Box in Valise

http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/318/w500h420/CRI_1318.jpg

Box in a Valise is portable museum of Duchamp’s works, reproduced in miniature, packed in a customized collabsible case, like a salesman’s valise. It debuted in a deluxe edition of twenty copies in 1940.

Duchamp must have been concerned for his legacy. In 1934 he learned that The Large Glass had been shattered (he would repair it in 1936). More than half the readymades were lost. The 3 Standard Stoppages had been misplaced. Box in a Valise is a mini-museum, a resumé of Duchamp’s life in art, created with painstaking care in the face of a vanishing material legacy.