Less Is More

From medieval Wunderkammern to

portable museums, Duchamp’s suitcases,
and dolls’ houses, the miniature
is an enduring and radical art form

by Erik Morse

68 69

Opposite: Cabinet of curios from the 16th and 17th centuries,
arranged according to historical record. Courtesy: Kunstkammer
Georg Laue, Munich and London
‘Everything important that I have done can be
put into a little suitcase.’
Marcel Duchamp, 1952
On New Year’s Day in 1941, the French
conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp distributed
a one-page bulletin to his patrons and collectors
announcing an upcoming project cryptically
titled de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy
(From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy).
Purported to be an archive of reproductions
spanning 27 years of the artist’s work, the card-
board box of pull-outs came in several versions,
including a deluxe edition of 20, covered in
leather with a handle. This unusual box could
be ordered via the form’s attached coupon and
delivered upon the work’s completion for the
cost of 4,000 francs (reduced temporarily from
5,000). Known only to his close friends, family
and select collectors, the project had consumed
much of Duchamp’s attention since 1935 and
prompted his travels as far afield as California,
Cleveland and Connecticut to document in
detail many of his archived works. His choice
to use handcraft in its execution – including
the time-consuming processes of phototyping,
watercolouring and engraving, as well as pochoir
(a stencilling method) for the replicas in plastic
– confused the status between original artworks
and their reproductions.
The resulting Boîte (box) – often referred to by
its first edition name Boîte-en-valise (Box in
a Valise, 1935–41) – contains nearly 70 miniatures
of the artist’s paintings, sketches, readymades,
‘delays in glass’ and assemblages in an organized
plexus of compartments and folders. Playing
on the dual connotations of ‘souvenir’ as both
a remembrance and a tourist trinket, the Boîte
is an example of a travelling Wunderkabinette and
retrospective readymade, and is also Modern
art’s first instance of a portable museum.
From its emergence in the high medieval
period, the Wunderkammer (a ‘chamber
of curiosities’) traded on the magic appeal of
small objects and ephemera housed as elabo-
rate, private exhibitions. Beginning as closets
but often expanding into vast rooms, these
proto-scientific assemblages of exotica, relics
and grotesqueries – from human body parts
to automata – served as symbols of wealth for
aristocratic collectors and, in their freak show
variant, a public amusement for plebeians. Their
popularity amongst both classes highlights what
medieval historian Bengt Ankarloo describes
as the ‘political purpose’ of esoteric wisdoms.
‘Marvels and secrets became the currency of
courtly science,’ he writes. ‘Natural magic helped
to promote the keen interest in the setting
up of Wunderkammern that typified courtly and
aristocratic notions of power and knowledge

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in this period.’1 The most celebrated European
Wunderkammer of the pre-Enlightenment era
belonged to the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand II,
the Danish physician Olaus Wormius and the
Bolognese aristocrat Ferdinando Cospi.
With the rise of the bourgeois merchant, the
cosmologies constructed inside the aristocrat’s
vast Wunderkammern were condensed into the
collector hobbyist’s Kabinette (cabinets or curio
shelves), perspective boxes and dolls’ houses.
An industrial rather than a feudal phenomenon,
these collections signalled the decorative and
imperial desires represented in the home as
a space both of dwelling and mercantile fantasy.
70 Appealing to the architectural constrictions of
middle-class interiors, they simulated virtual
environments beyond their modest sizes through
baroque tricks of miniaturization, trompe l’oeil
and diorama. Equally as significant were the
demographics of ownership of these precious
objects. Beginning as a male-dominated craft
that emphasized wealth and status, such cabinets
only subsequently became the province of
women and children, reflecting a changing
domestic order. Dolls’ houses and other ‘toy
boxes’ were soon transformed into pedagogical
tools for imparting gender roles and social
mores to children as part of the larger evolution
of modern discourses on adolescence and
tactile education.
Despite these disparities, the lure of the scale
miniature’s architecture remains founded in
universal desires, according to medieval scholar
Sarah L. Higley. Quoting Gaston Bachelard’s
La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space,
1957), she locates the miniature’s appeal in
a threefold quality: ‘That it is possessible, that it
is utopic and that its distortion of size “stimulates
profound values”, as Bachelard puts it:
“The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world,
the better I possess it.”’2
The deployment of miniatures in Modern art
was by no means exclusive to Duchamp. Of his
many New York artist-friends and collaborators,
both Joseph Cornell and the lesser-regarded
Carrie Stettheimer laboured almost exclusively
in the medium of miniature. Stettheimer’s
extravagant 12-room Doll House (1916–35), her
only public work, memorializes two decades
of the salon of avant-garde artists and writers –
of which Duchamp was a central member – held
by the Stettheimer sisters (including painter
Florine and writer Ettie). An autodidact and
perceived as the least ‘intellectual’ of the
Stettheimers, Carrie channelled her taciturn
demeanour into the domestic arts – party
hosting, decorative design and cooking – and
reflected the ostensible delicacy (i.e. ‘femininity’)
and mundanity linked with dolls’ houses of
the Victorian era. But her Doll House’s intricate
Neo-Classical exterior and Baroque interior of
salons, libraries and art galleries, was far from
the previous century’s typically dowdy plaything.
Duchamp’s own contribution to the Doll House
was an eight-centimetre pencil sketch of Nu
descendant un escalier no. 2 (Nude Descending
a Staircase, No. 2, 1912), executed in 1918
as a gift for Stettheimer, who installed it in the
doll house’s gallery alongside pieces from other
New York friends.
While Stettheimer’s work embodied
a transitional feminist aesthetic at the century’s
beginning, Colleen Moore’s 12-room Fairy
Castle (1928–35) drew upon the influences of
Hollywood’s modern cinematic imaginary,
particularly its increasingly lavish use of set
design and the rise of the female star. Moore,
who was herself a movie star and helped to
popularize the ‘flapper’ style with films such
as Flaming Youth (1923), commissioned her
castle with a fantastical, Gothic architecture –
as interpreted by industry art designers and
craftsmen – the results of which resembled
a Hollywood scenography of medieval
Romanticism. Unlike works by Cornell,
Duchamp or Stettheimer, Moore did not
personally fabricate or design any of the
structure or decor in the Fairy Castle, but acted
purely as curator or producer of the project.
However, like Duchamp, Moore attributed
a hermeneutics of the object to archival and
literary narratives – both the classic fairy tales
retold in the decorative motifs of each room
and in the companion publication, Colleen
Moore’s Doll House (1935) – a book that, like
Duchamp’s accompanying text boxes, was
intended to guide the viewer through the visual
experience of the artwork.
Miniatures
That both Moore’s and Stettheimer’s dolls’
houses are now exhibited in non-‘artistic’ venues
(the former in Chicago’s Museum of Science and
Industry, the latter in the Museum of the City
of New York) highlights the issue of institutional
representation and gender in miniature
works. In the instance of the Fairy Castle, this
is further complicated by its initial exhibition
via children’s charity tours and its subsequent
merchandizing through the celebrity persona
of Moore. This early evidence of a ‘paracinematic
culture’ – those film-related works that celebrate
popular or vernacular genres outside of the
‘film-as-art’ model – was an anathema to the
Carrie Stettheimer’s 12-room Doll House appreciators of fine art and relegated the house
to the subaltern status of ‘craft’.3 Similarly,
(1916–35) memorializes two decades Cornell – who had begun to produce his glass-
fronted boxes of found objects in the 1930s, in
of the salon of avant-garde artists and part due to Duchamp’s concept of the ready-
made (he would assist him in the final assembly
writers, of which Marcel Duchamp was of the initial ‘Boîtes’ series in 1942) – was
a self-taught craftsman who found grist for his
a central member.
work in Hollywood iconography and domestic
mundanity. In boxes such as Object (Roses des
Vents) (Object, Rose of the Winds, 1942–53)
and Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren
Bacall) (c.1944–46), Cornell invoked the form
of the Wunderkammer while exploring themes
of astrology and the fairy tale. The European
Surrealists and dealer/collectors – including
Peggy Guggenheim and Julien Levy – valorized
his boxes and collages, which endowed him
with institutional carte blanche. His work was
included in exhibitions at New York’s Museum
of Modern Art as early as 1936.
While gender was likely one cause for the
discrepant evaluation of the artists’ works as
either ‘vernacular’ or ‘fine’ art – or, respectively,
female and male art – this nonetheless fails fully
to explain how the miniature came to be inter-
preted by arts criticism in the early 20th century. 71
In many Modernist readings of Duchamp’s
and Cornell’s works, the miniature was seen to
This page: Marcel Duchamp Boîte-en-valise (Box
in a Valise) 1942–54. Cardboard and wooden box containing
replicas and reproductions of works by Duchamp, closed
8 × 35 × 40 cm, open 36 × 140 × 8 cm. Courtesy: National Gallery
of Australia, Canberra, and the Association of Marcel Duchamp /
ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 2017. Opposite: Carrie Walter
Stettheimer Stettheimer Doll House (front view) c.1916–35.
Wood, bronze, marble, alabaster, gilding, cardboard, paper, foil,
linen, ceramic, oil, ink, watercolour, gouache, graphite, Conté,
pastel, coloured pencil and other materials, 79 × 132 × 94 cm
Courtesy: Museum of the City of New York
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72
function according to its uncanny compression
of ‘lived’ space which rendered to the viewer an
experience of travel in the palm of your hand.
(‘Perhaps I had the spirit of expatriation, if that’s
a word,’ Duchamp said of his status as an exile
in a 1961 interview. ‘It was a part of a possibility
of my going out in the traditional sense of the
word: that is to say from my birth, my childhood,
from my habits, my totally French fabrication.’4)
Like their kitschy descendant, the souvenir
trinket, these boxes invoke a microcosmic land-
scape that could be possessed and traversed like
a kind of traveller’s map. Both artists’ implicit
emphasis on a tourist sensibility was championed
by the 20th-century avant-garde for extolling
the modern experiences of travel and displace-
ment in anticipation of both globalism and
Postmodernity’s free circulations of the sign
– or what T.J. Demos describes in The Exiles
of Marcel Duchamp (2007) as an ‘aesthetics
of homelessness’.
By contrast, Stettheimer’s and Moore’s
dolls’ houses retained an emphasis on domestic
space as a site of self-expression and ontological
rootedness to place, with their interior objects’
73
This page: Mrs James Ward Thorne A31: Tennessee Entrance
attendant associations of maternity and Hall, 1835 c.1940. Miniature room, mixed media, 36 × 37 × 77
femininity. Even the prolonged and laborious cm. Courtesy: the Art Institute of Chicago. Opposite: Mrs James
process of the dolls’ houses’ constructions Ward Thorne E-1: English Great Room of the Late Tudor Period,
1550–1603 c.1937. Miniature room, mixed media, 58 × 63 × 80
and disassembly prevented their literal status cm. Courtesy: the Art Institute of Chicago
as travel objects. According to the art critic
Christopher Reed, these works breached the
20th-century edict that ‘the home [was] posi-
tioned as the antipode to high art’. He explains:
As its military-derived name suggests,
the avant-garde (literally ‘advance
guard’) imagined itself away from home,
Artists such as Louise Nevelson and
marching toward glory on the battlefields
of culture […] Ultimately, in the eyes of
Mrs James Ward Thorne made use
the avant-garde, being undomestic came to
serve as a guarantee of being art.5 of miniature objects and Wunderkabinett-
Other artists such as Louise Nevelson and inspired assemblages to explore themes
Mrs James Ward Thorne, née Narcissa Niblack,
made use of miniature objects and Wunder­ of environments and interiority.
kabinett-inspired assemblages to explore similar
themes of environments and interiority. In
her seminal ‘crate’ works, Moon Garden Plus
One (1958) and Sky Cathedral (1958), Nevelson,
inspired in part by Duchamp, trades between
Miniatures Frieze Masters  2017
 1 5

following Modern art’s theatrical turn toward
installation, happenings and scenography
in the postwar era. These artists include Mike
Kelley, Edward Kienholz, Marnie Weber,
Rachel Whiteread and even Duchamp himself
Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart
Clark (eds), Witchcraft and
Magic in Europe: The Period
of the Witch Trials, vol. 4,
University of Pennsylvania
Press, Philadelphia, 2002,
pp. 169
Christopher Reed (ed.), Not at
Home: The Suppression
of Domesticity in Modern Art
and Architecture, Thames and
Hudson, New York, 1996, p. 7
6

Elyse Deeb Speaks,

with late-period works such as Étant donnés 2 ‘Experiencing Louise
(1946–66). The veneration of miniaturists Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Nevelson’s Moon Garden’,
among art critics, historians and theorists has of Space, cited in Sarah L.
Higley, ‘A Taste for Shrinking:
American Art, 21/2, 2007,
pp. 96–108

ensured the popularity of domestic scenography Movie Miniatures and the
by contemporary female artists such as Samara Unreal City’, Camera Obscura, 7

Hilton Kramer, ‘The Sculpture

3/16, 2001, pp. 1–35
Golden, Abigail Goldman and Hanne Tyrmi, of Louise Nevelson’, Arts
Digest, June, 1958, pp. 26–29
who actively explore the potential of domestic 3

Amelie Hastie, ‘History in

spaces outside of the narrow confines of identity Miniature: Colleen Moore’s
politics. Impacted by virtual communications Dollhouse and Historical
Recollection’, Camera Obscura,
and neo-liberal economy, the miniature has 3/16, 2001, pp. 113–157
taken on new themes of corporality, crime and 4

labour politics in these artists’ works. In the 500 Jennifer Gough-Cooper

and Jacques Caumont,
years since the invention of the Wunderkammer, ‘Ephemerides on and about
the persistent use of the miniature in forms of art Marcel Duchamp and Rrose
Sélavy 1887–1968’ in Marcel
continues to prove its iconic and often magical Duchamp: Work and Life,
role in an ongoing poetics of space. cited in Marcus Moore,
‘Marcel Duchamp: “Twisting
Memory for the Fun of It”
or a Form of Retroactive
Interference? – Recalling the
Impacts of Leaving Home
Erik Morse is the author of Dreamweapon (2004) on the Readymade’, Memory
and Bluff City Underground: A Roman Noir Connection, 1/1, 2011, p. 398

of the Deep South (2012). He is a former lecturer

at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, USA, and the 2015
recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol
Foundation Arts Writers grant.

From its emergence in the high medieval
period, the Wunderkammer traded
74 on the magic appeal of small objects.
colossal dimensions and miniature detail
to achieve ‘the sensory and the magical […]
The concept of “spatial belonging”, a medieval
worldview that saw the conjoinment of person
and world as unbroken, unreflective and
unmediated.’6 But contemporary critics were 75
often stymied by the conceptual language
Nevelson employed to describe these elusive,
domestic spheres and resorted to designations
such as ‘sculptures’, ‘enclosures’ and ‘protru-
sions’.7 A foil of sorts to the artist’s hypertrophic
environments, Thorne’s ‘Miniature Rooms’
(1932–40), comprise nearly 100 individual
boxes of perfectly scaled renderings of 17th- to
20th-century domestic tableaux with detailed
period furnishings, from E-1: English Great
Room of the Late Tudor Period, 1550–1603 (c.1937)
to A37: California Hallway, c.1940 (1940). Like
Stettheimer and Moore, Thorne was a self-taught
haute bourgeois with a longstanding passion for
miniatures, who co-ordinated and financed the
ambitious series with her own fortune. Perhaps
because of the extreme attention Thorne paid
to their authenticity and craft, the ‘Miniature
Rooms’ are interpreted less through a lens of
‘fine’ art but rather as pedagogical or historical
models of design. Despite their inclusion in
the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Thorne’s works continue to languish under the
dubious rubric of domestic arts.
Subsequent artists whose use of miniatures
and miniaturized spaces portrayed themes of
domesticity have often faired more successfully

This page above: Marnie Weber The Forever Room 2002.

From ‘The Dollhouse Series’, 2002. Collage on photograph,
87 × 155 cm. Courtesy: the artist, Simon Lee Gallery, London,
and Gavlak, Los Angeles. This page below: Joseph Cornell
Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall), c.1945–46,
Wood, glass, paint, tinted glass, mirror, foil paper, string, thread
and printed paper collage © The Joseph and Robert Cornell
Memorial Foundation/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2017.
© 2014 Christie’s Images Limited. Opposite page: Colleen Moore
Fairy Castle 1928–35. Aluminium, plaster, copper, bronze tin,
leather, silver, gilding, mother-of-pearl, glass and other materials.
2.6 × 2.5 × 2.3 m. Courtesy: Museum of Science and Industry,
Chicago; photograph: J.B. Spector

Miniatures Frieze Masters  2017