Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12:1 (2021), 33-59

33

Surrealist Shop Windows:
Marketing Breton’s Surrealism in Wartime New York
Jennifer R. Cohen
The Art Institute of Chicago

In a photograph by Maya Deren published in the May 1945 issue of View,
Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s magazine for avant-garde art and ideas, André
Breton’s gaze can be seen reflected in a shop window decorated by Marcel Duchamp
to advertise the release of the author’s book Arcane 17 (Fig. 1). A memoir scattered
with esoteric allusions titled after Breton’s symbol for hope after the liberation of
Paris— the “The Star,” Arcanum 17 in the tarot deck—the book has come to stand
for the height of the surrealist group’s invocation of hermetic systems of meaning.1
By contrast, Deren’s image of authorial achievement presents a studied play of
layered transparencies. Breton’s gaze, made visible through his reflection, mirrors
the framed author photograph in the display. Both seem to direct their gaze toward
the altered readymade fashion mannequin, which triangulates a kind of narcissistic
contemplation. Decades earlier, in the “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” Breton had
used such an image to portray the divided subjectivity that defined the automatic
method. The image that first spurred him to begin recording his thoughts was, in
his words, “something like: ‘There is a man sliced in two by the window.’”2 Deren’s
photograph sees Breton simultaneously inside and outside of the glass, observer and
observed, cut in two by the glazed New York storefront, and it suggests the changing
stakes of his brand of Surrealism as his time in exile neared its end.
Breton’s pose in this photograph models that of the passerby, the potential
consumer, a figure that has loomed large in historical accounts of surrealist making
and viewership. For example, the literary types of the ragpicker and the flâneur as
explored by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin have frequently been employed
as cultural tropes to explain the referents of surrealist creativity, where Surrealists
are described as engaging not only with mainstream forms of advertising and
shopping, but also with forms of accumulation on the cultural fringes, in the secondhand economies of flea markets.3 And, as Adam Jolles has pointed out, summative
Jennifer R. Cohen: jrosecohen@gmail.com
Copyright © 2021 (Jennifer R. Cohen). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021)

Fig. 1. Maya Deren, Photograph of Gotham Book Mart Window, 1945, Series X. Photographs,
Box 32, Folder 15, Alexina and Marcel Duchamp Papers, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Archives ©
Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2021

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“retrospective works” by Man Ray, Duchamp, and Salvador Dalí required skilled
consumption by their viewers; these works, as he writes, “demand … an expert
consumer,” defined as “an individual who need not be particularly well versed on the
topic of art but who must have firmly defined commercial interests and needs in
mind,” with a working knowledge of the conventions of “the department store
vitrine and the mail-order catalogue.”4 Such scholarly observations are rooted in
surrealist practice. Yet, as Thomas Crow has noted, “in retrieving marginal forms
of consumption, in making that latent text manifest, [Surrealists] provided modern
advertising with one of its most powerful visual tools.”5 Breton articulated his
anxiety about the loss of control inherent in the wide dissemination and cultural
acceptance of surrealist aesthetics in his 1935 lecture, “The Surrealist Situation of
the Object.” There, he articulated an abortive desire to ascribe a surrealist brand akin
to “Paramount Pictures” to a range of unconventional objects, including an aurora
borealis.6 As an author embodying the role of the consumer a decade later in this
photograph, Breton not only asserts the persistent role of consumption in surrealist
creativity—one in which maker and viewer become inseparable—but he also invokes
Deren’s historical crisis of the mid-1930s, reclaiming the definition of the term
Surrealism from competing salesmen.
When European Surrealists arrived on American shores during World War II,
surrealist aesthetics already had become a commercially successful form of fashion
merchandising.7 After Salvador Dalí’s first window arrangement for Bonwit Teller
in 1936, “surrealistic” shop window design had taken hold among professional
window dressers.8 While the contradictions of Dalí’s public activities in the United
States, such as his pavilion for the World’s Fair of 1939, have been described as
inherent to European Surrealism during the interwar period, Breton confronted the
misappropriation of Surrealism as a pressing reality upon his arrival in New York
City in 1941.9 As characterized by his biographer Mark Polizzotti, Breton remained
wary of commercialism; he did not capitalize on the popularity of surrealist
aesthetics, living more modestly than perhaps he might have, effectively shunning
Dalí.10
In contrast to the broad popularity of what Breton considered Dalí’s
“pictorial” approach, the window for Arcane 17 addressed a strikingly narrow
audience. This was also true of two others (Figs. 2 [top] and 3 [lower left]) that
Breton had invited Duchamp to organize, building on their 1937 collaboration for
the striking threshold of Breton’s short-lived Paris gallery Gradiva.11 Each of these
windows advertised texts released through the French publishing arm of Brentano’s.
Though one window was moved due to protests, they were all designed to be shown
in the Fifth Avenue outpost of the book emporium then known as the largest
bookseller in the world.12 As a quite visible rejoinder to the spectacularized version
of Surrealism being touted up the street at Bonwit Teller, these windows were
aimed at a French-speaking audience and filled with insider and esoteric references,

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intentionally minor and marginal. The narrowness of their address served as a
deliberate contrast to the high fashion ambitions of Dalí and those inspired by him.
Operating between advertising and critique, these windows served as a
laboratory for later surrealist events and installations that took up the topic of
consumption in the postwar era. For example, during the war Breton became
increasingly interested in the writings of the nineteenth century utopian socialist
Charles Fourier, and composed the epic poem “Ode to Charles Fourier” (1947)
during his road trip crossing the American Southwest.13 But it was with the window
displays that Breton began to truly flesh out Fourier’s description of a world in which
the exchange of goods would be driven by the “natural passions” of consumers,
conceived broadly to include erotic attraction, epicurean appetites, and consumer
cravings. Art historians have rightly called attention to the latter two windows
presented in 1945 as an indication of how we might read the stakes of Duchamp’s
work—both the earlier The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
(1915–23) and the later Given (1946–66).14 But developed at Breton’s behest and with
his participation, what can they tell us about his evolving conception of Surrealism?
The reclaiming of the shop window as a surrealist site—and in midcentury New
York, the space that would come to define and manufacture consumer desires—
set the stage for a more fulsome reconsideration of Fourier’s ideas in the postwar
period, when Breton once more led the reconvened surrealist group. Amid the
postwar “economic miracle,” works like Meret Oppenheim’s Spring Feast (1959), the
group-authored installation The Consumer (1965) led by Jean-Claude Silbermann, and
Jean Benoît’s The Necrophiliac (1965) produced fraught critiques of consumer culture
that also identified the surrealist artist as a “consumer.” During the interim period
of exile, Breton and Duchamp used the shop window as a space to explore this
dichotomy.
Through “Dripping Show Windows”: Dalí and Duchamp
The shop window was already a key motif within the first few years of the
surrealist movement, part of a broader stance toward consumer culture that has
come to be described in terms of either ambivalent or critical participation.15 In
Louis Aragon’s description of nocturnal reverie in front of a glowing cane shop
window in Paris Peasant (1926), the transparency of glass staged an encounter
with another reality; the shop window became an aquarium before his eyes, and
glass allowed these two incompatible realms, the wet and the dry, to coexist
simultaneously, transforming habitual consumer desire into an extraordinary, fleeting
experience, both alluring and frightening:
The canes floated gently like seaweed [...] I noticed that a human
form was swimming among the various levels of the window display
[...] Her hair floated behind her, her fingers occasionally clutched at

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Fig. 2. Reproductions in VVV 2-3 (March 1943), 36. Top: André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt
Seligmann, Brentano’s window for the release of La Part du diable by Denis de Rougemont; Bottom:
“Souvenir de l’exposition surréaliste 1942,” with string by Marcel Duchamp. Photo courtesy of the
Art Institute of Chicago

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021)

Fig. 3. Reproductions in Le Surréalisme en 1947: exposition international du surréalisme, exh. cat. (Paris:
Pierre à Feu, Maeght éditeur, 1947), 129. Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

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one of the canes. At first I thought I must be face to face with a siren
in the most conventional sense of the term, for I certainly had the
impression that the lower half of this charming spectre, who was
naked down to a very low waistline, consisted of a sheath of steel or
scales or possibly rose petals.16
For Breton, the transparency of glass was a foundational metaphor for the ideal of a
fully transparent inner life, for the communication between the interior and exterior
realities that he sought, and as a material vehicle for juxtaposition. Foreshadowing
Aragon’s notion of the Paris arcades as a “human aquarium,” Breton used the aquarium image to portray the ideal of transparency between otherwise inaccessible realms,
referring to “glass diving suits” and underwater domestic living spaces in Soluble Fish
(1924) and elsewhere.17 With its enlarged panes of glass, the shop window amplified
this quality even further in that it provided a found model for the arrangement of
disparate objects to alluring effect, and confounded the boundary between the interior and exterior spaces that it connected. Breton and Aragon’s metaphoric redoubling
of the selection and arrangement of shop window decoration in the form of surrealist juxtaposition is further evident in the inclusion of Eugène Atget’s shop window
photographs as illustrations in surrealist texts. For example, Atget’s view of a corset
shop on the Boulevard de Strasbourg becomes yet another source of new associations when positioned alongside a dream narration by Marcel Noll in the June 1926
issue of The Surrealist Revolution.18 Thus, when Dalí began to engage in shop window
design, he was not only using Surrealism to sell, but also employing one of its foundational motifs.
The terms of Breton’s criticism of Dalí’s activities in shop window design,
and a subtle reclamation of the medium, began to take shape inside the first issue
of the surrealist journal VVV (June 1942). In the Third Manifesto—cautiously
identified as mere introductory notes to a possible manifesto, a “Prolegomena
to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else”—he famously proposes a “new
myth” to counter that of fascism, involving transparent beings called the “Great
Transparents,” existing alongside us and appearing only to a select few during
tumultuous times in history.19 While Breton’s retreat into hermeticism and
esotericism has been described by critics as deeply problematic in relation to the
mythology of fascism at this historical moment, it takes on new meaning when
considered, first, in the context of Dalí’s extreme involvement in publicity, and then
also alongside Breton’s previous and evolving use of glass to signify the mutual
legibility of otherwise incompatible realms. The Great Transparents proposal allowed
him to advocate for complete transparency of knowledge and yet to continue his
retreat from public engagement.20
In the “Prolegomena” Breton also invokes another form of transparency
when he refers derisively to the “dripping show windows [ruisselantes vitrines] of Fifth

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Avenue” as an example of the proliferation of disingenuous surrealist activities.21
His use of the term “dripping” to describe these windows makes Breton’s criticism
legible as a pointed critique of the particular iconography of Dalí’s shop windows,
which actually included water, and also of luxury, the misuse of surrealist signifiers
for their sale. Like the English term, the French word ruisselant alludes to a surplus
of liquid (one translator used the term “rain-streaked”), but also to copiousness in
general, as in “dripping” with the luxurious wares on display inside Fifth Avenue
shop windows.22 Both connotations would have applied to Dalí’s 1939 shop window
design for Bonwit Teller, which more than merely dripped with the trappings of
luxury consumption; it literally spilled water onto the street below.23
As the well-known story goes, Dalí designed two windows for the store, titled
“Night” and “Day,” and according to a Time journalist, Dalí treated what he called
the “hackneyed subject” in the following way:
For ‘Day,’ the dapper, delirious Catalonian placed in one window an
old-fashioned bathtub lined with black Persian lamb and filled with
water, from which three wax arms arose holding mirrors. Pensive
before the tub stood a wax mannequin clothed in green feathers with
long, bright red hair. On the walls, upholstered in purple, small mirrors were fixed here and there, and narcissism was further indicated
by narcissuses floating in the tub. For ‘Night,’ Dalí showed in another
window a mannequin lying on a bed of glowing coals under a stuffed
trophy, which the artist described as ‘the decapitated head and the
savage hoofs of a great somnambulist buffalo extenuated by a thousand years of sleep.’24
By the time Dalí returned to inspect his work from the night before, he found that
his artistic vision had been betrayed by the department store in response to customer complaints about the out-of-style “Day” mannequin, a dust and cobweb-covered
vintage model from the 1890s, which had been exchanged for a “glamor [sic] dummy
in a tailored suit.” The “Night” mannequin had also been modified; it was no longer
to be found in repose, but had been exchanged for a seated model. For Dalí these
changes had “ruined all meaning.”25 By updating one mannequin and “waking up”
the other, management removed key representations of surrealist innovation—the
out-of-style and dreams. The store would not lower the curtains to hide the altered
displays as Dalí’s requested, nor remove his name from the windows; so in protest,
reportedly, the artist shattered the glass of one window with the water filled, fur-lined
cast iron bathtub.26 Press photos show the sidewalk strewn with broken glass, and the
window curtains finally lowered (Fig. 4). Above and beyond its quality as a publicity
stunt, we might evaluate this episode as a proto-performance in that it preserved the
artist’s intention for the windows as works of art not limited to their publicity value.

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41

Fig. 4. Bonwit Teller window broken by Salvador Dalí, March 16, 1939, Image by © Bettmann
Archive/Corbis via Getty Images

The episode demonstrated a reversal of the conventional trajectory encouraged by
the shop window, wherein the viewer is enticed to enter the shop. Here, by contrast,
Dalí violently expelled the interior contents of the shop onto the street outside. In
this regard, it is worth noting that the window designed by Dalí for Bonwit Teller in
1936 also simulated multiple ruptures between the interior and the exterior as part of
the design. It depicted tears in the background through which elongated arms from
inside the store seemed to reach toward the mannequin.27
Breton’s anxiety about “dripping show windows” was aimed at Dalí’s designs
and highly publicized stunt; it also reflected his greater concern that the term
Surrealism was slipping through his fingers, particularly because as Surrealism gained
increasing visibility, in the United States, Dalí came to stand for the movement as an
individual. For example, Time Magazine had recently dubbed him “The Surrealissimo.”28
As a pointed rejoinder, the first issue of VVV featured its own broken glass shop

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021)

Fig. 5. Irving Penn, Brooms in Window, reproduced in VVV 1 (June 1942), 50. Photo courtesy of the
Art Institute of Chicago

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window: in Irving Penn’s untitled photograph (Fig. 5), the banality and also the
dryness of a broom shop window contrasts the flashiness of Dalí’s stunt. It is a
broken window that has been painstakingly repaired, that does not drip in any
connotation, either with moisture or with luxury.29
Works by Breton and other artists in his circle, such as Kurt Seligmann, also
explored the aesthetics of broken glass. Seligmann exploited it as a device for the
production of chance-based composition, a technique featured on the cover of View
magazine in April 1943. He photographically enlarged shattered glass and projected
it onto canvas in order to trace its contours, producing abstract shapes that he called
“cyclonic” and coaxed into figuration as early as 1941.30 Breton made the act of
breaking shop window glass literal in a poem-object included in a VVV portfolio
(1943) (Fig. 6). For the edition of 20, he attached a postcard from Jack Delaney’s,
an equine-themed steakhouse run by a horse breeder and located just a short walk
from his Greenwich Village apartment, transforming the restaurant’s name into “Jack
the Ripper” (Jack l’Eventreur), a figure who plays into the integrated poem. Vectors
of multi-colored stitched thread radiate outward from each edge of the card and
onto the mounting paper where stanzas of the poem can be read and a series of
sequins are sewn, putting the work in conversation with the materials and procedures
of fashion. These vectors outline the trajectory of the consumer from exterior to
interior, but they also use a needle and thread to literally pierce the restaurant’s front
window from behind, in a manner not unlike Dalí’s expulsive trajectory from interior
to exterior in the context of the 1939 Bonwit Teller shop window.
Breton’s use of sewing in this object was also clearly in conversation with
Duchamp’s use of thread and string in works like Chocolate Grinder No. 2 (February
1914), Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14), and With Hidden Noise (1916), and even
more proximately, in his twine installation for the “First Papers of Surrealism”
exhibition at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion on Madison Avenue in 1942.31 Moreover,
Duchamp was the most notable proponent of the aesthetics of broken glass during
this period: he had already overseen the etching of each crack of the Large Glass
into celluloid miniatures for his Box in a Valise (1935-41) and the full-size work soon
went on view for the first time since its repair at the Museum of Modern Art, where
it remained, on loan from Katherine Dreier between 1944 and 1946.32 Though
Duchamp was not yet in New York to collaborate on the first issue of VVV in
1942, as he did for the remainder of the magazine’s run, Penn’s broom shop window
composition, with its seams, cracks, and dust, undeniably recalls the way in which
the Large Glass seems to collapse its surface incident into a single composition with
the three-dimensional view visible through it. The “shop-window quality” of the
work has been described by David Joselit, among others, in terms of Duchamp’s
handling of the medium and the work’s iconography of desire and alienation.33 Art
historians have identified the contents of shop windows as inspiration for many
of the key works that represented his transition away from Cubism and note that

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Fig. 6. André Breton, Poème-Objet from VVV Portfolio (c. 1941-42), postcard, thread, sequins, and ink
on gray paper, 18 x 14 in., Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Museum of Modern Art/
Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP,
Paris

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the iconography of the Large Glass is a precedent for his later shop window design,
pointing to Duchamp’s own early notes for the work.34
The rupture of the Large Glass, appears most indicative of its shop window
qualities, in Duchamp’s view, alluding to the way the shop window cultivates a desire
on behalf of the consumer to penetrate it. In a collection of facsimile notes dated
to Duchamp’s earliest work on the Large Glass in 1913, he described this journey
through glass as an imperative of the shop window’s address to the consumer, an
unfulfilling “round trip” of desire, decision, and acquisition:
[...] When undergoing the interrogation by
shop windows, you also pronounce
your own Condemnation.
In fact, the choice is a round trip. From
the demands of shop windows, from the
inevitable response to shop windows,
the conclusion is the making of a choice.
[...] The penalty consists in
cutting the glass and in kicking yourself
as soon as possession is consummated.35
Duchamp figures the response that the shop window encourages—“consummation”
or “consumption” (the term consommé can also be translated as “consumed”) as a
journey through the window, “cutting the glass.” Only a month before the Arcane 17
window was installed, Breton claimed Duchamp’s wartime work for Surrealism in
terms of the penetration of glass in his short essay “Testimony 45: On Marcel Duchamp,” published in a special issue of View (March 1945) that celebrated the artist.
There, he strongly argued for Duchamp’s relevance to contemporary art, writing that,
“Marcel Duchamp’s journey through the artistic looking glass, determines a fundamental crisis of painting and sculpture.”36
The shattered and visibly repaired Large Glass was itself made part of fashion
publicity on a scale perhaps even wider than Dalí’s broken shop window when it was
featured on the cover of New York Vogue in July 1945 (Fig. 7). Positioned there as a
lens through which to view fashion, it brings the structural associations between this
work and the shop window full circle. The fashion photographer Erwin Blumenfeld
aestheticizes the cracks of its surface veining by directing his lens toward the work
from behind and at a raking angle, making them sparkle in contrast to the flat
painted outlines in the lower pane. The semi-transparent work gives way to a fashion
model, identified by the magazine as a guest of the exhibition, wearing a dinner dress
by Hattie Carnegie. The diagonal draping of her dress mirrors the fanning shards of
the surface glass repairs, and the upward spray of her gold accessories echo the arc
of Duchamp’s seven sieves, playfully characterizing the interrelationship between the

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Fig. 7. Vogue (U.S. Edition, July 1945), cover © 2012 Condé Nast

46

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newly booming American fashion industry and the transatlantic brand of modern
art that MoMA was promoting during the war, when the art world’s center of
gravity underwent a seismic shift.37 The apparent commercialization of the Glass was
roundly condemned by Katherine Dreier, yet Duchamp did not seem to share these
concerns.38
This context—one in which the broken glass could equally be associated
with Duchamp as with Dalí—framed Breton’s facilitation of a surrealist shop
window, and his decision to make Duchamp his collaborator. However, while Vogue
emphasized the quality of Duchamp’s Large Glass as a lens, Breton would harness its
aspect as a visual obstacle, organizing shop windows that resisted interpretation.
Breton’s Surrealism in Shop Windows
The organizers’ evident enthusiasm about the precise moments when
the advertising function of these windows broke down underscores their narrow
purview as actual publicity. The first shop window headed by Breton in New York
at the beginning of 1943, for the Swiss intellectual Denis de Rougemont’s book La
Part du diable (1942; Fig. 2, top), was exemplary in this regard, designed to frustrate
the dynamic of identification and desire inherent to the medium by rebuffing the
potential consumer with an almost apotropaic quality. During the curtain raising,
Breton and de Rougemont were uniquely interested in the effect that the display
would have on the viewer, which de Rougemont identified as “the passerby” (le
passant). In his memoir, de Rougemont described their anticipation at the reactions
the window might generate and how they sought candid responses: “Everything’s
ready. The curtain is raised, at the stroke of noon, Breton and I post ourselves at
the edge of the Avenue’s wide sidewalk to watch for the reactions of the passersby.”39 If we are to take de Rougemont’s description at face value (noting the racist
implications of its primitivism), both he and Breton were gratified to witness what
they took to be an authentic fetishistic experience with one of the figurines inside
the window:
[the passerby] notices the Tibetan devil, arrayed in gold and purple in
the corner of the window, and suddenly he begins to jump in place,
to gesticulate, and to cry insults at the devil, accompanied by incredible grimaces. Finally, he sticks out his tongue with all his strength,
and after of this last outrage, he disappears into the small crowed that
has gathered.40
By prizing the response of a viewer conceived as a fetishist, who responds as if the
devil figure is animate, de Rougemont invokes the religious underpinning of Marx’s
description of capitalist fetishism and the fearsome implications of his well-known
description of commodities come-to-life.41 The visible affective extremes of this

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viewer—insults, grimaces, outrage—respond only to the registers of meaning materialized in this object that exceed its exchange value, to such an extent as to undermine
the function of the display as advertising. Strong rejection is also part of the description of the Arcane 17 window in View: “First commissioned by Brentano’s,” the
caption suggests, “it remained twenty minutes in their window, attracting crowds and
protests. Complaints were also made to GBM [Gotham Book Mart].” 42 As an ironic concession, a small apron was added to a poster by Matta to cover a breast after
another complaint was made by the New York Vice Squad.43
Intersecting with Breton during his stint as an administrator of Voice of
America, de Rougemont, a well-known Christian intellectual, took a sincere interest
in Surrealism, considering it a modern form of spirituality, and they developed a
close friendship. De Rougemont found welcome in such spheres as the Collège de
Sociologie in France before the war and, after his arrival in New York in 1941, the
École libre, where linguistics and Surrealism were examined side-by-side. Historian
Jeffrey Mehlman has called him “the most ubiquitous French-speaking intellectual
of the wartime emigration,” and his presence in New York alongside Breton and
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss no doubt helped define what would later
become French Structuralism.44 When it was translated into English a year after the
shop window collaboration, the text would be reviewed by Hannah Arendt, who
argued that while the book “[fell] into the worst pitfalls of gnostic speculation,”
de Rougemont’s characterization of the state of confusion among European
intellectuals was nonetheless important to take seriously and read charitably.
Ultimately she cited his sweeping comment on the darkness present across human
cultures, implicating democratic regimes in the emergence of Hitler: “the reality is
that ‘the Nazis are men like ourselves.’”45
Duchamp was invited by Breton to collaborate on the design for the window
advertising the book, and together with Kurt Seligmann, he devised a virtual
compendium of allusions to the devil and evil more generally, in keeping with the
dark theme of The Devil’s Share. They hung inverted black umbrellas from the ceiling
(bringing the word “dripping” to mind), which de Rougemont compared to “the
wings of giant bats.”46 Art historian Nina Schleif has pointed out that the umbrellas
referred explicitly to Dalí, who had used them in the same way to decorate his
Dream of Venus pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair, while simultaneously functioning
as an allusion to Duchamp’s previous use of coal sacks on the ceiling of the 1938
International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.47 Seligmann, interested in all things
esoteric, sourced occult symbols for the window directly from his growing library
on the history of magic and later published them in his expansive comparative
history of the occult in the Western world entitled The Mirror of Magic (1948).48
He reproduced images such as “The Devil” tarot card, portraits and signatures of
demons, and a magic circle on a draped paper backdrop.49 As de Rougemont later
elucidated, Duchamp and Seligmann also secured a variety of “devil statues of all

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sizes and periods and from fifteen different countries” from an antiquarian dealer,
including “a little Baphomet (a devil worshipped by the Knights Templar, according
to their enemies)” which they positioned as if viewing “a few handfuls of jumping
beans twitching on a black table.”50 As sweeping as Seligmann’s research, the window
respected no single mythological iconography, instead bringing multiple traditions
together into a comparative network of related imagery.
The window was reproduced in VVV 2-3 (March 1943), where it was
attributed to Breton, Duchamp, and Seligmann, ratifying window design as an
expressive medium at the center of surrealist activity. Following Breton’s criticism
of Fifth Avenue shop windows in the previous issue of the same publication, the
attribution makes the window a reparative proposal, nuancing his critique. Further
bolstering its importance as surrealist installation, the illustration places the window
in direct conversation with the “First Papers of Surrealism” exhibition (Fig. 2,
bottom), which had closed the previous October. An installation view—the string
attributed to Duchamp, criss-crossing at random intervals between the walls, ceiling,
floor, and movable display stands—was laid out inverted on the page, as if a mirror
image to the window. While multiple images were often laid out on single pages of
VVV without necessarily suggesting comparison, the mirroring of the installation
and window design effectively made them part of a single visual scheme.
If Duchamp’s installation mirrors the window display in these paired
photographs, the reverse is also true—the esoteric window becomes a reflection
on Duchamp’s twine installation. Made more abstract due to the alienating effect
of the photograph’s inversion, the two-dimensional representation of the webbed
strands collapses them into a shard-like surface, fanning out from central nodes of
entanglement to become the very image of broken glass. We know that Duchamp
compared the experience of viewing the exhibition through his string to seeing
through a window, and has been described by Lewis Kachur as comparable to
looking through the Large Glass.51 Due to the context of the exhibition detail’s
reproduction in VVV and its affinity with Duchamp’s poetic image of “cut” glass in
his description of the shop window’s appeal, we could extend this description of the
twine installation’s effect to incorporate the shop window. Duchamp even suggested
that he was simply aiming for “the cheapest form of attracting the attention of
the public to Surrealistic surroundings,” a statement that embodies the mixture of
economy and spectacle expected of professional window designers.52 The fashion
designer Elsa Schiaparelli—at whose instigation the “First Papers of Surrealism”
exhibition was organized—saw the twine as promoting viewer movement in and
through the space: “ropes were stretched to form a labyrinth directing visitors to this
and that painting with a definite sense of contrast.”53 The installation detail further
evokes historical descriptions of the department store as entrapping the viewer in a
seductive, “vast spider’s web.”54
The tactile quality of the twine, the way it seems to trace and encourage the

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movement of viewers, reinforces the comparison to the structure of shop windows.
The “round-trip” circulation that Duchamp described as part of the shop window’s
invitation to the viewer would certainly produce a similar tangle if delineated by
string. Maya Deren’s unfinished film The Witch’s Cradle (1943) emphasized this aspect
of Duchamp’s twine by animating it.55 The twine leads the camera through the
opening exhibition of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery, snaking
around and even through artworks, around Duchamp’s neck and down his pant
leg. Intercut with exhibition detail shots, Duchamp’s string is seen in play, in his
hands, in an exaggeratedly sloppy game of cat’s cradle at a café.56 Deren’s animation
of the twine dramatizes the function it played in “First Papers of Surrealism”;
recalling Schiaparelli’s reading, it invites movement through the space and thereby
a visual record of the web of meaning created by the works on view. Even more
provocatively, the film places the twine within a narrative of magical rites—like
that explored in the window for La Part du diable—culminating in a ritual led by
Anne Clark, her forehead inscribed with a magic circle. The twine’s capacity as a
comparative structure recalls Breton’s definition of esotericism as a vast “system of
comparison”:
with all due reservations about its basic principle, [esotericism] has
the immense advantage of maintaining in dynamic state the system
of comparison, boundless in scope, available to man, which allows
him to make connections linking objects that appear to be the farthest apart.57
As a comparative framework, esotericism emerges as a rather appropriate subject for
a surrealist shop window presentation; by staging the product of a symbolic form of
circulation inside a commercial one, the display compares mythology with the mythmaking of commodity fetishism.
This nexus of commercial and symbolic comparative frameworks did
not produce any straightforwardly critical effect. But the invocation of various
registers of arcane meaning within the shop window—a medium that portrays an
image of transparency—produced a tension explicitly targeted to the crises that
were threatening the ability of Surrealism to function as an avant-garde: the mass
appeal of surrealistic merchandising and the apparent irrationality of fascism. While
rationality had emerged as the primary subject of avant-garde critique after World
War I, Surrealists were faulted for their retrenchment into mythology and the occult
during World War II, when irrationality came to the forefront of traumatic world
events.58 Adorno wrote critically that occultism resulted from the same weakness of
thought that led to fascism:
The hypnotic power exerted by things occult resembles totalitarian

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terror: in present-day processes the two are merged. […] The horoscope corresponds to the official directives to the nations, and number-mysticism is preparation for administrative statistics and cartel
prices. 59
On the contrary, the mythological traditions advertised in the windows for La Part
du diable and Arcane 17—like Breton’s “new myth” of the Great Invisibles—at once
publicize Surrealism while limiting its reception to an initiated few. As in the initial
impulse for “occultation” at the time of the second manifesto, Breton and his collaborators produced these shop windows in need of deciphering and decoding at the
same time as both the author and his critics were intensely scrutinizing Surrealism’s
address to the public.
The display associated with Arcane 17 communicated not only the esoteric
themes of Breton’s book but also another kind of inwardness gesturing toward
the hermetic meanings of Duchamp’s oeuvre itself; the pantheon of internal
references visible in this window is on par with the esoteric themes of the book.
The arrangement, titled Lazy Hardware, has been included in Duchamp’s catalogue
raisonné, but photographs by Elisa Caro show that Breton too was present for the
window’s final installation.60 Displaying multiple copies of Arcane 17, an author
photo, and a selection of other surrealist publications and general interest art books,
the window held a large poster by the book’s illustrator Roberto Matta, depicting
the couple from his tarot card “The Lovers.”61 Most memorably, an altered fashion
mannequin held an upside-down copy of the book, recalling both conventional
fashion window merchandising and the artist-styled fashion mannequins of the Street
of Mannequins at the 1938 “International Surrealist Exhibition” in Paris.62 Almost
completely nude, the headless figure wore only a sheer white apron, a uniform of
domestic servitude that undermined the mannequin’s traditional role as an armature
for the display of fashionable clothing. Installing a faucet in her right leg, Duchamp
invoked the dripping water of Dalí’s window, but also the flow of the pen; an
inscription on a photograph of the artist at work on the window reads “which stops
flowing when one doesn’t write” [“qui s’arrète de couler quand on ne l’écrite pas”].63
The implied flow also gestured toward the re-circulation of Duchamp’s historical
artworks referenced by the faucet: the readymade Fountain (1917) was also identified
as an “article of lazy hardware,” a term invoked in the film Anemic Cinema (1926),
where one of the phrases that revolved among his roto-reliefs defined one of these
articles as a faucet “that stops running when it is not listened to.” In Duchamp’s
terms, this installation was a “mirrorical return” (renvoi miroirique), his term for
the extended, punning method of artistic production for which he was known. It
was therefore at home in the shop window as he likewise defined it, where one is
compelled to make a “round trip.”64

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Conclusion
Installed in a shop window—an environment of material transparency
designed expressly to encourage the swift movement of commodities out of the
store—Duchamp’s faucet would seem to represent the ideal of unlimited circulation.
However, in this context, it symbolized a more limited semiotic flow. Figuring
circulation in multiple registers of signs, commodities, artistic networks, this
surrealist shop window remains legible only to the initiated, it “stops flowing when
one doesn’t write,” as if Surrealists are to be their own audience. In a commercial
environment already saturated with surrealist imagery and criticisms of the relevance,
or even the ethical possibility, of surrealist artistic techniques, we can view these
windows as part of Breton’s necessarily limited effort to work out modes of
resistance and secure the movement’s relevance in opposition to the mass mythology
of fascism on one hand, and on the other, the ever-increasing pace of consumption.
The embeddedness of these latter two windows of 1945 in the constellation of
Duchamp’s iconography secured their relevance to the ambitions of the surrealist
group in New York at the time of their making. They were shop windows that—
in the self-conscious and playful obscurity that defined Duchamp’s style of artmaking—countered the widespread, uncontrolled dissemination of Surrealism as
style. To insist on the surrealist stakes of these windows is to underscore Duchamp’s
active, collaborative involvement in this chapter of the movement. Internally
coherent, the windows he organized redressed the “leakiness” or “dripping” of
unauthorized, surrealistic shop windows—in particular Dalí’s performance of
the window’s inherent instability and permeability—and, amid the widespread
consumption of Surrealism as an avant-garde aesthetic, offered an alternative to what
Breton viewed as the falsely branded windows on the same street.
Presenting an alternative object of consumption within these shop windows,
the “real” Surrealism was far from a pure critique of the commercial sphere. These
windows also portrayed some of the benefits of circulation, if not of commodities,
then between objects, authors, and viewers as a form of community. This became
increasingly evident in the last window of the trio associated with Breton, one that
scholars have already deeply explored in terms of the web of meaning internal to
Duchamp’s oeuvre. Presented during the fall of 1945, the window advertised the
text that defined Breton’s vision for the pictorial production of the movement,
a 1926 essay on painting reprinted and published in 1945 alongside his writings
on art as Surréalisme et peinture, suivi de Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme et
de fragments inédits (Fig. 3, lower left). As explored by Arturo Schwarz and Thomas
Girst, the iconography of the objects arranged in the window touched on numerous
themes in Duchamp’s career while also laying the groundwork for the posthumously
installed assemblage Given.65 Additionally, the window foregrounded relationships
inside Duchamp’s coterie. The design sourced a range of original contributions,

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placing readymade objects such as a chicken wire torso and a draped panel of sheer
paper from Duchamp’s studio among a pair of “hobnailed” female feet, a pair of
men’s shoes with toes painted on by Enrico Donati, and a construction by Isabelle
Waldberg. Most notably, Duchamp placed his “hobnailed” feet upside-down, beneath
Donati’s shoes, as if to suggest footprints, calling up the motif of “human boots” in
René Magritte’s The Red Model series, one of which served as the cover illustration to
Breton’s book. 66
Encouraging a mode of viewing as endless comparison and recalling Breton’s
definition of esotericism, the windows for Arcane 17 and Le Surréalisme et la peinture
were reproduced in the catalogue for the 1947 “International Surrealist Exhibition”
in Paris (Fig. 3) as part of a formal network. The mannequin rhymes with a pair
of legs in Jindrich Štyrský’s painting Majakovsky’s Vest (1939), while the drapery in
Wilhelm Freddie’s Pro patria (1941) leads the eye to the draped panel in the window
for Le Surréalisme et la peinture and up again to the laundry line depicted in Štyrský’s
painting. Inviting only the most self-conscious acquisition, these windows made
consumption visible in the way that breaking through a window makes it visible—
by partly obscuring it and revealing it as a mediating presence. Steps from Madison
Avenue, the epicenter of the developing language of advertising, this precisely
targeted appropriation of publicity techniques would be immensely generative of
future surrealist work in relation to consumerism during the postwar era. Side by
side, Breton and Duchamp approached the complex figure that would come to
dominate the themes of surrealist exhibitions in the era of European reconstruction:
the surrealist artist as consumer.

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1 Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and
Giroux, 1995), 526. For insight into this periodization of the surrealist movement and its stakes, see
Michael Stone-Richards, “André Breton’s Le Verre d’eau dans la tempête,” Art History, 320–321; Victoria
Clouston, André Breton in Exile: The Poetics of “Occultation,” 1941-1947 (Abingdon, UK and New York:
Routledge, 2018). While I generally translate the titles of artworks and publications in this essay, I
have not translated the titles of the books advertised in the shop windows I discuss, each of which
were released in the original French. This is because the marketing of untranslated text is important
to my claim that Breton and his colleagues were employing the tools of marketing without intending
widespread legibility in the context of midcentury New York.
2 André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver
and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 21-22.
3 See Janine Mileaf, “André Breton at the Flea Market of Saint-Ouen: The Tactile Flâneur,” in Please
Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2010),
85-118. Elza Adamowicz has argued that print advertising was generative of surrealist creative
processes. Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 36.
4 Adam Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France, 1925–1941
(University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 213.
5 Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the Common
Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 36.
6 André Breton, “Surrealist Situation of the Object (1935),” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard
Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 258. Kim Grant has
perceptively described the way in which, even as early as 1924—when “artistic avant-gardism was no
longer a clear indicator of rebellion,” but instead “a marker for fashionability in a booming art market
eager for novelty”—surrealists “[embraced] the impossibility of verifying Surrealist productions” and
emphasized discursive mastery over the visual. Kim Grant, Surrealism and the Visual Arts: Theory and
Reception (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9, 114, 372n51.
7 See Sandra Zalman, “Surrealism between Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Consuming Surrealism in American
Culture: Dissident Modernism (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 11-46.
Dickran Tashjian has also described Surrealism’s fashionability in New York City with reference to
the publicity of Dalí surrounding the “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art. Dickran Tashjian, “Surrealism in the Service of Fashion,” in A Boatload of Madmen:
Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950 (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 90.
Christine Mehring has described the earlier “pervasiveness of surrealist imagery in France during
late 1930s, especially within the cultural establishment of the fashion world.” Christine Mehring,
“Vanishings,” in Wols Photographs (Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1999), 19.
8 See Richard Martin, Fashion and Surrealism (New York: Rizzoli, 1987); Ghislaine Wood, Surreal
Things: Surrealism and Design; The Surreal Body (New York: Abrams, 2007); Felix Fanés, “Fiat modes,
pereat ars” in Dalí: Mass Culture (Barcelona: Fundació “La Caixa”; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofía, 2004), 140-143.
As early as 1930, Frederick Kiesler proposed surrealist art as a visual model for shop window design
in his book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display. Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art
Applied to the Store and its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930). See Nina Schleif, Schaufensterkunst
(Berlin and New York: Böhlau Verlag, 2004), 151-167.
9 See Robin Blyn, “The Dream of Eros: Surrealism on the Midway, 1939,” The Space Between: Literature
and Culture 1914-1945 14 (2018), https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-andculture-1914-1945/vol14_2018_blyn.
In 1938, a journalist wrote of the process by which surrealist methods and motifs were becoming
more widespread and speculated that the trendiness of Surrealism would soon make it a victim of the

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fashion cycle: “[Eight years ago] surrealism was a weird thing for weird people. Today it is recognized
by the most practical businessmen—advertisers and sellers. … Come a few more years, and we may be
examining surrealism in Macy’s bargain basement. Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” Scribner’s
Magazine 104, no. 2 (August 1938): 17-20.
10 Excluded from teaching income due to a language barrier enforced seemingly by choice, Breton
accepted a monthly stipend from Peggy Guggenheim and read propaganda for the radio program
Voice of America produced by the Office of War Information. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 501-3.
11 For an account of Duchamp’s entryway for Breton’s short-lived Galerie Gradiva in 1937, see
Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October 69
(Summer 1994): 110-32.
12 “Arthur Brentano, Bookseller, Dead,” New York Times, January 30, 1944: 38.
13 See Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 528-29; Donald LaCoss, “Attacks of the Fantastic,” in
Surrealism, Politics and Culture, ed. Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss, Studies in European cultural
transition (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), 267-99. On Breton’s attraction to Fourier, see
Kenneth White, “Introduction,” in André Breton, Ode to Charles Fourier (London: Cape Goliard Press,
1969), n.p.
14 Schleif, Schaufensterkunst, 188-210. Thomas Girst has argued for the importance of Duchamp’s
1945 windows as a defining moment in the development of motifs that would go into Etant donnés:
“he began work on his assemblage Given, kept secret for so long, with two shop windows.” Thomas
Girst, “Those Objects of Obscure Desires: Marcel Duchamp and his Shop Windows,” in Shopping:
A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz, 2002), 145.
15 Some of the most defining studies on the broader relationship between Surrealism and
commercial culture, including fashion, have been, among others, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, “Black
Materialism: Surrealism Faces the Commercial World,” in Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, ed.
Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2007), 101-17; Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993); Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000); Ulrich Lehmann, “The Uncommon Object: Surrealist Concepts and Categories for the Material
World,” in Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, ed. Ghislaine Wood (London: V&A Publications,
2007), 19-37; Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1990); Wood, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design.
Krzysztof Fijalkowski has described the surrealist engagement with economic spaces, the commodity,
and exchange as both participatory and critical: “a kind of passionate critical participation,” a
“critical engagement with commercial structures, oppositional and utopian in their intention rather
than a blanket rejection of them.” Krzysztof Fijalkowski, “Black Materialism: Surrealism Faces the
Commercial World,” 102, 12, 17. The historiography of modernism and the avant-garde has often
attributed the term of “ambivalence” to artists who have engaged with mass media and mainstream
consumerism, not only Surrealism, but Dada and Duchamp, European and American Pop Art,
“Capitalist Realism,” appropriation and postmodern art, and even activist art practices such as the
Situationist International. In terms of Surrealism, see Sundell, “From Fine Art to Fashion: Man
Ray’s Ambivalent Avant-Garde.” Adam Jolles has drawn this conclusion, for example, of the “street
of mannequins” on view at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, arguing that the
apparent critique of the installation was countered by an “ambiguous and vague assessment of
commercialism, not only because Dalí used ski mask designed by the famous fashion designer Elsa
Schiaparelli, but also because some of the works themselves served as advertisements for the artists
who designed them,” resulting in a kind of ideological opacity. Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-Garde, 20307.
16 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson-Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994), 21-23.
17 André Breton, “Soluble Fish (1924),” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen

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R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 62-63; André Breton, “Instructions to the
Reader,” in The Hundred Headless Woman, trans. Dorothea Tanning (New York: George Braziller, 1981).
18 Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 90-91.
On the effect of the layered transparency and reflections visible in Atget’s shop window photographs,
see Maria Morris Hambourg, “Photography Between the Wars: Selections from the Ford Motor
Company Collection,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Spring 1988): 37. See also Molly Nesbit,
Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Therese Lichtenstein, Twilight Visions:
Surrealism and Paris (Berkeley; Nashville: University of California Press; Frist Center for the Visual
Arts, 2009). Haim Finkelstein has argued that Atget himself did not explore the reflectivity of shop
windows and their consolidation of interior and exterior space until well after his work was taken up
by Man Ray. Haim N. Finkelstein, The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007),
86-87.
19 André Breton, “Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else,” VVV, no. 1 (June
1942): 18-26.
20 On the “Great Transparents” or “Invisibles,” see Ellen E. Adams, “After the Rain: Surrealism and
the Post-World War II Avant-Garde, 1940-1950” (PhD Dissertation, New York University, 2007),
70-83; Romy Golan, “Matta, Duchamp et le mythe : un nouveau paradigme pour la dernière phase du
surréalisme” in Matta (Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, 1985), 45-46; and Gavin Parkinson, “We
Are Property: The ‘Great Invisibles’ Considered Alongside ‘Weird’ and Science Fiction in America,
1919-1943,” The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 Vol. 14 (2018), https://scalar.usc.edu/
works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol14_2018_parkinson.
Martica Sawin has pointed to transparency as a key surrealist theme during this period, pointing to the
work and thought of Matta, Seligmann, and Gordon Onslow Ford but also to the notable precedent
of Duchamp’s Large Glass. Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School
(Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1995), 199-200.
21 Breton, “Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else,” 18-19; André Breton,
«Prolégemènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non (1942)» in Œuvres complètes (Paris:
Gallimard, 1999), 3:6; [« Les précautions prises pour sauvegarde l’intégrité à l’intérieur de ce
mouvement -- considérées en général comme beaucoup trop sévères -- n›ont pas cependant rendu
impossible le faux témoignage rageur d›un Aragon, non plus que l’imposture, du genre picaresque, du
néo-phalangiste-table de nuit Avida Dollars. Il s’en faut de beaucoup, déjà, que le surréalisme puisse
couvrir tout ce qui s’entreprend en son nom, ouvertement ou non, des plus profonds «thés» de Tokyo
aux ruisselantes vitrines de la 5e avenue, bien que le Japon et l’Amérique soient en guerre. Ce qui, en
un sens déterminé, se fait ressemble assez peu à ce qui a été voulu. »]
22 Though the English translation was placed side-by-side with the original French in its first context
of publication in VVV, one translator has used the term “rain-streaked” for the French ruisselant
instead of “dripping.” “Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not (1942),” in Manifestoes of
Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1972), 282.
23 For more on the perception of this episode as a publicity stunt, see Zalman, Consuming Surrealism
in American Culture, 29; Schleif, Schaufensterkunst, 175-88; Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 444.
24 “Art: Dalí’s Display,” Time 33, no. 13 (March 27, 1939): 31.
25 Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 444.
26 “Art: Dalí’s Display,” 31.
27 Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” 18.
28 Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, 444.
29 Penn would ultimately call this his “first serious picture,” taken after he left his job in New York as
art director for Saks Fifth Avenue. See “General Recall,” Notebook C8, Box FF 185.10, Irving Penn

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Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.
30 Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, 312.
31 Lewis Kachur has argued that Duchamp used thread or string to make reference to threedimensional volume in these works. Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and
Surrealist Exhibition Installations, 184-85.
32 Donald Shambroom, “Marcel Duchamp and Glass,” tout-fait.com (December 1, 1999), toutfait.
com/marcel-duchamp-and-glass/; Anne Umland, Adrian Sudhalter, and Scott Gerson, eds. Dada in the
Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York and London: Museum of Modern Art and Thames
& Hudson, 2008), 23.
During this period, the work appeared in the 1944 exhibition “Art in Progress,” and was the subject
of a monograph by Dreier and Roberto Matta. Katherine Sophie Dreier, ed. Duchamp’s Glass: La
Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (New York: Société anonyme, Inc.; Museum of Modern Art,
1944).
33 Pointing to the lower half where perspectival rendering dominates, Joselit argues that the Large
Glass is in itself an “imprisoning vitrine” like the shop window. He cites Robert Lebel’s argument that
we might see the Large Glass as a “restaurant window encrusted with advertisements” and Richard
Hamilton’s suggestion that the objects rendered on the Large Glass should be perspectivally read as
behind it. David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 13742.
Citing a note by Duchamp suggesting that “the entire bride” should be put in “a transparent case,”
Herbert Molderings has argued not only that the Large Glass should be interpreted as a kind of shop
window, but by extension too, that Duchamp considered “any perspectivally painted picture” similarly
as “a view through an imaginary pane of glass onto an artistically arranged piece of the world.”
Herbert Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010), 80.
34 Molderings has described Duchamp’s early inspiration by the shop window in other works:
“Duchamp’s works of 1913-14 reflect, in many different ways, the iconography of the shop signs
and shop windows of his immediate Parisian surroundings” In terms of the iconography of the
Large Glass, he points out that there were two pharmacies on Duchamp’s typical walk to the library,
as well as a gas mantle seller, and uniform shops. The Chocolate Grinder, he points out, stems from a
chocolate shop store window in Rouen. Citing Duchamp’s note on shop windows, he writes that “It
was this analysis of Duchamp’s personal experience of the modern consumer-capitalist world that
strengthened his decision … not to execute The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even on canvas but
on glass.” Molderings, Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, 81-82.
See also Tamara Trodd, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the
Digital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Thomas Girst, “Duchamp’s Window Display for
André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1945),” tout-fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal 2,
no. 4 (2002), https://www.toutfait.com/duchamps-window-display-for-andra-bretons-le-surraalismeet-la-peinture-1945/.
35 Marcel Duchamp, note dated “Neuilly, 1913” from À L’Infinitif (The White Box). Translation by
Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk, In the Infinitive: a Typotranslation by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk
of Marcel Duchamps’s White Box, trans. Jackie Matisse (The Typographic Society, Northend Chapter,
1999), 5-6. As Hannah Higgins has observed, the first three lines of the note, which pose the
“question” of shop windows, encompass both the transparency and reflectivity of glass. Hannah
Higgins, “Duchamp through Shop Windows,” Electronic Book Review (September 1, 2001), http://
electronicbookreview.com/essay/duchamp-through-shop-windows/.
36 André Breton, “Testimony 45: On Marcel Duchamp (New York, January 18),” View (March
1945): 334.
37 In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the work of Carnegie might also be seen to signal

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the shift of the center of artistic activity and fashion to New York City. Carnegie was one of the most
prominent American designers to rise to fame after fashions from France had become unavailable due
to the occupation, and later due to a textile shortage in France.
38 In a strongly worded letter to James Johnson Sweeney, Dreier wrote, “One cannot blame Vogue for
they run true to form, but one can only be amazed and shocked that you should advise your Trustees
to so flippant and devastating a presentation of important works of art in the collection and loans
of the Museum for commercial purposes … But apparently the desire for notoriety preceeds [sic]
any reverence for art.” Letter from Katherine S. Dreier to James Johnson Sweeney, 13 August 1945,
Folder 12, James Johnson Sweeney Papers, MoMA Archives, New York.
39 Denis de Rougemont, Journal d’une époque (1926-1946) (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 527.
40 de Rougemont, Journal d’une époque, 527.
41 See William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” in Fetishism as
Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily S. Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 129143.
42 Reproduction and caption in View, Series V, no. 2 (May 1945): 41.
43 Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: the Life of André Breton, 526-27.
44 Jeffrey Mehlman, “Denis De Rougemont: New York Gnostic,” in Emigré New York: French
Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 61-84;
Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind: the Life of André Breton, 505.
45 Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” The Partisan Review 12, No. 2 (Spring 1945): 259-60.
46 de Rougemont, Journal d’une époque, 527.
47 Schleif, Schaufensterkunst, 194.
48 A section titled “The Devil’s Share” like the title of de Rougemont’s book would later be featured
in Kurt Seligmann, The History of Magic (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948), 255-261.
49 Kurt Seligmann, The History of Magic, 292, 301, and 425.
50 de Rougemont, Journal d’une époque, 527.
51 “It was nothing. You can always see through a window, through a curtain, thick or not thick ...”
Marcel Duchamp cited in Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and
Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 183.
Kachur has argued that the twine simultaneously allows and denies access to what is behind it,
comparing the effect of the string installation to that of looking through Duchamp’s Large Glass,
in that it “split the bodily experience of the spectator from the optical one.” Kachur, Displaying the
Marvelous, 183. T.J. Demos, on the other hand, has posited that the web of string ruptured viewership
precisely by materializing “the labyrinthine structure of mediation between objects, spaces, and
viewers.” T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 239.
52 Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 182.
53 Elsa Schiaparelli cited in Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 179.
54 Lisa Tiersten, “Marianne in the Department Store: Gender and the Politics of Consumption in
Turn-of-the-Century Paris,” in Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939, ed.
Serge Jaumain and Geoffrey Crossick (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 121.
In his important treatise on shop window display and contemporary art, Frederick Kiesler used
the metaphor of the funnel to describe the ideal goal of the well-designed store front: “You must
CREATE DEMAND. You must stimulate desire. […] Gradually the receding funnel type of store
front came into being. It slopes back at carefully determined intervals. It draws the customer in with a
suction-like power […] Window and door have in fact become one.” Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied
to the Store and its Display, 79.
55 For a study of this film and Deren’s connections and contributions to the group of European
surrealists living in New York during World War II, see Krzysztof Fijalkowski, “Surrealist Networks
and the Films of Maya Deren,” in Surrealism and Film after 1945, eds. Kristoffer Noheden and Abigail

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021)

59

Susik (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2021), 21-34. Fijalkowski emphasizes that
Duchamp’s installation recalled preexisting depictions of networks by Matta and Gordon Onslow
Ford and represented a “web of relationships that characterise surrealism at this crucial period for the
movement (30-31).”
56 As Helmut Klassen has observed, this gallery functioned, in many ways, as the realization of
Kiesler’s ideas on shop window design: “The primary characteristic of the space is that of a spatial
mechanism reminiscent of the spatial funnel effect of the shop window.” Helmut Klassen, “The
Figure of the Spiral in Marcel Duchamp and Frederick Kiesler,” in Transportable Environments 3: Theory,
History, Context, ed. Robert Kronenburg and Filiz Klassen (London and New York: Taylor & Francis,
2006), 19.
57 André Breton, Arcanum 17: with Apertures, Grafted to the End, trans. Zack Rogow (Kobenhavn; Los
Angeles: Green Integer, 2004), 116-17.
58 As Ellen Adams has explained, citing Georges Bataille’s essay “The Psychological Structure of
Fascism (1933),” “the word ‘myth’ … was hardly a neutral term in the early 1940s, as the example of
Fascism revealed … one important way the National Socialists had infiltrated the German psyche was
by carefully constructing a mythology that served their larger goals.” Ellen E. Adams, After the Rain,
71-72.
59 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia; Reflections from Damaged Life (London: New Left Books,
1974), 240. See also Theodor W. Adorno and Stephen Crook, Adorno: the Stars Down to Earth and Other
Essays on the Irrational in Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2002).
60 Elisa Caro Breton, photographs of the Gotham Book Shop in New York, arranged by Marcel
Duchamp for the release of Arcane 17 in 1945, Centre Pompidou/MNAM-CCI/Bibliothèque
Kandinsky, Fonds André Breton, BRET 3.1-6.
61 Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: the Life of André Breton, 526-27; Girst, “Duchamp’s Window
Display for André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1945).”
62 For analysis of the use of fashion mannequins in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in
Paris, see Katharina Sykora, “Merchandise Temptress: The Surrealistic Enticements of the Display
Window Dummy,” in Shopping: a Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and
Max Hollein (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 130-141.
63 This signed photograph is among the series that Elisa Caro Breton took of the Gotham Book
Shop window being arranged in 1945, Centre Pompidou/MNAM-CCI/Bibliothèque Kandinsky,
Fonds André Breton, BRET 3.1-6.
64 “The punning associations of the faucet bring together all the elements that define Fountain as a
Mirrorical Return.” Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 133. As Thomas Girst has noted, a 1964 etching refers to The Fountain as “An Original
Revolutionary Faucet / ‘Mirrorical return’? / A faucet which stops dripping when nobody is listening
to it.” Girst, “Those Objects of Obscure Desires: Marcel Duchamp and his Shop Windows,” 143-44.
65 “Above a female mannequin made by Isabelle Waldberg, he designed a ‘paper-fall’ in the shape
of a wedding veil, which may be a reminiscence of the Bride’s Garment in the Large Glass, where it
appears just above the Waterfall.” Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York:
Delano Greenridge Editions, 1997), 227. Girst, “Duchamp’s Window Display for André Breton’s Le
Surréalisme et la Peinture (1945),” n.p.
66 Reproduction in La Victoire (November 24, 1945), as cited in Girst, “Duchamp’s Window Display
for André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1945),” n.p.