In Marcel Duchamp’s cryptic final work, a nude woman lies stretched out in a field. Francis M. Naumann argues that the figure in Étant donnés (1946–66) is modeled on Maria Martins, the Brazilian sculptor who was Duchamp’s model and first true love. In Impossible: The Love Affair Between Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins, and the Artwork It Inspired (2026), the historian draws a direct connection between the artists’ obscure relationship and Duchamp’s shadowy masterwork, contending that Martins shaped his last two decades of artistic production.
The book borrows its title from Martins’s striking 1946 bronze sculpture. In that work, two figures fitted with sharp, pointed barbs move toward one another. Naumann reads that tension as a reflection of the fraught bond between Martins and Duchamp, who were powerfully drawn together but ultimately divided by circumstance. The pair met in New York City in 1943, likely at Martins’s second solo exhibition at Valentine Gallery. At the time, Duchamp was 56, a French expat and celebrated artist and chess player, while Martins was 49 and emerging as a major sculptor with studios in New York and Washington, DC. She was also married to the Brazilian ambassador to the United States and had no intention of divorcing.
Even so, the meeting became decisive. Over the course of their roughly eight-year affair, Martins was “the center of [Duchamp’s] emotional life,” Naumann writes, and “the main focus of his creative activities … for some twenty years to come,” even after she later relocated to Paris and then São Paolo. Using sketches, artworks, letters, and gifts, the author uncovers an unexpected exchange that enriched both artists, though especially Duchamp. He suggests that Étant donnés was shaped not only by Duchamp’s drawings of Martins posed nude, but also by his response to her own bold art.
Among the works Naumann cites are Martins’s 1948 bronze sculpture “Huitième voile (Eighth Veil)” and her lost 1945 piece “Je crus avoir longuement rêvé que j’étais libre (I Believed that I Long Dreamed I Was Free),” in which female figures assume a similarly open and erotic pose to the one seen in Duchamp’s later work. The book therefore offers valuable insight into Martins’s artistic practice, but its treatment of her remains uneven. Naumann calls Martins by her first name throughout, while Duchamp is identified by his surname, a choice that subtly reinforces their unequal status.
He also describes Martins as “one of the most important and accomplished Surrealist sculptors of her generation,” yet elsewhere labels her a “classic femme fatale, a seductress who did whatever she needed to get a man to fall in love with her.” Naumann repeatedly dwells on Martins’s looks and even speculates that she “probably treated the act of making love as a wild and uninhibited event, entrapping her men as a Venus fly trap consumes its prey.” Those passages come across as reductive, cartoonish, and frankly bizarre.
