up former hospital boat, the Maréchal Lyautey.
1942 - Finally leaving Europe, Marcel Duchamp waves wildly from onboard a ship taking him from Marseille. He was accompanied to the quay by André Gomes (who shot this photograph) and Henriette Gomes, and the Romanian artist Victor Brauner seen at the left. Marcel is the small figure with raised arms in the center background.
1942 - June 7: Marcel Duchamp boards the Portuguese ship the Serpa Pinto, leaving from Lisbon to New York. It carries refugees and over 50 children escaping the War in Europe, arriving June 25, 1942.
“A smoking reproach against staid scholarship—juxtaposing biography, industrial history, literary history, photography, and other disciplines to produce a fairy tale about chess and friendship, and a meditation on the contradictory role of the gift in the world of art.”
—LINDSEY BANCO, author of Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature and associate professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan