The Bride stripped bare.

You can't bury dirt deep enough.

I was browsing in an old Yale University Press hefty catalogue raisonne of the vast collection of avant-garde art amassed in the last century by the self-styled Societe Anonyme-which in fact consisted of the Brooklyn art patron Katherine S. Dreier and her close friend and adviser Marcel Duchamp. On page 210, a fleeting reference appears to Dreier's "brief marriage in 1911 with American painter Edward Trumbull."

Brief indeed. On August 22, 1911, the New York Times reported,

"Miss Dreier Finds She is not a Wife...Wedding cards recalled." 

Mr. Trumbull, "several years the junior of Miss Dreier and belonging to one of the oldest families in Connecticut," according to the news item, left the wedding party abruptly after the exchange of vows to fly to the side of his mother in Detroit and then telegraphed his new bride that he had something to tell her. It seems he was not legally free of a model he had previously married, in London.

Edward Trumbull’s vast ceiling mural, “Transport and Human Endeavor,” in the marble and steel lobby of the Crysler Building.

Miss Dreier left at once for one of those long trips abroad. Word of the Brooklyn society girl's misalliance must have pre-ceded her to the gabby salon of Gertrude Stein, to which she had been introduced by Edward Steichen. Soon after her arrival, Duchamp began working on sketches of a magnum opus (our picture), which he sold to Miss Dreier years later. Now known as The Large Glass, it had a working title that was more evocative: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.

Miss Dreier, who carried a torch for Duchamp the rest of her life, never tried to marry again, even.