Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared
Book by David Hopkins; Clarendon Press, 1998

Introduction
In revising what was originally presented as a doctoral thesis at the University of Essex in 1989 I have largely preserved the shape and flavour of the original but sharpened certain historical points and updated the notes as far as possible. If I tackled the same project now I would no doubt produce a very different book, but what has struck me is that even as the social construction of gender and postmodern theory ceases to have the methodological novelty it once had, it remains an absolutely appropriate model for rethinking the material with which I deal. 1 This said, I hope the reader will approach the book as an extended discussion, or a series of interwoven discussions, which is deliberately contentious in places. The Duchamp chapters can be read as a self-contained entity, but the Ernst material relies heavily on the first half of the book. It should be stressed, however, that the project was conceived from the outset as an argument to be read from start to finish. The subsections within chapters provide thematic signposts, but the overall effect is intended to be cumulative.

Duchamp and Ernst are perhaps an unlikely pair 2 and I can only hope to convince the reader of the logic of bringing them together. My emphasis on themes such as Catholicism and Rosicrucianism/Masonry might also seem inexplicable. In the popular imagination Dada and Surrealism are iconoclastic movements; the photograph of the Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret insulting a priest 3 embodies the spirit of defiance many of us would wish to preserve. One of my aims, however, has been to show that both of these artists replicate the structures of the Catholicism they were brought up with just as surely as they undercut them. They also subscribe at times to models of élite and clubbish masculinism, discussed here in relation to a concept of Dada/Surrealist 'homosociality', which makes the links to secret societies surprisingly apt. In the latter connection I am conscious of partially reviving the kind of 'hermetic' reading of Duchamp that was prevalent in the late 1960s but has recently come in for some disparagement, 4 despite historical indications to the contrary. 5 One of the advantages of reading Duchamp through Ernst, as I do towards...

1 In terms of Duchamp, Amelia Jones produced a book in 1994 drawing extensively on gender theory and postmodernism: Post- modernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Quite apart from its concentration on later phases of Duchamp's pro- duction than those considered here, her book foregrounds its 'postmodern' methodology much more forcefully than I have seen fit to, as she ambitiously attempts to engage Duchamp in a kind of transferential relationship, equivalent, as she notes at one point, to that between (psycho)analyst and analysand (p. 113 ). (For a fuller consideration of her methodology, along with certain reservations on my part, see my 'Pushing Marcel past the "post"', Art History, 20/ 1 ( Mar. 1997), 157 -63.) By contrast, while I share an interest in Duchamp's position on gender, I am fundamentally concerned with a historically-based discussion of how those areas of Duchamp's output which might appear to resist post- modernism's horror of 'closure' (the Rosicrucian/Catholic and Cartesian strands, for instance) are in fact mobilized in relation to one another to produce proto-postmodern patterns of replica- tion (here dealt with in accordance with the thematics of 'autonomy'). As far as Ernst is concerned, few lengthy revisionist studies have so far been produced, although Rosalind Krauss's discussion in chapter 2 of The Optical Unconscious ( Bost, 1993) is a notable exception. 2 It is interesting that Rosalind Krauss has recently brought them into proximity--if not direct alliance--under the banner of The Optical Unconscious (see n. 1 above). 3 La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 8 ( Dec. 1926),