Back to February 2000 Looking at Art  

On April 18, 1910, in his studio just outside Paris, Marcel Duchamp presented a friend with an unusual gift: a wood toy called a bilboquet. The object consists of a ball, about four inches in diameter, with a hole in it. The ball is attached to a stick by a string (missing in the example shown here) and is intended to be used in a game of dexterity in which a player throws the ball into the air and tries to impale it on the stick. The origin of the bilboquet is obscure. It appears for the first time in French 16th-century literature and engraving. The game was especially popular during the time of the French Revolution, possibly because of the invention of the guillotine or, more specifically, the practice of placing severed heads on stakes for pubic display.

Marcel Duchamp, Bilboquet, 1910, wood toy, height 11 3/4 inches.

Etymologically, the term bilboquet seems to derive from the French words bille, meaning a small ball or marble, and bocquet, a lance-head or spear head in a coat of arms. More compelling is its possible origin in the word bouquer, meaning either to chase an animal from its den or to force someone to give a kiss. Some dictionaries suggest that in an earlier usage bouquer implied to shove or thrust. Indeed, as we shall see, it may be this latter meaning that inspired Duchamp to select the object as a gift for his friend.

Duchamp’s friend was the German painter Max Bergmann (1884–1955), who had come to Paris to study art. In addition to sharing artistic interests, the two young bachelors enjoyed the night life of Paris and, on at least one occasion (we know from Bergmann’s diary), spent a memorable evening indulging in the offerings of a fancy bordello on the rue Pigalle in Montmartre. Might it have been the memory of what took place that night that inspired Duchamp to give the bilboquet to his friend as a souvenir of Paris? If so, an erotic reading of the object would be difficult to resist. A single orifice is, of course, a universal symbol for woman, and the stick—particularly when its goal is to be inserted into the hole—is unquestionably phallic.

Whereas the meaning may have been immediately apparent to the two artists, it remains unclear why Duchamp took the liberty of so prominently inscribing the ball on its surface. With a stylus or other sharp instrument, he wrote: “Bilboquet/Souvenir de Paris/A mon ami M. Bergmann/Duchamp printemps 1910.”

To comprehend fully the anomalous implications of this gesture, we need only place ourselves in the position of the two artists. If we were to give a friend such a gift, even after sharing the kind of experiences Duchamp and Bergmann had, would we have defaced the object in this way? If we felt the compulsion to inscribe it, why not do so in a more discreet place, such as the underside of the sphere? What was Duchamp thinking?

Since we know that a few years later he would introduce the concept of the readymade—the simple, commonplace object automatically elevated to the status of art by the artist’s signature—it is difficult not to think of the bilboquet as the first readymade. But such reasoning is challenged by the fact that some three years would pass before Duchamp would make a similar object (Bicycle Wheel, 1913), and it would not be until 1915 that he came up with a term to define these objects. It may have been for these reasons that the bilboquet was intentionally omitted from Arturo Schwarz’s recently revised catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

Apparently, Duchamp wasn’t the first to imply a potentially erotic reading of the bilboquet. The eccentric French author Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), whose writings Duchamp greatly admired, referred to it in one of his novellas, and in his Almanach of 1901—which was illustrated by Pierre Bonnard and Jarry himself—the character Père Ubu is rendered vigorously playing with a bilboquet positioned between his legs (a possible allusion to masturbation, not so farfetched considering that one of the only rules of the game of bilboquet is that it be played by a single player).

Finally, in view of Duchamp’s love for puns, he might have appreciated the wordplay on the term bilboquet found in the poem “Reverie” by the French Surrealist writer Jacques Prévert (1900–1977):

Pauvre joueur de bilboquet
A quoi penses-tu
Je pense aux filles aux mille bouquets
Je pense aux filles aux mille beaux culs.

Poor player of bilboquet
What thoughts are thine
I’m thinking of the girls with a thousand bouquets
I’m thinking of the girls with a thousand cute behinds.

Even if we reject the bilboquet as part of Duchamp’s oeuvre, its affinity with his future work is remarkable. Some have noticed that its overall shape formally resembles the Bicycle Wheel of 1913, but, iconographically, it is even closer to the theme explored in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass, of 1915–23. As in the latter work, the “bride” is given a superior position above her corresponding “bachelor,” and just as nearly everyone who plays with a bilboquet experiences frustration, the bachelors in the Large Glass—try though they may—never succeed in attaining union with the bride above.

It is also compelling to recognize how closely a sphere impaled on a stick resembles the magnified view of an egg being penetrated by a sperm, a biological vision that might have been very much on the minds of these young bachelors. Ironically (and certainly coincidentally), on February 6, 1911—just about nine and a half months after Duchamp presented the bilboquet as a gift to his friend—Jeanne Serre, a young model who had known both artists, gave birth to a little girl. Although she was never officially recognized by Duchamp, this little girl—who would grow up to become an accomplished painter in her own right—was his only child.

Replete with potential meanings, the bilboquet remains one of the most enigmatic objects in Duchamp’s corpus. It is ironic that anything made by the inventor of the readymade could cause us to question its classification as a work of art. Perhaps it represents just one of many possible responses to an intriguing question Duchamp asked himself in 1913: “Peut on faire des oeuvres qui ne soient pas ‘d’art’?” (“Can one make works which are not ‘works of art’?”)

Francis M. Naumann’s most recent book is Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Ludion Press, Ghent/distributed by Harry N. Abrams).

PHOTO CREDIT: COURTESY ACHIM MOELLER FINE ART, LTD