Page 500 - The Secret Museum

small L.H.O.O.Q., an artwork he created in 1919 by taking a cheap postcard copy of

the Mona Lisa, drawing a moustache and beard on her face and then writing the
letters of the title on it. These letters, when pronounced in French, make the phrase
‘Elle a chaud au cul’, which was translated by Duchamp as ‘There is fire down
below.’

Once I’d looked at those works, Siro began unpacking the box. It’s like a
travelling salesman’s bag: it contains a bit of everything. He pulled out a miniature
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1, a work which now hangs in the Philadelphia
Museum of Art. We looked at Nude (study), Sad Young Man on the Train, a painting

that hangs, full size, in the gallery upstairs.

Showing me the lot was quite a fiddly job for Siro, but we enjoyed checking out
each of Duchamp’s pieces and seeing what was what in his box of miniature
creations, his tiny, travelling museum.

This particular Box in a Valise was made public in 1941. There are many more
like it, but this is the most precious in the world, because is the first and because it
was given to Peggy Guggenheim. She financed the entire project, and he wrote a
dedication to her inside the box.

This box was one of 20 originals of the de luxe edition Duchamp made; they’re
now in museums around the world, including the MOMA in New York City. These
first 20 took six years to make. Each of the boxes has one unique piece of art inside

it.

Peggy was born Marguerite Guggenheim in Manhattan in 1898. She had two
sisters, Hazel and Benita; she was very close to Benita. Her father died on the
Titanic and her childhood was, as she put it, excessively unhappy’. When she turned
21 she inherited a small fortune, had a nose job – which didn’t go well and which she
regretted – and changed her name to Peggy.

She met her first husband, Laurence Vail, while working for free in a bookshop,
and they had two children together. He introduced her to Duchamp, whom she would
describe as ‘the great influence of my life’. She left Vail in 1928 for an English

intellectual, John Holmes, who died tragically young in 1934.
For many years she lived in the Sussex countryside with Douglas Garman, who, I
found out in her memoirs, was a friend of a poet named Edgell Rickword, my great-

grandfather Cecil Rickword’s cousin. I have a book of poems by Edgell, with a
dedication inside written by my great-grandfather.

It wasn’t until Peggy Guggenheim left Garman and turned 39 that she decided to
begin the life for which she would be remembered: she started collecting modern art.
She learned as she went along, with the help of Marcel Duchamp.

In her autobiography, she writes: ‘At that time I couldn’t distinguish one thing in
art from another. Marcel tried to educate me. I don’t know what I would have done
without him.’ He introduced her to artists, planned her shows and gave her lots of