Marcel Duchamp. Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette.

A bottle off the shelf

In 1921, Marcel Duchamp took a perfume bottle by the house of Rigaud, the kind sold in shops. He did not make the bottle. He did not compose the scent inside. He only replaced the label.

This is the logic of the readymade, which Duchamp had pursued for years: choose an existing object, place it in an art context, and let the choice be the work. With Belle Haleine he went a step further. The object was altered, if only slightly. Scholars call this an assisted or rectified readymade.

The new label was made with Man Ray. It carried a portrait he photographed and the title of the work, Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette. The bottle was still a bottle. But now it belonged to someone else.

The face on the label is Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp's alter ego. In Man Ray's photograph Duchamp is dressed as a woman. The picture needs no caption. It sits exactly where a perfume house would put its face. Spoken aloud in French, the name sounds close to a familiar phrase about love and life, the kind of pun Duchamp loved.

Commercial perfume often shows the woman the buyer hopes to become. Duchamp kept the convention and turned it over. The woman on the label is a man. Perfume, which promises to make someone more alluring, now asks: whose allure is it, and is identity just a label stuck on?

The Centre Pompidou holds a glass negative of Man Ray's 1921 photograph of the work, 12 x 9 cm, given by Lucien Treillard in 1995. The museum places it within Dada, noting wordplay, humour and cross dressing.

Two letters swapped

The text on the label is where the work does most. The original read violette, violet. Duchamp reversed letters to make voilette, a fine veil. Violet water became veil water.

Belle Haleine means beautiful breath. According to the Pompidou, it is a joke on Belle Hélène, beautiful Helen. A figure of myth is replaced by something bodily: breath, a smell everyone has and few mention.

A few letters move and the whole bottle changes meaning. Flower becomes veil. Helen becomes breath. A man becomes a woman. Nothing is added to the bottle. Everything happens on the surface.

From a magazine cover to olfactory art

In April 1921 a photograph of the bottle appeared at the centre of the cover of New York Dada, the magazine Man Ray and Duchamp produced in a single issue. Around it, the title and date were printed upside down. The perfume bottle became the face of New York Dada.

Belle Haleine is often cited as one of the first works of the twentieth century to use perfume as conceptual material. It gives the viewer nothing to smell. It makes them think about smelling: about the name, the label, the image that comes with every scent sold.

Nearly a century later, its title was borrowed for a major exhibition on smell in art, Belle Haleine, The Scent of Art. The borrowing says where the small bottle stands: at the start of a line of art in which the nose is also an organ of thought.