Painted in Munich right before the painting entitled Mariée, and right after the two drawings both called Vierge (Virgin), Le Passage de la vierge à la mariée (The passage from virgin to bride) represents a crucial point of passage in Duchamp’s life and work, one in which, I believe, he accomplished his desire to become a significant painter and, by the same token, one in which something was revealed to him about painting’s loss of historical significance. It is as if, quite suddenly, a compelling desire to establish his identity as a painter set in, and as if he understood, albeit unconsciously, that Cubism was both a mandatory path toward this identity and a transitional style which avant-garde art would soon abandon, and which he would have to betray at the same time that he adopted it. But the production bracketed by those dates displays an extraordinary and enigmatic concern for painting, Cubist in appearance, yet invested with an irony and an eroticism absent in orthodox Cubism. He had been a rather eclectic painter until then, seemingly uncommitted, and not too gifted either. IT TOOK MARCEL DUCHAMP exactly one year, from Sonate (Sonata) in August 1911 to Mariée (Bride) in August 1912, to make his way through Cubism.

Pro paint contemplative state