Significance of the 'Jura-Paris Road'
In October 1912, two artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia along
with their friend the poet and critic Apollinaire returned by car to
Paris from the village of Étival in the Jura. Duchamp commemorated the
journey in a note soon afterwards entitled 'The Jura-Paris road'.
The note has afforded insights into the fusion of man-machine imagery
that all three men were keen to explore. The note also introduces their
common interest in developing an interdisciplinary approach to their
work. Important as these insights are, there is more to be learned from
this journey and the note that accompanies it. This was, for instance,
where Duchamp first began to develop his theme of military foreboding,
which then reoccurs as a distinctive element in subsequent work.
Duchamp's note rejects ordinary descriptions of automobile travel and
instead uses the journey as a metaphor for the operations of an alien
force on a reconnoitring mission. Instead of scenic descriptions and
endorsements of motor travel we have something that ominously suggests
an environment of competing powers trying to gain advantage in the
endgame of a culture that has compromised art, religion, the military
and territorial conquest - all of which would be overturned in the
German invasion of 1914.
Two other people make important contributions to the story: Gabriele
Buffet, Picabia's wife who was by now keenly aware that she had become
the obsessive object of Duchamp's erotic desire and who was increasingly
prepared to play up to this dream. Her brother Jean Challié is the
other person; he owned the house in Étival, which became the fulcrum of
the visit. Challié was an established painter and a former painting
associate of Picabia's but he was by now violently opposed to cubist
painting and therefore ideologically hostile to the three artists who
came in the car. Although not present at the time, his influence broods
over the assembly adding an immediate and personal dimension to the
forbidding nature of Duchamp's note, while also providing a clear view
of the competing tensions in Paris as cubism began to outplay - and
outsell - other less radical movements in pre-war art.
