In 1943, Marcel Duchamp was asked by the gallery owner Julien Levy to design the announcement for an exhibition to be called “Through the Big End of the Opera Glass.” The show was to feature unusually small-scale work by Duchamp, alongside the French Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, and the American collage and assemblage artist, Joseph Cornell.
View of Announcement unfolded, front side. One of Duchamp's last contributions to the plastic arts, the invitation is a conceptual artwork itself and the initial vehicle through which Duchamp's Endgame Problem was famously presented. T
Presented on transparent glassine, the invitation brings to mind Duchamp's previous work, To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
On the back cover of the announcement Duchamp provided the image of a cupid with a stretched bow and arrow in his hands, but the figure is inexplicably reproduced upside down. Duchamp painstakingly drew the cupid himself in pen and ink.
The title of the exhibition is a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
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