Last year the poet Tess Taylor began having long discussions with Marcel Duchamp.
Taylor had been spending her days immersed in letters the artist wrote to his close friend, fellow artist Man Ray. As she sifted through the thick correspondence, she became more and more preoccupied with Duchamp and the details of his life as he discussed the imminent death of his partner, the artist Mary Reynolds—a resistance fighter during World War II—his travel plans, and the high price of leather.
Taylor reports that during her imagined chats and arguments with Duchamp, he could be both sexist (after all, he once said maternal energy is antithetical to the creation of art) and generous (he helped Frida Kahlo arrange a show in Paris). “What if art was procreative?” Taylor remembers asking him. “What if we thought of the artist as a gardener, or a mother, a steward of life?”
The glimpse of a gruff, travel-worn Duchamp inaugurates the second season of Getty’s Recording Artists podcast, which features unique archival materials from the Getty Research Institute (GRI). Spanning the end of World War II to the civil rights movement and the explosion of feminism in the early 1970s, each episode in the series’ second season, called Intimate Addresses, focuses on one letter from an artist’s life. The series features letters by Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, and M. C. Richards. These letters are read by Pulitzer Prize–nominated actor and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, known for her roles on television shows like The West Wing as well as for her one-person plays, in which she embodies multiple characters inspired by real-life interviews. In the series, Taylor, alongside guest artists, critics, and scholars, probes the private lives of the artists, their work, and the historical and social forces that shaped them.
“We obviously wanted to tell the story of 20th-century art through these letters,” says Taylor, “but we also wanted to capture artists in these moments in their ordinary lives, in the backstage of making art as they were falling in love, asking for money, or working through pain.”
Looking into the Inner Worlds of Artists
The podcast was an ideal project for Taylor, whose poetry often draws from archival sources. In her poetry collection, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Taylor collaged fragments from the notebooks of photographer Dorothea Lange to tell the story of California during the Great Depression. And as a poetry critic for NPR’s All Things Considered and a trained classical singer, Taylor already loved the idea of reaching people through the intimacy of the human voice. When Getty approached her to host Intimate Addresses, she enthusiastically agreed and began her deep dive into the archive at the GRI.
Sorting through an archive is always part eavesdropping and part looking at a rough draft of history, with unordered events that haven’t yet been organized into a narrative. Its beauty, as Taylor says in one episode, is its “web of strange fragments, lost voices, old postage stamps.” We see the uneven lines of cursive, the smudges, bleeds, and cross-outs; feel the paper’s grain and heft. We hold the physical traces of a life, if only in pieces.
In the letters, the poet and potter M. C. Richards describes her lover’s eyes like “black blood sausage,” and video artist Nam June Paik jokes about the growing colony of roaches in his New York apartment. Frida Kahlo, on straw-yellow stationery, complains about her cast-iron corset, and Fluxus artist and composer Benjamin Patterson announces the birth of his son in Paris. “You have the elements surrounding an artist’s life in front of you, and it feels a little bit like being in your grandmother’s attic,” says Taylor. “If you spend time with those different artifacts, you get a sense, almost like an aroma, of the time and context in which people are working.” Instead of figures entombed in history books, they are human beings amid the familiar chaos of living.
If an archive is a puzzle—a motley assortment of old letters, memos, sketches, photographs, and diary entries, among other things—then there are many ways of piecing these fragments together. “It was exciting seeing people from an angle that you’ve never seen before,” says Taylor. She found that, for instance, she learned a drastically different story about Duchamp than the one taught in her college art history classes. While he is infamous for placing a porcelain urinal inside a gallery, Taylor began to see him primarily as a box maker, obsessively creating suitcases—which would become series like Bôite-en-valise—as he fled the Nazis. In the wake of destruction, Duchamp created his own archive: a leather suitcase carrying miniature replicas of nearly everything he’d made before life as he knew it exploded.
A Fresh Look at the Process of Making
The letters also provided the material to rewrite the usual stories told about art. “The archive is a place where you can shift the story of what’s important about a life, or whose life is important, or whose story is important,” says Taylor. She had never heard of a few of the artists. Patterson, for example, struggling against racial barriers, had dropped out of the art world for many years. And Richards, part of the famed experimental art school Black Mountain College, was long overshadowed by male members like John Cage. “Finding these artists in the archive was like finding a new art ancestor, and it was incredibly nourishing to fill in the story of people who might have otherwise been left out,” she says.
In the process of researching, writing, and recording the six episodes, Taylor experienced what it meant to craft a life around creativity, in all its precarity and joy. With each of her subjects, she found a new and exciting way to pursue a life as an artist. “I felt like I got six different role models out of it in terms of their wisdom, their strategies, their stamina,” she says. “You see the through-line of ‘makerly’ lives. All of us that are makers in any way, we sit down to blank canvases and blank pages and blank screens and try to get our work into the world.”
Part of the value of these old letters was witnessing the beginnings of artworks before they grew into the well-known pieces found in museums today, the seeds of ideas. “Seeing that can be so powerful because it helps you see your own doodles and drafts a little bit differently—that they have this kind of unfinished potential to them,” Taylor says.
Building a Global Creative Community
By the end of the project, the experience for Taylor felt like reading a linked novella, with the different artists’ stories overlapping over the years and across the world to form a vast, interconnected network—with Duchamp at the center. “All the artists were having a conversation with him in some way or another,” she says. “I was imagining it almost like a Netflix series, like ‘Lights up on 1956!’” she says. “‘Lights up on 1963,’ now we’re in New York City. ‘Lights up on 1975,’ suddenly we’re in Switzerland.” The references to common places, events, or people came into focus, each letter dotted with small clues, and the form of the past—rippling, concordant, kaleidoscopic—began to take shape. “This was a project about archives, and yet Duchamp saw the archive as a kind of art that you combine in different ways. And then I saw the other artists recombining him in different ways.”
To these artists’ voices, Taylor adds her own, combining and recombining. We also hear the voices of contemporary artists and scholars, reflecting on the meaning of these artists’ work, their lives and motivations. We hear Smith’s voice as she animates the decades-old correspondence, and, of course, the voices of the artists themselves. “All of these voices converge to imagine this moment or this person and what’s at stake,” says Taylor. Although our knowledge of the past will always be incomplete—some of its mystery dissolved, but not all—this chorus of voices, the endless conversation, brings it a little closer.
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