"The wig afford she is mine," I replied,

John Perrault: Can I dare to urge you to be even more personal?

Marcel Duchamp: I hate being personal, but since I have long admired your avuncular, haphazard approach to art criticism, I will do my best.

JP: This is a dangerous question. Why did you marry Lydie Sarazin-Levassor? I have been reading about that in Calvin Tomkins' biography of you. I can understand your relationship with Mary Reynolds, and then your marriage to Teenie, but Lydia, whom you married in 1927, seemed totally unsuitable. She was overweight, uninterested in art, and not even very rich.

MD: Although it would have been very pleasant if she had been as rich as I first thought, I married her because she was indifferent to art. I now claim the marriage as an art work, a Happening, a Performance, very much ahead of its time. After all my masterpiece is called The Bride Stripped Bare by Bachelors, Even. Marriage extended that theme - only in reverse.

JP: My next personal question is about money. We know you kept your expenses to a minimum. But isn't it true that you became a private art dealer?

MD: There were all these Brancusi sculptures floating around and this and that. One has to make a living.

JP: Is there Dada now?

MD: The Dada we tried to create has not yet come into existence, probably cannot come into existence.

JP: Have you seen any new art that you like?

MD: I don't get around much any more.

JP: May I recommend an exhibition?

MD: Certainly. I am always interested in what other artists are doing

©1996 John Perreault All Rights Reversed

[drawing: by Man Ray, Mort des heures [Death of Hours], 1936]


Subject: One of two Peter Saul exhibitions now
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:07:10 -0400

PETER SAUL
Nolan/Eckman Gallery
560 Broadway, at Prince Street
SoHo
Through Oct. 26

Saul moved to Paris in the mid-1950's. For a while he lived in a
hotel ''with an extremely angry woman,'' as he puts it, and supported
himself on $20 bills his mother periodically mailed to him. He painted. By
the early 60's, he was painting the pictures here. Alan Frumkin, the
dealer, saw a few of them, offered Mr. Saul a show, and things started to
turn around for him, not that everybody grasped what he was up to.

Mr. Saul remembers the weird reaction to his work back then. People were so caught up with the idea that painting had to be abstract that they couldn't see what was in the paintings. ''They told me, 'Peter, it doesn't matter whether it's Batman or a tree or a circle.' '' he said. All that mattered was how he pushed the paint around.

Michael Kimmelman @ NYTimes 10-13-06

Peter Saul "Business Woman" 1990