The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 91

A working note of Duchamp's describes his idea for this enigmatic work: "A straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases and creates a new image of the unit of length." Here, three such threads, each fixed to its own canvas with varnish, and each canvas glued to its own glass panel, are enclosed in a box, along with three lengths of wood (draftsman's straightedges) cut into the shapes drawn by the three threads.

Duchamp later said that 3 Standard Stoppages opened the way "to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art," such as what Duchamp called "retinal painting," art designed for the luxuriance of the eye. This required formal intelligence and a skillful hand on the part of the artist. The Stoppages, on the other hand, depended on chance—which, paradoxically, they at the same time fixed and "standardized." (Duchamp used the phrase "canned chance.") Subordinating art both to accident and to something approximating the scientific method (which they simultaneously parodied), 3 Standard Stoppages advanced a conceptual approach, an absurdist strain, and a way of commenting on both art and the broader culture that inspired countless later artists of many different kinds.

Francis M. Naumann, The Mary and William Sisler Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, pp. 168–171

When asked in the early 1960s to name the single most important work he ever made, Duchamp responded: "As far as date is concerned, I'd say the Three Stoppages of 1913." For Duchamp the basic component of this work—the element of chance—was a discovery that, as he put it, "tapped the mainspring of my future." This was the work that "opened the way," he said, "the way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art."(1)

The idea for this work first came to Duchamp in the late summer of 1913, just after he had returned from a brief trip to southern England, where he had spent the month of August at Lynton College in Herne Bay with his sister Yvonne, who went there to prepare for a degree in English. In a note included in The Green Box—labeled "the Idea of the Fabrication"—Duchamp outlined the theoretical foundation for this work: "If a straight thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases and creates a new image of the unit of length."(2)

This was exactly the procedure Duchamp used in the actual execution of this work. Three separate pieces of thread, each exactly one meter in length, held horizontally at the height of one meter, were allowed to drop freely onto the surface of three separate pieces of canvas. Varnish was then dripped onto each thread in order to affix it permanently to the canvas. Once the varnish had set, each canvas was removed from its stretcher and glued to the surface of three separate plates of glass. Wood templates repeating the curves of the threads were then cut, and the entire ensemble was housed in a specially prepared wood box, producing, as Duchamp himself wittingly called it, a box of "canned chance."(3)

When this work entered the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in 1953, Duchamp was asked to fill out a questionnaire providing information on a variety of details pertaining to its construction and conceptualization. In response to a question about the significance of this work, he wrote that it was "part of a reaction against 'retinal painting'...a joke about the meter."(4) Essentially then Duchamp's central aim was to throw into question the accepted authority of the meter, the standard unit of measurement adopted by Europeans and officially established as precisely the distance between two scratches on a platinum-iridium bar housed in a temperature-controlled chamber in the Académie des Sciences just outside of Paris. Duchamp elected to establish the multiple units of measurement; a single division would only establish the guidelines for a new system, with no more claim to authority than the old. In his notes on this project he explained: "3 samples obtained in more or less similar conditions: considered in their relation to one another they are an approximate reconstitution of the unit of length. The three standard stoppages are the meter diminished."(5) That Duchamp chose to create three separate units of measurement is equally significant. "For me the number three is important," he later recalled, "one is unity, two is double, duality, and three is the rest."(6) In other words, as he clarified in the Museum questionnaire, one would be inadequate, two would set up an opposition, but three would result in an effective series.

According to Duchamp, there were no established principles in any discipline that should be blindly accepted as ultimate truth: "Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth," he later remarked. For these very reasons he also refused to rever the doctrinaire principles that form the basis for our concept of scientific truth. "The word 'law' is against my principles," he said. "Every fifty years or so a new 'law' is discovered that changes everything...so I had to give another sort of pseudo explanation."(7) In fact, at the time Duchamp developed these new units of measurement, the notion of fixed line, accepted by mathematicians since the time of Euclid, was being challenged by a number of theoreticians. Duchamp himself explained that the Three Standard Stoppages was intended as "a humorous application of Riemann's post-Euclidean geometry which was devoid of straight lines."(8) Indeed, unaware that Duchamp had identified these sources, both Linda Henderson and Craig Adcock independently traced the origins of this work to sources in the popular writings on non-Euclidean geometry that were published around the turn of the century. Henderson concluded that the Three Standard Stoppages represents "the purest expression of non-Euclidean geometry in early twentieth-century art."(9)

In the questionnaire solicited by the Museum Duchamp identified another important literary source for his Three Standard Stoppages: a book by Max Stirner titled L'Unique et la Propriété.(10) Stirner was the pen name of Kaspar Schmidt, an early nineteenth-century German philosopher whose major work appeared in 1845 under the title Der Einzige und sein Egentum (The Individual and His Property). In this highly influential work Stirner outlined a controversial treatise in defense of philosophic egoism, wherein, based on his observation that all people are beings who possess unique qualities unto themselves, he championed the right of the individual to assume a superior position in society. To this end he rejected all systematic philosophies and launched a bitter attack on his contemporaries, particularly against socialist philosophers such as Marx and Engels. Stirner regarded the state as the supreme enemy of the individual, and he supported its destruction by rebellion rather than revolution, a position that has linked his philosophical beliefs to extistentialism and nihilism (in this light he has been considered a forerunner of Nietzsche); in its most extreme sense, his position against the state has been equated with philosophical anarchism.

Stirner's philosophy experienced a popular revival in the intellectual circles of Paris around the turn of the century; two translations in French appeared one after the other in 1900, followed in 1904 by Victor Basche's L'Individualisme Anarchieste: Max Stirner, still considered a definitive evaluation of Stirner's philosophical doctrine. It was with Stirner's ideas about the supreme rights of the individual fresh in mind, then, that Duchamp conceived the Three Standard Stoppages, a unique system of measurement that was precisely determined by the chance of a given individual, and which was to be utilized exclusively within the framework of his own personal requirements.

Duchamp later explained that the idea for the title of the Three Standard Stoppages came after it had been completed.(11) The inspiration for the word stoppages came from a sign he had seen over a shop on the rue Claude Bernard in Paris. In French stoppage means literally the action of stopping, which in the case of the Parisian shop, would refer to invisible mending, the skillful manipulation of thread in sewing together fabric for the repair of worn clothing.

It is likely that the primary inspiration for Duchamp's amusing or playful manipulation of the rules of physics came from the writings of Alfred Jarry, who originated the "Science of Pataphysics" in the late 1890s. "Pataphysics," according to Jarry, "is the science of imaginary solutions...the science of the realm beyond metaphysics."(12) The basis for this "science" would only have become accessible to Duchamp when it was first published in 1911, several years after the French poet's death and only two years before Duchamp's first experimentation with chance as the basis for the creation of a work of art. In 1952 Duchamp was elected to the rank of "Transcendent Satrap" in the Collège de Pataphysique, and in 1964 he told an audience that the Three Standard Stoppages had cast "a pataphysical doubt on the concept of a straight line as being the shortest route from one point to another."(13)

1. Quoted in Kuh, The Artist's Voice, p. 81.

2. From a note first included in The Box of 1914 and repeated in The Green Box; see Schwarz, Notes and Projects for the Large Glass, p. 150, notes nos. 96, 97.

3. First referred to as such in a note dated 1914 included in The Green Box; see Schwarz, Note and Projects for the Large Glass, p. 152, note no. 99; also see Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 47.

4. Artists' files, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

5. From the note included in The Box of 1914; Schwarz, Notes and Projects for the Large Glass, p. 150, notes nos. 96, 97.

6. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p. 47.

7. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 18, 34.

8. From The Museum of Modern Art questionnaire.

9. Henderson, Fourth Dimension, p. 131–132; and Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes, p. 57.

10. Here Duchamp recalled the title of this book as Le Moi et lat Propriété.

11. From The Museum of Modern Art questionnaire.

12. From Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien, quoted in Shattuck, Banquet Years, p. 187.

13. From the notes for a slide lecture, "Apropos of Myself," delivered at the City Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, on November 24, 1964; quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, pp. 273–74.

Anne D'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973, pp. 273–274

"...This is not a painting. The three narrow strips are called Three Standard Stoppages from the French 3 Stoppages-Etalon.

"They should be seen horizontally instead of vertically because each strip shows a curved line made of sewing thread, one meter long, after it had been dropped from a height of 1 meter, without controlling the distortion of the thread during the fall. The shape thus obtained was fixed onto the canvas by drops of varnish....Three rulers...reproduce the three different shapes obtained by the fall of the thread and can be used to trace those shapes with a pencil on paper.

"This experiment was made in 1913 to imprison and preserve forms obtained through chance, through my chance. At the same time, the unit of length: one meter was changed from a straight line to a curved line without actually losing its identity [as] the meter, and yet casting a pataphysical doubt on the concept of a straight line as being the shortest route from one point to another."