Time & Perspective Quote by Beatrice Wood

Romance is dangled here like a shiny lure, then casually yanked away. Beatrice Wood opens with the kind of line that sounds like a private confession - "we immediately fell for each other" - and then punctures it with a disarming shrug: of course they did, everyone did. The maneuver is pure Wood: flirtation as truth-telling, ego as comedy, intimacy as social observation.

The intent isn’t to diminish Duchamp so much as to locate his power. Wood frames him less as a singular love object than as a force field, a person whose charisma rearranged the emotional furniture of any room he entered. The subtext is slyly democratic: if falling for him was the default setting, then Wood’s own attraction isn’t evidence of naivete or romantic destiny; it’s evidence of Duchamp’s gravity and of the era’s hunger for a new kind of man - ironic, unpossessable, allergic to sentimentality.

Context matters. Wood moved through the avant-garde at a moment when modern art was redefining what counted as value, authorship, and seriousness. Duchamp, the patron saint of the readymade and the raised eyebrow, embodied that shift. Wood’s line mirrors his aesthetic: it treats emotion like a found object, something real but not sacred, something you can hold up, label, and laugh at without destroying it. There’s also a quiet self-protection in the joke. By refusing the grand narrative of "the one", she keeps her own agency intact - not the muse caught in his orbit, but the artist alert to how orbit works.