Robert Lebel, French art critic and collector, was instrumental in rendering Marcel Duchamp’s often hermetic life, art, and ideas accessible to a wider public across Europe and the United States, principally with his 1959 publication Sur Marcel Duchamp, the first monograph and catalogue raisonné devoted to the artist. Duchamp was a willing partner in the book’s creation. In fact, his active participation in both its conception and layout was so substantial that the book is considered part of the artist’s oeuvre. But the project took six years to complete. The trials, tribulations, quarrels, and machinations that plagued the production, publication, and publicity of Sur Marcel Duchamp are the focus of this correspondence between two lifelong friends. Translated and printed in full together for the first time, and including the original French texts, these letters, postcards, and telegrams from the collection of the Getty Research Institute offer uncensored access to the evolution of the relationship between Lebel and Duchamp from December 1946 to April 1967. They provide valuable information about their daily activities as well as those of friends and colleagues, vital details concerning their various collective projects, and illuminating insights into their thinking about art and life. These documents, witty and sincere, bear witness to the art of friendship and a friendship in art.

The decades following the 1973 publication of Alessandro Conti’s Storia del Restauro have seen considerable scholarly interest in the development of restoration in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. A number of technical treatises and biographies of restorers have offered insight into restoration practice. The Restoration of Paintings in Paris, 1750–1815, however, is the first book to situate this work within the broader historical and philosophical contexts of the time. Drawing on previously unpublished primary material from archives in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Venice, Noémie Étienne combines art history with anthropology and sociology to survey the waning decades of the Ancien Régime and early post– Revolution France. Initial chapters present the diversity of restoration practice, encompassing not only royal institutions and the Louvre museum but also private art dealers, artists, and craftsmen, and examine questions of trade secrecy and the changing role of the restorer. Following chapters address the influence of restoration and exhibition on the aesthetic understanding of paintings as material objects. The book closes with a discussion of the institutional and political uses of restoration, along with an art historical consideration of such key concepts as authenticity, originality, and stability of artworks, emphasizing the multilayered dimension of paintings by such important artists as Titian and Raphael. There is also a useful dictionary of the main restorers active in France between 1750 and 1815.