Color aquatint and etching, 1934. Signed by both Duchamp and Villon and numbered 194/200 in pencil, lower margin. Etched by Jacques Villon. Published by Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris. A brilliant, richly-inked impression with strong colors, slight undulation from the rich inking, else fine. Plate 19-1/3"high x 12-1/4" wide. 20-1/4" high x 13" wide; mat and frame 4-1/2" wide.  Ginestet/Pouillon 672 (Villon).

In 1912 Marcel Duchamp showed his painting Nu descendant un escalier 2 (1911-12) at a group exhibition of work by the artists’ collective Section d’Or. His artist friends and his brothers criticized the work, probably because the suggestion of movement called to mind Italian Futurism, seen as a rival to Cubism. Duchamp withdrew the painting from the exhibition and from then on was never part of an artists’ group. After a solitary stay in Munich, he made his last Cubist works: two drawings entitled Vierge (1912) and the paintings Le passage de la vierge a la mariée (1912) and Mariée (1912). The Mariée shown here is a lithograph of the latter painting, printed in 1935 so it could be included in La boîte verte. 

The titles of the 1912 paintings suggest a change from a chaste to a sexually active life. In one of his notes Duchamp described Le Grand Verre as a skeleton on an X-ray and  called it a retard en verre, a delay in glass, identifying its components in an associative, poetic way, a "wasp with a secretion of love gasoline" and referring to the "sparks of the desire magnet." This mechanized view of sex is also present in the Mariée, where the figure appears to be constructed from an assortment of engine parts and internal organs and is is painted in the same way, without expression and with the precision of a technical draughtsman.

On his return to Paris in the autumn of 1912 he gave the painting to his friend Francis Picabia, the husband of Gabrielle Buffet, the woman he was secretly in love with and whom he may have had in mind when he was devising the bride.