| Apolinère Enameled | |
| Artist: | Marcel Duchamp |
| Material: | Gouache and graphite on painted tin, mounted on cardboard |
| Height Metric: | 24.4 |
| Width Metric: | 34 |
| Metric Unit: | cm |
| Imperial Unit: | in |
| Museum: | Philadelphia Museum of Art |
| Accession: | 1950-134-73 |
Apolinère Enameled was painted in 1916–17 by Marcel Duchamp, as a heavily altered version of an advertisement for paint ("Sapolin Enamel").[1] The picture depicts a girl painting a bed-frame with white enamelled paint. The depiction of the frame deliberately includes conflicting perspective lines, to produce an impossible object. To emphasise the deliberate impossibility of the shape, a piece of the frame is missing. The piece is sometimes referred to as Duchamp's "impossible bed" painting.
Apolinère is a play-on-words referencing the poet, writer and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, a close associate of Duchamp during the Cubist adventure. Apollinaire wrote about Duchamp (and others) in his book The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations of 1913.[2]