[Synopsis: Cassandra exerted great appeal on Duchamp as seer of unbelievable oracles. His insistence to call after her the foundation that was to donate Étant donnés to the Philadelphia Museum of Art is most evocative of his agenda’s Homeric undertone.]
Cassandra and her twin brother, Helenus, were among the younger of fifty children of king Priam and queen Hecuba of Troy. According to legend, at their birthday feast, celebrated in the sanctuary of Thymbraeus Apollo, they grew tired of play and fell asleep in a corner, while their forgetful parents, who had drunk too much wine, staggered home without them. Next morning, when they were sober, the parents returned to the temple, and found the sacred serpents licking the children’s ears. At Hecuba’s scream for terror, the serpents at once disappeared into a pile of laurel boughs (Apollodorus 1921:III.49). However, from that moment their ears’ sensors were so purified that they could listen to mystical sounds that exist in nature, such as the voices of animals, and especially of birds. Cassandra had an immediate relation with animals and could speak like a bird, as mentioned in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Aeschylus 1926:1050). Yiannis Melanitis represented the divine operation on her ears, including the one that corresponds to the invisible side of her face, as if the serpents were surgical instruments creating fissures on the fine phosphorescent paper. The legend further claimed that Cassandra was so beautiful that she became object of god Apollo’s desire. She consented to have sex with him on the promise that he would teach her the art of prophecy, but having learnt the prophetic art she broke her promise. Cassandra referred to this affair in Aeschylus, “Oh, but he struggled to win me,
breathing ardent love for me […] I consented to Loxias [Apollo] but broke my word.” (Aeschylus 1926:1206-1208). Apollo was outraged of her rejection, but was unable to take back her prophetic powers. Ultimately, Cassandra agreed to a kiss, as a compromise that she thought would not do any harm. However, Apollo took this opportunity to spit into her mouth, thus cursing her that although she would always tell the truth, no one would ever believe or understand what she said, rendering her prophetic powers worse than useless. “Already I prophesied to my countrymen all their disasters […] Ever since that fault I could persuade no one of aught.” (ib. 1926:1210-1213). Her cursed gift from Apollo became a source of endless pain and frustration. Her family and the Trojan people saw her as a liar and a madwoman. Exceptionally, her proclaiming that the shepherd Paris was her brother was believed (a long time ago an oracle had forced his parents to abandon him in the wilderness, but he was saved by shepherds). This incident took place after Paris sought refuge in the altar of Zeus from his brothers’ wrath over winning the prize of his own bullock, which resulted in his joyful reunion with his family, despite the curse. However, foreseeing Paris’ central role in the destruction of Troy, Cassandra
Yiannis Melanitis (Greece, b. 1967). Cassandra, 2006. Ink on Gmund paper, within plexiglass (100x70). Athens, GR: The American College of Greece - ACG Art.
Edward Burne-Jones (England, 1833-1898). Maria Zambaco as
Cassandra, c. 1867. Sanguine on paper (36x28). London, UK:
tried to kill him, but he was rescued. According to Robert Graves, embarrassed by Cassandra’s criminal intentions and to avoid scandal, Priam built a pyramidal structure upon a tower to confine her (Graves 1955:626). She was accompanied there by the wardress who cared for her under orders to inform the king of all of his daughter’s prophetic utterances. Cassandra truly went mad in her pyramid; she attacked her visitors and tore her clothes and hair and refused to eat. She shrieked well into the night, banging on the door and sobbing. Then she slept for six days. When she was finally released, she asked to become a priestess of Athena. Subsequently, when Paris and Aeneas set off for Sparta to kidnap Helen, Paris’ promised prize, Cassandra, predicted the doom his voyage would cause, and Helenus agreed. They were ignored, though, and Priam refused to pay any attention to either of his prophetic twins in this matter (ib. 1955:635). Cassandra also warned the Trojans about the Greeks hiding inside the Wooden Horse (Aeneid 2006:2.323). She knew her own and her mother’s fate. She prophesied the doom of the Greeks’ nostos (homecoming) – Agamemnon’s death at the hands of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, and their own murder by Orestes, and Odysseus’ ten-year wanderings before returning to his home. She predicted that her cousin Aeneas would escape during the fall of Troy and found a new nation in Rome. However, she was unable to do anything to forestall these tragedies since no one believed her. At the fall of Troy, Cassandra sought shelter in the temple of Athena and there she was clinging so tightly to the Palladium (wooden statue of Athena) in supplication for her protection that the Greek warrior Ajax the Lesser knocked it over from its stand as he dragged her away. As if that was not enough, Ajax brutally raped her inside the temple. Athena was furious at the Greeks’ failure to penalize Ajax for his crimes in her temple, and she gravely punished them with the help of Poseidon and Zeus by sending storms to destroy much of the Greek fleet on their way home from Troy, while ensuring a terrible death for Ajax (Lattimore 1965:4.499-511). Agamemnon then took Cassandra as a concubine to his kingdom in Mycenae. Unbeknown to Agamemnon, while he was away at war, his wife, Clytemnestra, had begun an affair with his cousin, Aegisthus. When Agamemnon returned, the adulterous couple murdered him and Cassandra with a labrys (double-headed axe). Upon her death, Cassandra’s soul was led to the Elysian Fields, as she was judged worthy enough from her dedication to the gods and her religious nature during her life (Westmoreland 2007:179).
One of the best-known representations of Cassandra is the vase decoration attributed to Kleophrades Painter. The theme of the Sack of Troy encircles the vase’s shoulder. A detail focuses on Ajax and the cursed prophetess Cassandra. She kneels next to the
Palladion, the wooden statue of
Athena. She is represented in a seemingly erotic pose, naked, with a cape tied around her shoulders, her legs spread wide open to reveal her groin, and her breasts bare and emphasized by the knot of her cape. One arm is grasping the Palladion, and the other is outstretched directly over Ajax’s genital area in a gesture of supplication rather than beckoning. Ajax has one hand in her hair, and the other hand grasping his outstretched sword, sticking towards Cassandra in an almost phallic stance. Finally, the statue of Athena is facing towards Ajax, her shield and spear drawn as if she were challenging him.
The most evocative modern depiction of Cassandra as a crazy doomsday prophetess is by Edward Burne-Jones. He used as model the Greek beauty Maria Zambaco (1843-1914), who was also his mistress as of 1866, and was recorded to have been “howling like Cassandra” (Oswald and Wahl 1965:685), when in 1869 her lover decided to break with her. Though Duchamp would not be familiar with the relation of Zambaco to Cassandra, her example demonstrates how the Homeric archetype may apply in real life. Cassandra has always been shown in paintings with her long hair tousled in what has been considered lunatic fashion, scantily clad, and helpless in the face of her predicted doom. Shakespeare presented her as a madwoman ranting along the walls of Troy in his play
Troilus and Cressida (1602). However, she was not a madwoman, but rather a tragic heroine who was cursed by
the gods for not playing by their rules.
Kleophrades Painter (Greece, c. 5th BC). Sack of Troy: Cassandra holds on to the
Palladion, beseeching Ajax the Lesser not to harm her, c. 475 BC. Attic red-figured
Her name, Cassandra, has an ambivalent meaning. Graves translated it from Greek to mean “she who entangles men” (Graves 1955:747), which is ironic since, although she was stunningly beautiful, her madness repelled most men and her prophesies foretold their ignorant deaths. An enduring archetype, nowadays ‘Cassandra’ is called someone whose true words are ignored, since her doom was to predict what others refused to believe (Powell 1995:325). Modern invocations of her are most frequently an example of a ‘Cassandra complex,’ a psychological phenomenon in which an individual’s accurate prediction of a crisis is ignored or dismissed. To emphasize such a situation, her name is frequently used in fiction when prophecy comes up, especially true prophecy that is not believed.
Cassandra appeared variously in the Homeric epics – as a promised bride (Lattimore 1951:13.366); a visionary seer (ib. 1951:24.699); and a martyr (Lattimore 1965:11.422). Likewise she featured in both of Joyce’s masterworks – Ulysses (1914-1922) and Finnegans Wake (1922-1939). While the former openly referred to the
Odyssey, Professor Nanos Valaoritis found the latter’s theme, Polemos (Greek for War), to make it associate with
the Iliad (Valaoritis 2015:123). Most relevant of all is the mention of Cassandra in the former’s Nestor episode, which parallels the part in the Odyssey when the young Telemachus goes to seek news of his missing father from Nestor, the aged king of Pylos. Much like Homer satirised Nestor because of his ponderous verbiage, offering Telemachus pointless words, Joyce has his ‘Nestor’ embody everything he is rebelling against – tired clichés and racist comments. After Stephen taught his lesson of history at the Clifton School, he was lectured by the headmaster, Mr Garett Deasy. The highlight was a letter in which Mr Deasy foresaw the spread of foot and mouth disease in Ireland unless the Irish “take the bull by the horns” (Joyce 1934:2.34), by which he meant vaccine therapy. Therein he begged to be “Pardoned a classical allusion [to] Cassandra” (ib. 1934:2.34). Though the idea of Cassandric prophecy was inspired to Joyce by the most devastating outbreak of foot and mouth in Ireland on 30 January 1914, this disease is actually a certain allegory of broader corruption. Ironically, Deasy himself was corrupt since he was portrayed as an anti-Semitic and pro-British Irishman. Being difficult for him to refuse, Stephen agreed to promote Deasy’s letter to his literary friends at the press. The fact of the matter is that Deasy identified with Cassandra emblematising the advent of doom that could be prevented if she was believed. In
Finnegans Wake, Cassandra was clearly implied in the fall of “The house of Atreox” (Joyce 1939:55.3), while her
name was obscurely camouflaged as “Olecasandrum” (ib. 1939:124.36), a pun for old Alexandria, which was a prominent Apostolic see. Warfare made sure to sever the heroic lineage of Atreus and Cassandra, while at the same time preserve their names as reference in post-heroic times.
Unlike Joyce, but in the same spirit of appropriation, Duchamp became obsessed with Cassandra as a kindred spirit, and made it his aim to associate with her enigma. He had been living primarily in New York since William Nelson Copley (1919-1996) – known to his friends as Bill – met him in 1947. Copley, son of a newspaper tycoon who had amassed the publishing empire known as Copley Press, was a frequent visitor to Duchamp’s studio on Fourteenth Street once he returned to New York after his years in France. In 1953 Copley married Noma Rathner (née Norma Ratner) and, while in Chicago in 1954, set up the William & Noma Copley Foundation with funds he inherited from his father, to provide artists with small grants for their creative endeavours. The foundation had a board of contemporary artists, including Duchamp, as an advisory board. Duchamp’s input can be surmised from the names of recipients of the awards, many of whom were his closest friends and family members – Hans Bellmer, Joseph Cornell, Richard Hamilton, Duchamp’s stepson Paul Matisse, and Isabelle Waldberg (Taylor 2009:130).
Left to right: Teeny Duchamp, Richard Hamilton, Betty Factor, William N. Copley, Donald Factor, Walter Hopps, Betty Asher, Marcel Duchamp. Photographed at Stardust Hotel, Las Vegas, October 1963.
The sculptor James Metcalf (1925-2012) cited the fact that Duchamp’s attraction to the idea that Cassandra represented emerged following the production of Euripides’ Troades (The Women of Troy) at Théâtre Récamier, Paris (Metcalf 2000). Metcalf’s party, including Bill and Noma Copley, the Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz, and Duchamp, attended the production’s opening on 3 November 1961. The performance began with the Mexican actress Pilar Pellicer (b. 1938), who was to become Metcalf’s wife, in the title role, bursting on stage with a flaming torch in each hand, seemingly possessed with prophecy. This scene must have been an epiphany for Duchamp, quite like Roussel’s Impressions of Africa play. Later, over dinner, the group discussed the role and fate of Cassandra. Duchamp was well aware of her myth. As seer of unbelievable oracles, Cassandra exerted great appeal on Duchamp. Her pessimistic prophetic pronouncements, that were never believed, tragically always proved true. Duchamp may have associated the Greek myth of Cassandra – who argued that the admission of the
Wooden Horse offered by the Greeks would precipitate the fall of Troy – with his own effort to persuade fellow
artists to relinquish the yoke of retinal painting, a task that must have appeared hopeless during the height of abstract expressionism (Taylor 2009:135).
Not long after the experience of Euripides’ Troades, Metcalf made a sculpture called The Torch of
Cassandra, which was purchased by Barnet Hodes,
the Copley Foundation’s legal adviser and secretary- treasurer, and also lawyer of Duchamp. Some years later, Hodes told Metcalf that because of this sculpture he investigated the story of Cassandra, so that, in 1964, when Duchamp presented the motion to change the name of the foundation to the Cassandra Foundation, he knew why. According to Metcalf, Copley informed him that Noma did not, naturally enough, see why their foundation should be rechristened, especially as her own name would be replaced with that of another woman. Duchamp was
waiting in the living room of the couple’s New York apartment at 7 West Eighty-first Street, while Bill and Noma engaged in a heated argument over the foundation’s proposed name change. After quite a time, “Bill blew a cloud of white cigarette smoke out the door of the bedroom” (Metcalf 2000) and into the adjacent living room to let Duchamp know that his efforts succeeded at last.
Copley had been one of the few people who knew that Duchamp was secretly working on his sequel masterwork, after the Glass, since 1946. This was
Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). It
was with his wholehearted support that the Cassandra Foundation purchased Étant donnés, as soon as it was
James Metcalf (USA, 1925-2012). The Torch of Cassandra, 1962. Bronze (83x18x24). Courtesy of Scott Hodes and Maria Bechily Collection, Chicago, IL. | Letter from Barnet Hodes to Evan H. Turner. Memorandum of Agreement between the Cassandra
Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1 July 1969. Reproduced in Taylor
2009:426. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Archives.
Donald L. Brooks (USA). Poster for Euripides “The Trojan
Women”, 1971, New York. Courtesy of the Theatre of the Lost
completed in 1966 for $60,000 (Tomkins 1996:433), and on 1 July 1969, soon after the artist’s death, agreed to donate it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it is permanently on view since that time.
The solution to the enigma about the Cassandra Foundation must be sought in the particular scene of the
Troades that Duchamp experienced in 1961. Unfortunately there is no visual evidence of that production by Jean
Tasso at Théâtre Récamier, which ceased to exist as of 1978. However, this tragedy, based on Homer’s Iliad, is the greatest pacifist piece of world literature, and would have appealed to such a conscientious objector as Duchamp. In its anti-war sensibility, Euripides was a fairly solitary author pushed aside for most of history, because he exposed war as the root of all evil. However, amidst the Cold War (1947-1991) and particularly during the Vietnam War (1955-1975), anti-war and peace movements grew into very large demonstrations in the United States from 1967 until 1971. Therefore, it follows that the year 1971 saw two significant productions of the
Troades – first, Michael Cacogiannis’ film starring American actress Katharine Hepburn as Hecuba, British actors
Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Blessed as Andromache and Talthybius, French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold as Cassandra, and Greek actress Irene Papas as Helen; second, Donald L. Brooks’ production at the Theatre of the Lost Continent, New York, with an all male cast including Bill Maloney as Hecuba, Harvey Fierstein as Andromache, Mario Montez as Cassandra, Leo Rice as Helen, and Don Wyckoff as Talthybius. Both these versions made use of the more up-to-date and critically acclaimed translation by Edith Hamilton.
The stage represents a battlefield, a few days after the ultimate battle, in the dusk of early dawn, before sunrise. In the Cassandra scene, the Greek herald Talthybius, conversing with queen Hecuba informs her, “King Agamemnon chose her [Cassandra] out from all [./.] for the king’s own bed at night.” (Euripides 1937:23). To this announcement Hecuba protests, “Oh, never. She is God’s, a virgin, always. / That was God’s gift to her for all her life.” Talthybius adds, “He [Apollo] loved her for that same strange purity [her virgin crown]” (ib. 1937:24). Mourningly in response, Hecuba soliloquizes on
Cassandra, “Throw away,
daughter, the keys of the temple. / Take off the wreath and the sacred stole.” (ib. 1937:24). Then, observing a burst of light from within the nearby shelter, Talthybius reacts with alarm, fearing the women indoors have decided to burn themselves to death. Hecuba reassures him, “No, no, there is nothing burning. It is my daughter, Cassandra. She is mad.” (ib. 1915:27). A moment later, the door opens from within and Cassandra enters, white-robed and wreathed like a priestess, with blazing torch on either hand, dancing to her soft song to herself without noticing the herald or the scene before her, “Lift it high—in my hand—light to bring. / I praise him. I bear a flame. With my torch I touch to fire / this holy place.” (ib. 1937:26). Then she continues in extreme irony, “Blessed the bridegroom, / blessed am I / to lie with a king in a king’s bed in Argos.” (ib. 1937:27). She then makes a circle round her, waving her torch as though bearing incense, and the vision of Apollo appears to her. She dances a bridal song begging, “Honour to him / whose bed fate drives me to share.” (ib. 1937:28). In response Hecuba mourns, “O fire, fire, when men make marriages / you light the torch, but this flame flashing here / is for grief only. Child, such great hopes once I had. / I never thought that to your bridal bed / Greek spears would drive you. / Give me your torch. You do not hold it straight, you move so wildly. Your sufferings, my child, / have never taught you wisdom. / You never change. Here! someone take the torch / into the hut. This marriage needs no songs, / but only tears.” (ib. 1937:28). In response Cassandra reveals to Hecuba her vision, “If Apollo lives, / my marriage shall be bloodier than Helen’s.” (ib. 1937:28), and true intentions, “Agamemnon, the great, the glorious lord of Greece— / I shall kill him” (ib. 1937:29). After noticing the scene for the first time, she gently