D for DOOR

This essay explores the history, meaning and function of the weathered exterior door for Marcel Duchamp’s Étantdonnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gazd’éclairage.This door – which physically separates the viewer from the mysterious scene inside of a recumbent female nude holding aloft an old fashioned illuminated gas lamp against the backdrop of a lush hilly landscape – was actually part of a much larger farmhouse door leading that the artist found in 1965 in La Bisbal in northeastern Spain. Four years later the door was brought to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it was permanently installed in Gallery 1759 as part of Duchamp’s extraordinary tableau assemblage. Since 1969 countless visitors have looked through the door’s peepholes where they encounter the startling sight of a realistically constructed simulacrum of a life-sized nude woman lying on a bed of dead twigs and fallen leaves.