About the book

This monograph proposes that *Morée*—a painting long hidden from view—functions as the missing keystone in a conceptual system Duchamp began in 1912 and completed with *Étant donnés*.

The study argues that:

– The pearls in *Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2* were a crucial feminizing symbol, widely misread as mechanical “motion rings.”
– Around 1915, Duchamp responded to this misreading by painting *Morée*, staging the pearls as a sacrificial subject in a “waterfalling” field, and embedding a punning title meaning “she who has died.”

Morée: mor – from Latin mors, mortis: death.
ée, a feminizing suffix in French: “she who”
Together: “she who has died”.

– Motifs from *Morée* appear to echo in works from Duchamp’s New York circle, including the black photographic border around Nude Descending a Staircase No. 3, the drips in Francis Picabia’s “Mistinguett”, and described literally in Walter Arensberg’s poem “Theorem” from the second issue of Duchamp’s The Blind Man.

– The title *Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage* gains new clarity when read through *Morée*: the “waterfall” aligns with the painting’s atmospheric backdrop, and the “illuminating gas” highlighting the nude or “she who has died” the literal figure holding the gas lamp in *Étant donnés*.

Taken together, the book suggests that Duchamp constructed a two-part structure spanning fifty years:

1. **Morée (1915)** — a private burial of the 1912 *Nude*
2. **Étant donnés (1946–66)** — a delayed revelation of her identity as the Nude or “she who has died” as suggested when viewed through Morée.

If this framework is correct, *Morée* sits at the conceptual origin of Duchamp’s late work and requires a rethinking of early New York Dada.