STURTEVANT
1930 Lakewood, OH/USA–2014 Paris

Title: Duchamp Eau & Gaz.
Date: 1970.
Technique: Enamel sign on wooden plate.
Measurement: 19 x 25 x 3 cm.
Notation: During firing monogrammed lower centre: E.S..


Description: This work is a quotation from a work by Marcel Duchamp. Robert Lebel published the catalogue raisonné of Marcel Duchamp's work in 1959, which included the metal sign in the special edition (see Schwarz, Arturo: The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York 1997, cat. rais. no. 560)








Provenance:
- - Michael Neff, Frankfurt a. M. (acquired in 2010)


Exhibition:
- Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London (label)


Literature:
- Maculan, Lena (ed.). Elaine Sturtevant. Catalogue raisonné 1964 - 2004. Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, Cat. rais. no. 324



- Central pioneer of the appropriation art

- Cites a work by Marcel Duchamp and shows the trenchant confrontation with the concpet of originality

- Sturtevant received the Golden Lion for he life's work in Venice; the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a large retrospective to her in 2015



Sturtevant is among the most pioneering and, at the same time, idiosyncratic figures in twentieth-century art. She gained international recognition in the mid-1960s through a radical artistic concept: the repetition of already existing artworks. In her first solo exhibition in 1965 at New York’s Bianchini Gallery, she presented works based on iconic motifs by her contemporaries, ranging from Andy Warhol’s flowers and Jasper Johns’ flags to Claes Oldenburg’s garments. Sturtevant did not reproduce these works in order to copy them, but rather to retrace the creative process of their making. Her interest lay in the question of how art is perceived and what confers value upon it. Through re-creation, she examined the structure, meaning, and impact of artworks within an altered temporal context. In doing so, she granted images a new life and opened up new interpretive possibilities. Sturtevant challenged fundamental assumptions of modernism, particularly the notion of originality as the decisive criterion of artistic creation. By recreating familiar works, she provoked disruption within both the art world and the viewer. Familiar images suddenly appeared strange: certainties surrounding authorship, uniqueness, and value were destabilized. Her art deliberately generated confusion about things presumed certain and disrupted established patterns of perception. At the same time, she did not obscure the origin of her source material but instead made it explicitly visible: her titles always included the name of the artist whose work she was revisiting.

In the 1960s, Sturtevant appeared ahead of her time and was met primarily with sharp criticism and incomprehension. As a result, she withdrew entirely from the art world in 1974, only to resume her practice in 1986 precisely where she had left off. Today, she is regarded as a central pioneer of Appropriation Art, although she clearly distanced herself from that label. By 2011 at the latest, when she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, she attained the broad recognition long denied to her.

The work presented here, Duchamp Eau & Gaz (1970), stands as an exemplary instance of Sturtevant’s engagement with the art of Marcel Duchamp, whose works she had been revisiting since 1967. The enamel sign mounted on a wooden panel resembles Duchamp’s Eau et Gaz à tous les étages (“Water and Gas on All Floors”), originally created in 1959 for the special edition of his catalogue raisonné edited by Robert Lebel. The sign, featuring white lettering on a dark blue background, was a common sight in Parisian apartment buildings at the beginning of the twentieth century and, in the spirit of Duchamp’s readymades, transfers an everyday element of urban culture into the context of art. Yet subtle modifications distinguish the present work from its source: while Duchamp’s original is mounted on a box, Sturtevant places hers on a wooden panel. The monogram remains in the same position, at the lower right, but changes from “M.D.” to “E.S.,” leaving no doubt as to authorship.

By reintroducing this motif eleven years later, Sturtevant opens the discourse to a new interpretation. The work becomes not merely a recollection of Duchamp’s gesture, but also a reflection on the reception of art itself. Conceptually, Sturtevant stands within Duchamp’s tradition. He is considered one of the first artists to radically question what art can be and what defines it. Through his readymades, he detached the artistic act from manual craftsmanship. What unites the two is their questioning of established conventions and their dismantling of fixed categories of originality and authorship.

Duchamp Eau & Gaz thus becomes more than a mere repetition of an art-historical object. It is a dialogue between two artistic positions that fundamentally unsettled the conventions of the art world. In recent years, moreover, Sturtevant’s engagement with the concept of originality has gained renewed urgency and relevance through the growing societal importance of social media and artificial intelligence. Few artists compel us as forcefully to question entrenched ways of thinking, thereby opening up a new perspective on both the history and the present of art.



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