An Excerpt

Given this climate, it is also unlikely that Quinn would have approved of Duchamp's next sensation. In conjunction with the Independents' show, he had arranged for a lecture by an old acquaintance from Paris, Arthur Cravan. Traveling on the same "old tub" as an unknown young Russian radical named Leon Trotsky, Cravan arrived in New York from Barcelona on January 13, 1917. In his autobiography, Trotsky admiringly remembered that the boxer Cravan "confesses openly that he prefers crashing Yankee jaws in a noble sport to letting some German stab him in his midriff." The self-styled nephew of Oscar Wilde now billed himself as the "The World Champion at the Whorehouse." Introduced by Duchamp as a Parisian authority on art, Cravan was soon asked to lecture on this subject before a select audience.

New York's most prominent hostesses and their escorts crowded the Grand Central Gallery's auditorium on the appointed evening, chattering and sipping cocktails as they awaited the lecture on modern art by the former editor of the Paris art magazine Maintenant. The buzzing grew louder as time passed and no lecturer appeared. Finally, after more than an hour's wait, the audience quieted as the 240-pound Cravan appeared on the podium. As Man Ray recalled the scene, "He came in with a red valise, already dead drunk... He slams the valise down on the table, opens it up and starts throwing out all his dirty linen." His lecture on modern art consisted of shouting obscenities, including "one of the most insulting epithets in the English language." As he spoke, Cravan began to strip off his clothes, tossing shirt, pants, socks indiscriminately into the elegant crowd. Before the end of the "lecture," the police arrived to drag him off, in handcuffs to the police station. Walter Arensberg, tolerant to the end, later bailed Cravan out and took him home, where a "beaming" Duchamp joined them, burbling, "What a wonderful lecture."


from Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare by Alice Goldfarb Marquis