MARCEL DUCHAMP
Fresh Widow
1920
Miniature French window; painted wood frame and eight panes of glass covered with black leather.
30 ½ x 17 5/8 inches
77.5 x 44.8 cm
on wood sill: ¾ x 21 x 4 inches
1.9 x 53.3 x 10.2 cm
Inscribed verso, on base, in black ink: Marcel Duchamp 1964.
On copper plate affixed to base [inscribed]: Marcel Duchamp 1964 Ex Arturo; engraved: FRESH WIDOW, 1920 / Edition Galerie Schwarz, Milan.
Front of base applied across sill in black paper-tape letters: FRESH WIDOW COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920
ex. Arturo 1964, Milan

Joseph Cornell,Toward the Blue Peninsula: for Emily Dickinson, c. 1953.

Box construction. 36.8 x 26 x 14 cm. The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman Photo The Robert Lehrman Art Trust, courtesy of Aimee and Robert Lehrman Photography: Quicksilver Photographers, LLC © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA, NY/DACS, London 2015.

“‘Toward the Blue Peninsula: For Emily Dickinson’ (c1953), a glass-paned wooden box with mesh framing a painted blue window looking out to open sky, references a deserted aviary and also the upstairs bedroom in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Dickinson wrote her poems. Like Cornell, Dickinson was reclusive, unmarried, untravelled. The bare room is at once a barred prison and a haven for contemplation and creation, and the work takes its title from a poem beginning, ‘It might be lonelier/ Without the Loneliness/ I’m so accustomed to my Fate’ and ending, ‘It might be easier/ To fail — with Land in Sight —/ Than gain — My Blue Peninsula —/ To perish — of Delight”.’

—Jackie Wullschlager