do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?” Brancusi later sculpted bird forms, which U.S. Customs officials mistook for aviation parts and for which they attempted to collect import duties.
During this decade Duchamp began working as a librarian in the Bibliotque Sainte-Genevive, where he earned a living wage and withdrew from painting circles into scholarly realms. He studied math and physics areas in which exciting new discoveries were taking place. The theoretical writings of Henri Poincar particularly intrigued and inspired Duchamp. Poincar postulated that the laws believed to govern matter were created solely by the minds that “understood” them and that no theory could be considered “true.” “The things themselves are not what science can reach…, but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable