With The Great Hidden Inspirer, the fourth volume in the Poiesis series, the renowned Duchamp researcher Michael R. Taylor investigates the role of Duchamp as the “secret mastermind” at decisive moments in art history. In his eponymous essay, “The Great Hidden Inspirer,” Taylor reveals that it was Duchamp who, while in exile in New York between 1942 and 1947, helped Surrealism out of its crisis and gave the movement a new direction.
The volume celebrates the 100th anniversary of what is probably Duchamp’s most provocative stroke of genius, Fountain, and contains another one of Taylor’s essays, “Blind Man’s Bluff,” which describes the backstory of how the urinal shook the art world. The attempts at the time to classify this provocative object are evidence of the difficulties its critics faced at the start of the twentieth century as they sought to free themselves from traditional aesthetic concepts.