At the London Review of Books, Brian Dillon considers Marcel Duchamp’s vacation in English coastal town of Herne Bay (and other unlikely historical connections between Kent and Europe’s 20th-century experimentalists):
Details about Duchamp’s time in Kent are scarce. We know that he travelled as chaperon to his 17-year-old sister, Yvonne, and stayed for most of August at Lynton College while she learned English… During or soon after his holiday at Herne Bay, Duchamp made four drawings and a couple of notes that all relate to The Large Glass. The drawings are prototypes of enigmatic – animal, mechanical or anthropomorphic – elements in the achieved work: the ‘pendu femelle’ (an apparently female form that hangs at the top left) and the ‘sex cylinder’ or ‘wasp’ that attends it on the right. There is a colony of rare digger wasps at Reculver, which has excited some Duchampians, but the more obvious link to Herne Bay is in the notes. Duchamp tore out and kept a small photograph of the illuminated pier and wrote, apparently describing a potential backdrop for The Large Glass: ‘An electric fête recalling the decorative lighting of Magic city or Luna Park, or the Pier Pavilion at Herne Bay.’
Who would have thought it?
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