This week’s guest is Paul B. Franklin, an independent scholar and a leading expert on Marcel Duchamp based in Paris and Céret. From 2000 to 2016, Paul was the editor in chief of the annual, bi-lingual scholarly journal Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, one of the most highly regarded publications devoted to the artist and his work. He also worked with Duchamp’s heirs for many years, managing the artist’s estate. Paul earned his doctorate in art history from Harvard University and has subsequently lectured and published widely. Among recent publications are The Artist and His Critic Stripped Bare: The Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel (Getty Research Institute, 2016) and “‘Can one make works that are not works “of art”?’: Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack” in Marcel Duchamp: “Porte-bouteilles” (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2016); in 2018, he curated the exhibition Brancusi & Duchamp: The Art of Dialogue at the Kasmin Gallery in New York, for which he also wrote the catalogue. In 2020, he curated Matisse in Black and White, also at Kasmin. Franklin’s exhibition Please Touch: Marcel Duchamp and the Fetish opened at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London in 2021 and traveled to Paris in 2022. His most recent curatorial project, Marcel Duchamp and the Lure of the Copy, will open in October 2023 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

At the end of this week’s program we’ll hear Margaret Leng Tan play John Cage’s Music for Marcel Duchamp (1947), courtesy of Mode Records (MODE 106, John Cage Volume 25, The Piano Works 4, 2002).

"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!