Pulled at Four Pins is one of Duchamp’s most revealing lost readymades precisely because the 1964 etching that preserves it refuses to show us the object clearly. The original was said to have been a rotating chimney ventilator selected in New York in 1915, given away, and later lost. It was never photographed. Almost half a century later, Duchamp produced an etching from memory. The result is not a usable illustration of a ventilator. It is an image in which the object’s visible logic has been almost completely suppressed.
A real wind-driven chimney cowl is a radial machine. Its upper component is built to rotate around a fixed central axis. The repeated curved vanes catch moving air and turn as a unified circular body, while the lower section remains secured to the chimney. Radiality is not decorative. It is the mechanism’s whole operating principle.
Duchamp’s etching makes almost none of this visible. There are no clear vanes, no repeated radial elements, and no readily intelligible central hub. The drawing gives the spectator a cylinder, a bent upper contour, and an awkward set of lines that do not immediately resolve into a rotating apparatus. Without the later explanatory narrative, there would be little reason to identify it as a chimney ventilator.
Yet Duchamp labels what he declines to depict. Across the upper section he writes “Cette partie tourne”: “This part turns.” On the lower section he writes “Cette partie est fixe”: “This part is fixed.” Beneath it he adds “axe”: “axis” or “axle.” Those words make the essential relation unmistakable: movement around a stable center.
The radial machine is therefore present, but not visibly. It has been transferred into text. The drawing is deliberately inadequate as an image; the labels retain the whole mechanical proposition. A turning body, a fixed base, an axis. Once those terms are read, the absent radial form can be reconstructed in the spectator’s mind.
The printed sheet makes even that reconstruction difficult. Duchamp etched the lettering normally into the copperplate, with the result that it appears reversed in the impressions. The viewer first confronts backwards writing and a drawing that looks like almost anything but the machine it is supposed to record. The work stages a problem of recognition. Its information is there, but it must be recovered against the image rather than from it.
That fact gives the work a particular importance beside Bicycle Wheel. The purpose of Bicycle Wheel remains uncertain. Duchamp later described it as a private studio object and said he enjoyed watching the wheel turn. But he also remarked: “Obviously, the wheel must have had a great influence on my mind, because I used it almost all the time from then on.” He does not explain what that influence was, and there is no reason to force a fixed meaning onto the work. Still, he identifies the spinning wheel as a form that remained important to him.
The comparison with Pulled at Four Pins can therefore remain simple. Bicycle Wheel presents rotation directly: a circular wheel turning visibly around its fixed center. Pulled at Four Pins records another rotating mechanism, but hides its radial form in an almost unreadable drawing. Where Bicycle Wheel shows the turning structure, the later etching makes the spectator infer it from three short labels: this part turns; this part is fixed; axis.
It is possible that Bicycle Wheel supplied an early visual model for the radial organization that reappears, more concealed, in Pulled at Four Pins. Duchamp’s comment about the wheel does not prove that. It does make the question legitimate. If the rotating wheel remained important to his mind, then the ventilator’s radial mechanism may be more than a random practical feature of a selected object.
Schwarz’s placement of the work makes the possibility still more consequential. Arturo Schwarz, who worked closely with Duchamp and collaborated on the 1964 reconstruction project, identified Pulled at Four Pins as Duchamp’s first New York readymade. At the threshold of the New York sequence, then, stands a work organized around a basic opposition: movement and fixity, rotation and axis.