Lot Essay
Duchamp considered this his very own 'Portable Museum' - a compendium 'of approximately all the things I produced' which had preoccupied him during much of the 1930s and which he continued to reproduce in a series of differing versions until his death in 1968. Consisting of sixty-eight miniature replicas of his most important works, all painstakingly reproduced and carefully assembled into a briefcase-sized box, La boîte expresses a typically whimsical and Duchampian take on the nature and comparative value of the work of art, the museum and the multiple all rolled into one.