1911, Marcel Duchamp, Apropos of Little Sister -- Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice)
From the museum label: Duchamp painted this colorful Cubist portrait of his youngest sister, Magdeleine, when she was thirteen years old. Seated in a blue wing chair -- its ornamental arm stump conspicuously occupies the center of the composition -- Magdeleine appears far older due to the stoop of her back and her emaciated physique. The improbable proportions of her neck, torso, and legs also suggest a certain ungainliness, like that of a giantess, and imbue the portrait with a comedic, caricatural air. First exhibited in New York in 1915 under the formulaic title Study of a Girl, Duchamp devised the current one in 1936. Scorning traditional art-world nomenclature, this far more suggestive title bespoke his esteem for the literary and the poetic.
1911, Marcel Duchamp, Apropos of Little Sister -- Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice)
From the museum label: Duchamp painted this colorful Cubist portrait of his youngest sister, Magdeleine, when she was thirteen years old. Seated in a blue wing chair -- its ornamental arm stump conspicuously occupies the center of the composition -- Magdeleine appears far older due to the stoop of her back and her emaciated physique. The improbable proportions of her neck, torso, and legs also suggest a certain ungainliness, like that of a giantess, and imbue the portrait with a comedic, caricatural air. First exhibited in New York in 1915 under the formulaic title Study of a Girl, Duchamp devised the current one in 1936. Scorning traditional art-world nomenclature, this far more suggestive title bespoke his esteem for the literary and the poetic.