Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp

Around October 1912, at the age of 25, Marcel Duchamp decided to stop painting and to give up the idea of making a living as an artist, and found employment as a trainee at the Sainte‐Geneviève Library, Paris. I gather, however, from Hector Obalk’s “preamble” to this book that Marcel did not take his library studies very seriously seeing the post as a means of gaining “free time” and an opportunity to consult “treatises on perspective and the fourth dimension”.

This chronologically‐arranged selection of 285 letters, telegrams and postcards written by Duchamp, representing about one‐fifth of his total output, begins...