The Hidden Arc of Duchamp’s Career

In 1914-15, Marcel Duchamp wrote a cryptic note:

Étant donnés:
1° la chute d’eau (the waterfall)
2° le gaz d’éclairage (the illuminating gas)

For decades, scholars assumed these words referred to The Large Glass.
The rediscovery of Morée (1915–16) reveals their true meaning.

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1° Waterfall — Morée

The title Morée can be read as “she who has died.”
The painting is a symbolic death scene: a carefully staged composition where earlier forms are dissolved in a waterfall of corrosive drips.

Here, Duchamp takes his first step into conceptual art.
Morée is not merely a painting — it is an encoded statement, announcing the end of his earlier work and the birth of an entirely new approach to art.
It quietly launches the hidden conceptual project that would unfold over the next fifty years.

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2° Illuminating Gas — Étant donnés

Five decades later, Duchamp completed this secret system with his crowning masterpiece, Étant donnés (1946–66).
Inside a sealed chamber, a nude figure lies sprawled on the ground, a gas lamp casting its glow across her body.

By the mid-20th century, such lamps were relics of a bygone era.
Its inclusion deliberately reaches back to 1915 — the moment Duchamp first wrote his cryptic note.
The light’s role is exact and literal:
it illuminates the nude herself, the figure first named but never shown in Morée — “she who has died.”

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The Complete System

Together, the two works reveal the hidden logic of Duchamp’s note:

• 1° Waterfall (Death and Concealment) — Morée, where the figure is symbolically marked as dead and concealed, inaugurating Duchamp’s conceptual art.

• 2° Illuminating Gas (Revelation) — Étant donnés, Duchamp’s final masterpiece, where that hidden figure is finally revealed and literally illuminated.

For over a century, the second half of this riddle was known but not understood.
With Morée rediscovered, the entire arc of Duchamp’s career comes into focus:
a secret, unified project that began before Fountain and concluded only with his death.