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# In Marcel Duchamp's last work, Étant donnés, made in secret between 1946 and 1966, a naked woman lies sprawled in a field
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-poslednei-rabote-marselia-diushana-etant-donnes-kotoruiu-on-delal-taino-s-1946-po-1966-god-obnazhionnaia-zhenshchina-lezhit-rasprostiortoi-v-pole/
- Published: 2026-08-25T06:42:30.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:20.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Books, Mores, New York

In Marcel Duchamp's last work, Étant donnés, made in secret between 1946 and 1966, a naked woman lies sprawled in a field. According to Francis Naumann, the leading Duchamp specialist, the figure was modelled on the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins.

In his book published in 2026, Impossible: The Love Affair Between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins, and the Artwork It Inspired, Naumann draws a straight line from the little-known liaison of the two artists to Duchamp's masterpiece and maintains that it was Martins who gave the impetus to the last two decades of his work.

The title of the book is borrowed from Martins herself: her bronze sculpture of 1946, The Impossible, depicts two figures with sharp thorns, straining towards one another. Naumann compares it to a relationship in which the attraction was strong and the circumstances insurmountable.

Martins and Duchamp met in New York in 1943, probably at Martins's second solo exhibition at the Valentine gallery. Duchamp was fifty-six, long resident in France and America as an acknowledged artist and chess player. Martins was forty-nine, with studios in New York and Washington, and was married to the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, having no intention of divorcing him.

The affair lasted some eight years. Naumann writes that Martins was the centre of Duchamp's emotional life and remained the principal subject of his creative work for roughly twenty years, even after she had left for Paris and then for São Paulo. Through drawings, letters and gifts, the author reconstructs an exchange that proved useful to both, but above all to Duchamp. In his version, Étant donnés grew not only out of the drawings of the naked Martins but also out of his interest in her own works, in particular the bronze Huitième voile of 1948 and the lost piece of 1945, Je crus avoir longuement rêvé que j'étais libre, in which female figures are placed in poses close to those that would appear in Duchamp.

In essence, the book supplies important information about Martins's works, but the portrait of her that emerges is ambiguous. The author calls Martins by her first name and Duchamp by his surname, and the inequality is fixed already at the level of nomenclature. Further on, Naumann declares her one of the most significant and accomplished Surrealist sculptors of her generation, and in the same breath calls her a classic femme fatale, a seductress prepared to do anything to make a man fall in love with her. He returns constantly to her appearance and goes so far as to suggest that she probably treated love as a wild and untamed event, luring men like a Venus flytrap devouring its prey

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