The Duchamp research portal

Alison McDonaldAntoine, Séverine, what were the origins of this project? What motivated the Association Marcel Duchamp to embark on such a major undertaking?

Antoine MonnierMy family gave a lot of archival materials to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we wanted to make all of those archives more accessible. That was the wish of my mother [Jackie Matisse-Monnier], and we have worked to follow it.

Séverine GossartYes, digitizing Duchamp’s archives and making them accessible has been a goal for a long time, and from the perspective of the Association Marcel Duchamp [AMD] I think this project has a much longer history—it could even go back to Alexina Duchamp, the artist’s wife, who, right after his death, secured the preservation of the archives and started to make an inventory of everything. Teeny, as she was known, gathered rich documentation about Duchamp over the years and compiled several scrapbooks, which you can see on the portal. Of course she was helped by her children, first Paul Matisse and then her daughter, Jackie Matisse-Monnier, who later took over that work and founded the AMD.

AMcDMargaret, would you speak about how the idea for the digital portal was initiated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art [PMA]?

Margaret HuangThe project started before I joined the PMA. Creating an integrated and accessible database, one that could combine information about objects in our collection with related information from our archives, was an idea initially proposed by our director, Timothy Rub. The life and work of Marcel Duchamp were in his opinion an ideal choice for such a project, as this would also enable us to collaborate with other institutions, initially the Centre Pompidou and the Association Marcel Duchamp, with important collections and archival holdings of the artist’s work.

AMcDWhat were some of the earliest decisions that had to be navigated? How did you decide on the parameters and contributions for the collaboration between the institutions?

AMWell, it was an early decision to link the PMA archives with the Pompidou archives and the AMD archives. That was already challenging [laughs]—it’s not easy to combine archives from different institutions. Making a digital portal exclusively with the PMA would have been much easier, but there was so much to be gained in bringing the collections together. Still, we were linking two unique institutions in different countries with unconnected legal systems.

AMcDAurélien, how did those early decisions play out at the Centre Pompidou?

Aurélien BernardCécile Debray, who was a curator at the Centre Pompidou back then and is now the president of the Musée national Picasso, Paris, had made an exhibition that explored Duchamp as a painter [Marcel Duchamp: La peinture, même, 2014–15]. She started a discourse about this project between the PMA and Centre Pompidou. An early step taken by the Centre Pompidou was to survey what we had in the archives relating to Duchamp, because owing to its history, the Centre Pompidou has different repositories and archives across the institution.

AMcDAurélien, is your role similar to what Marge was doing at the PMA? How does your work complement each other’s? What are some of the differences?

ABWhen I was first approached, I was working at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Pompidou, to which the Duchamp family had donated archives in 1984. [The donation was made by Teeny Duchamp.] I worked closely with Marge on behalf of the Centre Pompidou, but the master plan for the project came from the PMA. My role was to facilitate the implementation and management of the project on the Centre Pompidou side and to bring in perspectives from across our institution. I would gather information from colleagues across all departments—archivists, librarians, curators—to identify the scope of the collections in the library, in our archives, and at the museum in general. All the teams would then discuss what could or could not be digitized, and of course I was responsible for keeping up with ongoing project management.

AMcDMarge, what do you see as the main differences between each institution’s archival holdings?

MHWell, in broad strokes, the PMA has more of the Marcel-centered items and the Pompidou and the AMD have much more related to Duchamp’s siblings, who were all talented artists in their own right. And putting them all together gives a lot of context about Duchamp’s family life and how that affected him as an artist. The PMA also holds the Arensberg Archives, which was a gift from his main patrons. Each archive speaks to different aspects of his life.

AMcDWhen you started, was any of it already digitized?

MHSpeaking for just the PMA, some things here and there had been digitized over the years for various projects, but not systematically. That wasn’t done until this project.

AMcDAnd what about at the Pompidou?

ABYes, many documents had been digitized before the project began, because for more than ten years there’d been a program to digitize many periodicals, books, and archives at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky. And because Duchamp is such an important artist, any files relating to him had been prioritized and were already partly digitized. That said, creating more digital files was still part of our agenda, especially the Duchamp family papers and the archives of the 1977 exhibition on Duchamp that inaugurated the Centre Pompidou.

AMcDWould you clarify for me what you mean when you say “digitize”? It can mean so many different things—resolutions, file types, metadata, coding structures. How did metadata and file-naming conventions come into play? How did you put a structure in place for the files?

MHAt the PMA, even though we had things that were already digitized, we actually rescanned some materials because we were creating so many new files and we felt it was important for everything to look consistent. We created nearly 40,000 new images for the project. We had a vendor set up on-site for almost six months, because these were our most important collections and we didn’t want to send them off-site. Our vendors followed FADGI [Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative] guidelines and produced 24-bit color tiff images at 400 to 2800 PPI depending on the original size of the material.

But what pulls it all together in the portal is our unified metadata schema. And thankfully, the Pompidou archives use the same standard that we do, which is called EAD [Encoded Archivable Description]. The project demonstrates why standards in our field are so important: they can facilitate projects like this, where data has to be shared or integrated together. And the fact that the Pompidou and the PMA were already producing archival data according to the same standard, which united all of the intellectual and descriptive content, allowed us to then share a template with the AMD to seamlessly create metadata according to the same standard.

AMcDThat’s great.

ABYes, it was a testament to the importance of international standards such as EAD. We were really glad to see that we were speaking the same “data language.”

AMcDAntoine and Séverine, there was a survey phase for the project between 2015 and 2017 when decisions were made about selecting materials to be included in the project. Could you share more details about this process?

SGEarly on we had to think about the number of documents and images that would be implemented in the portal. So we thought about the chronological range that would be included: we decided to add material gradually, rather than all at once, and to stop for now in 1969, which was the year Étant donnés was revealed after Duchamp’s death. We made two exceptions: we included files from the 1973 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the PMA, and files from the 1977 Centre Pompidou retrospective, together highlighting the history of our partnering institutions. But we didn’t want the portal to be a showcase for scholars or art historians; instead, we wanted to focus attention on the primary documents. So the portal is not a place for interpretations of the work. That was quite an important decision, and I believe it followed the direction already set up by Jackie: she didn’t want to support strictly individual undertakings. This collective project, this portal, continues in that spirit as well.

AMAnother important early decision was whether it would include only archival materials or whether images of artworks would also be included. And Cécile Debray was an advocate for including both. She felt that if we had the archives, we also needed to see the works to which they relate.

AMcDThe portal seems to me really useful for scholars. In concentrating on documentation, you’re dealing with objects as they exist—with facts that aren’t lent any kind of interpretive stance. The work is there for people to see, and they can make something out of it in their writing or their curating or however they want to use it.

AMExactly. In fact, we could fill an entirely different portal with interpretations of Duchamp’s artworks [laughter]. It would be massive. But to mix the primary sources with interpretations would just make things confusing. We have to think long term—making the primary sources more widely available is the first goal. There’s a lot of critical writing on Duchamp, and I think the primary sources would be submerged by the interpretations if we tried to include both.

SGThe portal is not a forum.

AMThat is correct. And that was a choice also.

AMcDCan you shed any light on the sheer volume of material included in the portal? The scope of the project is impressive.

MHRight now the portal consists of nearly 50,000 images, including correspondence, drawings, photographs, exhibition ephemera, news-
paper clippings, and images of the work.

AMcDHow did you determine the categories that would help users navigate the site and find what they’re looking for?

MHIt wasn’t based on categories as much as on collections. We already had the Alexina and Marcel Duchamp Papers, the Marcel Duchamp Research Collection, the Marcel Duchamp Exhibition Records, the Étant donnés Curatorial Records, and the Arensberg Archives. We knew these documents had significance for Duchamp. It was the same at the Pompidou: they had groups of documents and then materials were selected from those.

AMcDWhat about defining how people search for and find materials? Is that all navigated through metadata?

MHThere are three ways to navigate the site. You can use keyword searching, or you can use our filters, and those filters work because of the descriptive metadata. For instance, you can choose the correspondence filter and see all of the correspondence across all of the collections. Or you can filter by a person, someone like Man Ray, and see all the materials that have Man Ray associated with them. Or you can combine filters such as “correspondence” and “1920s” to get all of the correspondence from the 1920s. The third way is to navigate the materials through the finding-aid structure. If you’ve done archival research before, you might appreciate being able to browse the materials through the hierarchy of the archival arrangement.

AMcDDid the metadata already exist when the files were digitized, or was it added through conversations with the group?

MHA little bit of both. When the project first started, we did a data survey where we looked at what data everyone was already creating, what the overlaps were, what fields we were using or not using, et cetera. We came up with a minimum cataloguing standard, the fields that everyone had to have at minimum, and then filled it in from there.

AMcDWhat legal considerations emerged? Was copyright and intellectual property law discussed, and if so, was it problematic that laws might be different in France from in the United States?

SGThere were a lot of discussions involving legal counsel. We all agreed from the beginning on two essential aspects: to publish a noncommercial portal, and to provide free access to everyone. Nevertheless, when a user connects to the website, the very first page they see commits them to respecting the legal requirements of using the site.

ABTo our knowledge, this was the first time a portal like this was shared between an American and a French entity—there have been projects like this in the United States and projects like this in Europe, but the rights issues you have to deal with in each of those cases are very different. We could see no precedent, so there were no ready-made answers when we started. It was a very interesting problem to solve, and also to think about the future in terms of projects that might face similar challenges.

AMcDWhen I’m using the site, I can see the material but I can’t download it or use it for my own purposes. That seems important to the legal considerations—that it’s really there for study, like a reference library where you can’t check anything out, or use it without permission from the copyright holder. Similarly, for other creators whose works are reproduced on the site, do you direct users to places where they can license those materials for their scholarly or commercial needs?

SGYes. Users can contact any of us three, or the ADAGP in France or ARS in the United States, to receive information about licensing. Details and contacts are available in the “About” section of the portal.

AMCDMarge and Aurélien, what were you able to learn about Duchamp from your immersion in this material? What insight into Duchamp as an artist did you get from overseeing a project of this scope? Did you encounter documents that made you think about his work differently?

ABDuchamp is such a central figure in art history that it felt intimidating at first to get involved in a project about him. But the more I read his words, the more I felt drawn to him as a human being and to his outlook on things. Ultimately I found it surprising that, reading through his correspondence with, say, Constantin Brancusi, I could see how conversations from 100 years ago still feel unbelievably contemporary. Marcel Duchamp sounded like an artist working today.

MHDuchamp is such a larger-than-life figure—part of every art-history student’s curriculum. I never would have imagined that one day I’d be working on his archive, and, especially, seeing his personal items, like his passport, his rent receipts, that sort of thing. The project really humanized him, rather than presenting him as this monolithic figure in modern history.

Another interesting thing that I learned, especially doing the cataloguing, was through following the negotiation that the Arensbergs went through to decide where they wanted to donate their art collection. Originally the collection was going to go to the University of California, Los Angeles, but the contract required that UCLA build a museum to house the collection and when it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, they nullified the contract. After that they were courted by many museums across the United States. Duchamp visited those museums on their behalf. And for me, thinking about the decisions they made in the past, I could see that those choices were part of what made this project possible today. What if they’d decided to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Art Institute of Chicago? Duchamp’s work wouldn’t be at the PMA and we wouldn’t have gotten his papers and maybe I wouldn’t be working on this project.

AMcDThe project is a generous gift to Duchamp scholars, and future generations will surely benefit from its creation. How do you anticipate researchers will use it? Has anyone surprised you yet with new ideas or connections that resulted from using this new system?

SGIt’s still too early to see all the ways it will be used, but we’ve received many emails from people telling us they were very excited about the portal. We certainly hope that scholars and the public will benefit from the direct access that it offers to primary sources, and that it will help to open new perspectives and develop a critical retrospective eye on the Duchamp literature. Working on the portal confirmed that learning is often about unlearning things we thought we knew!

AMcDSo what this has done, quite clearly, is allow an audience all over the world to have the same level of access without traveling to see physical archives. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that, especially in light of the covid-19 pandemic.

MHThe analytics on the site confirm that we’ve had visitors from over 120 different countries so far.

AMcDTimothy Rub has spoken about the idea of seeking to create a richer online experience of art. Do you identify with this? If so, how does the portal achieve it?

AMIt’s always good to visit a museum and experience an artist’s work in person, but the portal offers you another view that includes the knowledge around Duchamp and where he came from. At AMD we believe that it’s important to see Duchamp in context. His brothers were quite influential on his practice, his family was very important, where he came from made an impact.

AMcDWhat does the future of the Duchamp Research Portal look like? Will you invite others to add to the archives? Will you continue to refine it or add features?

MHWe’re still working with our development firm to refine the site. And since the very beginning the vision has been to work with additional partners and to continue to grow the site’s content.

SGThe portal has been designed as an aggregate of sources and it will be a work in progress for a long time. We plan to add new segments of material little by little to keep it alive and fresh.

AMcDAny words of advice for others who might have ambitions to create similar resources in the future?

MHThinking about other foundations or estates that might be interested in similar projects, it seems important to note that while it was totally worth it, these projects require a lot of resources, in terms of both funding and human energy. This portal is over eight years in the making, involving more than thirty people across three institutions, over 50,000 images being digitized and organized, tens of thousands of lines of metadata being created, and so on. And then of course you need to have the funding. It was a huge effort.

AMBut you all make it look so easy [laughter]. And you make it so easy for everyone who wants to use the material. I’m sure scholars are very, very grateful. I have to imagine it’s going to open up quite a bit of new thinking.

The Duchamp Research Portal has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom, with additional contributions from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Martha Hamilton Morris and I. Wistar Morris III, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other generous donors.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment of the Humanities.