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In retrospect, these mechanical images can be considered among Duchamp’s most important works of these years, for not only are they his first significant departure from the pictorial vocabulary of Cubism, but they are among the earliest examples of his work made in a conscious effort to defy the conventions of taste, the kind of judgmental reactions he sought to avoid.  “He did not want taste to intervene,” a friend from this period recalled years later; let alone any facility of the hand.  “That was anathema to him.”  Duchamp himself later explained that he chose the technique of mechanical drawing because it “upholds no taste, since it is outside all pictorial convention.”  “I wanted things to get on the surface [of] the canvas by themselves,” he said of his paintings of this period, “from my subconscious if possible.”

The Chocolate Grinder was one of several mechanical images that Duchamp incorporated into the composition of his masterwork from these years, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a painting on the surface of two large rectangular plates of glass – one placed directly above the other – more commonly referred to as the Large Glass.  Intricate notes for this work had been in preparation for three years, and several studies were completed in France before Duchamp’s departure, but its actual construction was not begun until shortly after his arrival in New York.  Years later, he explained that the idea for this work came from the games he had seen at country fairs, where, in order to win a prize, contestants throw balls at the figure of a bride and her surrounding retinue.  Although this may have been the initial source of inspiration for its subject, some scholars have chosen to interpret the Large Glass as a more personal and self-referential statement, pointing out, for example, that the French title contains an amalgam of Duchamp’s first name: MAR[iee] (bride)/ CEL[ibataires] (bachelors).

Most who saw these works found them utterly incomprehensible…a critic who had seen both versions of the Chocolate Grinder on display at the Carroll Galleries said that these paintings looked like “two engines for grinding chocolate impeccably drawn and colored as if for a machinery catalogue,” and he went on to question their artistic merit, asserting, “it is not easy to take seriously as ‘Art’ two such mechanical evocations.”

If people found these works difficult to accept as art,we can only imagine what they would have thought of Duchamp’s readymades, commonplace prefabricated objects, isolated from their functional context and, with or without alteration, elevated to the status of art by a mere act of declaration.  Although Duchamp had brought his first readymade into being two years earlier in Paris – when he mounted an inverted bicycle wheel on the seat of an ordinary kitchen stool – it was only after settling in New York that he came up with a name for these unusual artistic creations…Of course, Duchamp knew that the concept of the readymade was not something everyone would be willing to accept, not even those who professed to embrace the most advanced notions of modern art.  If an ordinary object could be declared a work of art, most would have reasoned , then by inference, why couldn’t virtually everything be considered art? – a question that continues to be the main objection for countless critics and historians who still reject the importance of these objects even today.

New York Dada 1915-23
Francis M. Naumann
Harry M. Abrams, Inc., Publishers
1994