T'um

Executed in 1918, T'um is Marcel Duchamp’s last painting on canvas.

 text from Yale University art gallery -
“Tu m’ was commissioned by artist, collector, and educator Katherine Dreier to be hung over a bookcase in her library, hence the unusual length and frieze-like shape of the work…
The title lends a sarcastic tone to the work, for the words, perhaps short for the French “tu m’emmerdes” (you annoy me) or “tu m’ennuies” (you bore me), seem to express his attitude toward painting as he was casting it aside”.


T’um is Duchamp’s critique of painting but its elements are presented in a linear manner, using images as words. The format of the painting is akin to Monet’s Nympheas in the Jeu de Pomme in Paris, but unlike Monet, Duchamp requires one to “read” the picture from left to right ,as one would read the library books stored below. It does not permit the act of holistic, delocalised perception with which we see the world (and Monet’s Nympheas) and subsequently acquire understanding; T'um has to be read, not ‘seen’.

There is venom in the work - the title “I’m bored with..” expresses Duchamp's denial of paintings meaning and purpose beyond the utility of depiction. He relegates the three major representational elements of the work to be shadows and the painting to be their backdrop. Casting the shadows are his own three dimensional readymades, existing outside the picture, in the real world - an implicit disembodying of painting and reducing it to a passive object.
Authorship is also implicitly devalued through the employment of others to paint elements of the work . The cut in the canvas is often read as an ‘intervention’, a revealing act, exposing painting as primarily an object, “breaking the spell’ and consigning the rest to being largely illusionism. However, the cut is a rough jagged zig zag, and is a violent and expressive act of refutation -  admittedly repaired, but with objects (three safety pins)

T’um is not a painting as such - it is a linear list of decontextualised, symbolised elements parodied as tricks and devices, a Cartesian deconstruction of “retinal” painting’s constituent parts or elements, (colour spectrum, occluded space, perspective, shadow, etc.). Beauty is inferred by the elements elegant arrangement, but this is merely laying the table tastefully - another critique/denial of meaning.
It’s akin to the dissembled parts of an automobile laid out before us on a workbench, or, at the end of some kind of micro-autopsy, the dissected parts of a butterfly, but this car will never move and this butterfly will certainly never fly. Before Duchamp's indifferent, elegant ennui, there was an emotional, perhaps bitter separation.