Marcel Duchamp'sBoîtes-en-valise: Collaboration and conservation

Between 1941 and 1968, Marcel Duchamp produced a series of roughly 300 boxes, or Boites, containing, in his words, ‘everything important that I have done’ (Sargeant, W. 1952. Dada's Daddy: A New Tribute is Paid to Duchamp, Pioneer of Nonsense and Nihilism. Life, 32(17): 102). Over the course of 30 years and seven editions, Duchamp and his assistants filled these ‘portable museums’ with miniature reproductions of his most significant works. The materials used included leather, paper, cloth, metal, glass, ceramic, cellulose acetate, gouache, varnish, and wood. The variety of the constituent materials, and the complex physical and conceptual ways in which they interact, make conservation treatment of the Boites unusually challenging. The conservator must consider both the condition of the specific Boite being treated and its relationship to the dozens of other Boites still in existence. After an overview of the history and manufacture of Duchamp's miniature museum, the results of a pilot survey of th...