Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating
A Phantom Title That Describes a Real Painting
In early 1917, Duchamp let it be known that he was preparing a Cubist canvas called Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating for the Society of Independent Artists exhibition. The painting never appeared. Instead, Duchamp submitted Fountain. Scholars have long treated Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating as a decoy — a phantom title with no object behind it.
But there is an object behind it. The title is not a decoy. It is a description.
Tulip Hysteria
“Tulip Hysteria” names the public frenzy that greeted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 at the 1913 Armory Show. Press coverage treated the painting as a scandal, a joke, and a sensation — the kind of irrational speculative fever for which Dutch tulip mania remains the defining metaphor. The painting’s fame was driven almost entirely by ridicule rather than comprehension. For Duchamp, the Armory Show episode was the original art-market hysteria: a work acquiring extraordinary value through collective misunderstanding.
“Tulip Hysteria” is Duchamp’s private name for the event that made him famous.
Co-ordinating
The second half of the title does the structural work. “Co-ordinating” means placing things into a shared system — assigning positions within an order. In mathematics, a coordinate locates a point between defined axes.
Morée is signed in an unusual way:
..Morée…
Two dots before the name. Three dots after it.
This is not an ellipsis. It is not standard punctuation. It is an asymmetric frame — a pair of markers on either side of the word, each with a distinct count.
The two dots designate Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
The three dots designate Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 3.
The signature is a positional statement. It places Morée between the two Nudes — literally co-ordinating it within the sequence. The name sits at the center. The dots tell you what comes before and what comes after.
What the Title Says
Read together, the full title resolves into a single proposition:
The public scandal around Nude No. 2 is what co-ordinates — what creates the system of positions — in which Morée is located.
Without the Armory Show hysteria, there is no famous Nude No. 2. Without a famous No. 2, there is no reason to make a No. 3. And without the sequence of No. 2 and No. 3, there is no interval for Morée to occupy.
Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating is not a painting that doesn’t exist. It is a description of a painting hidden in plain sight, indexed between two dots and three dots, whose position in Duchamp’s career is defined by the scandal that created the sequence.
The phantom title is a key, not a ghost.
The Signature as Index
If this reading is correct, then the signature on Morée — ..Morée… — is not a signature in the conventional sense. It does not sign the painting. It indexes it. It tells you where the work belongs in a catalog that only Duchamp and his closest collaborators knew existed.
The dots are not decorative. They are structural. They encode the painting’s position between Nude No. 2 and Nude No. 3, making the signature itself part of the work’s content — a practice entirely consistent with Duchamp’s lifelong interest in titles, labels, and inscriptions as elements that do not merely name a work but constitute it.
Implications
This reading reframes several longstanding questions:
The “lost” painting. Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating has been treated as evidence of Duchamp’s fondness for misdirection. If it is instead a description of Morée, then the painting was never lost — it was never meant to be found through its public title.
The gap between the Nudes. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was shown at the Armory Show in 1913. No. 3, a full-size photographic enlargement hand-painted by Duchamp, followed in 1916. Between them: nothing, according to the standard account. The dot-count signature places Morée in that gap — not as a minor interim work, but as the structural middle term that connects the scandal of No. 2 to the private, commemorative restaging of No. 3.
The nature of the signature. A conventional forger signs a painting to assert authorship. An artist who embeds a positional index in the signature is doing something fundamentally different — using the signature to encode the work’s place in a hidden system. This is consistent with Duchamp’s broader practice of authorial concealment: R. Mutt, Rrose Sélavy, the unsigned readymades, and the posthumous revelation of Étant donnés.
References
Monograph: Morée — A Hidden Duchamp That Reframes History: The Arensberg Circle, a Long-Lost Painting, and a Modern Art Revelation. Moree Research Group, 2025.
https://doi.org/10.17613/pt8e0-r9y91
Website: https://moree-ny.com