Readers of Ruth Brandon's lusty Spellbound by Marcel: Duchamp, Love, and Art can be excused for wondering if, with all the bed-hopping and heart-breaking going on in its pages, the featured artists actually managed to get any work done. Happily, the book's art reproductions attest to the artists' productivity and facility, if not always their integrity.
Here's what happened: in 1916, budding American artist Beatrice Wood fell in love with French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp in New York but, to her dismay, Marcel saw no need to link sex with fidelity. Redirecting her affections, Beatrice romanced fellow Marcel fancier Henri-Pierre Roché, who rather inconveniently fell in love with the married Louise "Lou" Arensberg; Henri-Pierre and Lou had an affair. Lou--along with her husband, Walter--hosted a salon in an apartment they owned in Manhattan. Here, Marcel had a studio and paid his rent with his art. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the overlapping free spirits ricocheting through the mischievous Marcel's orbit at this time in history.
Spellbound by Marcel is about not the art but the art-makers, and cultural historian Brandon (Ugly Beauty) has everyone's number, especially Duchamp's, whose "particular talent" she shrewdly defines as "his unerring ability to slide needles under the art world's fingernails." The book is a juicy, assiduously researched probe into the lives of an international cadre of artists who, on the eve of the U.S. involvement in World War I, found a hot spot and kept it warm with their hearts and bodies. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer