It was in an issue of Secession, a journal frequented by the New York Dadaists, that Sister Amia Croom made her only known appearance in print. There, in early 1923, she published a belated response to Marcel Duchamp’s manifesto poem “Possible” (1913). While Duchamp claimed that “the possible is only a physical ‘mordant,’ burning every aesthetics,” Croom countered that Dada is centered on this tension between the possible and the impossible, and that Dada’s success at creating impossible objects mirrors God’s creation. She closed her letter with a quote from Bishop Tempier’s Condemnation of 1277, “All the things that will exist in the future will exist by necessity and those that will not exist are impossible.” With that one quote, Croom tied a centuries-old theological argument about the limitations of God’s power to the prior half-century’s history of reactive arts.
Croom has languished in obscurity for decades, lacking the well-curated notoriety of Duchamp, or even a champion to resurrect her brilliance, as Siri Hustvedt has done for Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Lohringhoven. Duchamp’s early correspondence, covering the period concerned, 1923 through 1927, was not among the papers his wife, Alexina Duchamp, left to the Philadelphia Museum of Art archives when she passed in 1995, twenty—seven years after her husband. In the absence of evidence, it was the conventional wisdom among scholars that these letters, which he would have received while living in Paris, were lost when he fled Nazi occupation in 1940. When a box of correspondence addressed to Duchamp appeared, from an anonymous seller, at a small New York auction house in 2004, the letters were initially dismissed as fraudulent. ¹ However, upon examination, it seemed unlikely that a forger would have taken the time, not only to forge letters to Duchamp, but also to write as so many different people and include details that matched what was known about the life of Duchamp and his associates in that period.
It was among those letters, dated from 1920 through 1940, that Sister Amia Croom’s name first entered the art world’s academic consciousness. Alone, her letters amongst Duchamp’s papers represented a minor mystery, one buried in the sheer mass of scholarship that followed discovery of the trove. The controversy surrounding the provenance of “Fountain,” for example, took center stage, with professors of art history and their students alike scouring the letters and looking for clues that the “readymade” had, as claimed by Hustvedt and others been co-opted from the bizarre and brilliant von Freytag Lohringhoven. ²
Only one scholar, Dr. Trey Signholden of Wallach University, referenced what he called “the Duchamp-Croom correspondence,” ³ in a footnote to his paper “Duchamp’s Connecticut Period: The Repair of ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’” published in the September 2006 edition of Modern Art Times. Even there, Signholden’s footnote was more about the oddity represented by a letter from Duchamp, apparently never mailed, addressed to a Sister Amia Croom, Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary, Buffalo, NY, and dated 1936, nearly ten years after the last recorded letter from Sister Croom.
The significance of their correspondence only came into focus once Duchamp’s letters to Croom were published, in the January 2007 Dada Journal, after a box arrived in their offices with a Buffalo postmark. It is still not known whether these letters were shipped in response to Signholden’s curious note, and if so, why they were sent to the Dada Journal instead of Modern Art Times, and whether the nuns of the Dominican Order were regular readers of both the Times and the Journal. The Lord works in mysterious ways. ⁴

According to census records, Amia Croom was born in 1898 in Sagawau, New York, which had yet to be consumed by sprawling Binghamton. Her parents, Robert Croom and Irina Rother, were both first-generation citizens whose parents had emigrated from England and Hungary, respectively. Robert was a salesman for the short-lived Huntington Desk Encyclopedia. Irina took in washing to supplement her husband’s income, but there is some suggestion in Croom’s letters that her mother was widely read, with intellectual tendencies. A survey of The Binghamton Press from 1890 through 1910 turned up sixteen editorials by a “Mr. Ira Roth,” mainly concerning the social issues of the time. However, the Binghamton census records from 1890, 1900, and 1910 show no one by the name ‘Ira Roth.’
Both Robert Croom and Irina Rother passed within months of each other in 1911 without producing any additional children. The 1920 census finds Amia already in Buffalo as a sister in the Dominican Order at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary. Other than brief, illustrative biographical descriptions of her parents, Croom makes scant reference to her early life in her letters to Duchamp and never identifies the religion of her parents.
Only thirteen years old at her parents passing, Croom was not yet old enough for a workhouse. It is possible that, in the spirit of divine mercy, she was taken in by the Binghamton Catholic Home for Orphaned Children, and from there passed on into the Dominican Order.

“I don’t get to New York City,” Croom wrote to Duchamp on May 17th, 1924, “but even in Buffalo we get the news.” Her admission was an understatement, as Croom had been cloistered within the walls of the monastery for at least four years at that point. The life of a cloistered Dominican nun, as described by contemporaneous reports, was centered around work and prayer. There does not appear to have been time for either “getting the news” or artistic expression as its own end; however, Croom’s insights may have found opportunity in the daily practice of Bible study. Through the lens of Christ’s teaching, Croom could explore the artistic expression of God’s children.
How Croom was able to not only read, but also submit (in the case of her Secession letter), to the Dada literature of her time remains an enigma. It could not have been easy to procure copies of Secession in Buffalo and the other contributors to the magazine were, with few exceptions, geographically collocated in either New York or Paris, the two great Dada centers of the 1920s. What she must have lacked in breadth of Dada exposure, Croom made up for with the depth of her study. ⁵

Both religion and art can be seen as a series of actions and reactions. In this paradigm, Dada was a rejection of Symbolism. In his 1917 diary, Hugo Ball, one of the founders of the Dada movement, wrote that
[T]he human figure is progressively disappearing from pictorial art, and no object is present except in fragmentary form. This is one more proof that the human countenance has become ugly and outworn, and that the things which surround us have become objects of revulsion. The next step is for poetry to discard language as painting has discarded the object, and for similar reasons. Nothing like this has existed before.
Ball put words to what he observed as a departure from representation. ⁶
Symbolism was a rejection of Realism, Realism a rejection of Romanticism, and Romanticism a rejection of the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment. Each generation declared a revolution, demanding the dismissal of the idea that held forth in the prior generation. ⁷
Religion had its parallels, with the rejection of some ideas as ‘heretical,’ and schisms announcing the arrival of the new. The history of Christianity, for example, isn’t linear—instead, there is a tendency toward diversification, an entropy. Social pressures caused adaptations, as can be seen today with the gradual acceptance of women as laity and then clergy, or even in the Dominican Order’s rationalization of torture as a means to truth durig the Inquisition. ⁸ Similarly, the rejection of Realism by the avant—garde of Symbolists did not mean that there were no more Realists, that no one created in that style. Instead, there is, perhaps, a diversification of art in the same manner as religion. ⁹
Croom’s dedication to the Bible transcended the book itself, but also extended it. Through her eyes, the world and the Bible were mirrors of themselves and seeing this, she embraced the Lord and his teaching through her study of art history, and, in particular, Dada. It could have been anything, though—and this she concedes in her letters to Duchamp: “I immediately saw Dada as an expression of God—a glorification of his power. Maybe I would have seen this in anything I’d studied, though. When God is what you know, you see His work everywhere.”

What Croom saw in Dada was a pure expression of God’s limitless power. “Take, for example, your readymade ‘Cadeau,’ the clothes iron with tacks attached to its face,” Croom wrote to Duchamp in 1924. “You have nullified the utility of the object, erasing its purpose. You have made it impossible. But why? Because, through God, you can conceive of it still.” This passage is notable not only as a distillation of Croom’s perspective on the central link between God and Dada, but also because she has attributed ‘Cadeau’¹⁰ to Duchamp when it is the work of his contemporary, Man Ray. Did Croom think that Duchamp had presented ‘Cadeau’ as his own work? Elsewhere in their correspondence, she dismissed the idea of individual authorship, claiming instead that “all art is God’s creation.”

Where Croom is scholarly and direct in her letters, Duchamp is circumspect. The famed Dadaist is known for his readymades and his affinity for chess, but he is not known for his correspondence. Few of his pre-1946 letters survived, and those that do are not exactly brimming with thought. Duchamp wrote to his friends mainly to coordinate logistical details, such as visits and art shows. He seemed taken aback by Croom, in fact, and offered her little encouragement beyond the courtesy of a response. “I had not considered readymades in the context of God or religion,” Duchamp writes back to Croom in 1924, separating the notions of ‘God’ and ‘religion.’ Before I saw them as a sculptural expression of Tzara’s manifesto. An illustration.” He was likely referring here to Dada ideologue Tristan Tzara’s 1919 essay “Note on Poetry,” where he states that
Simile is a literary tool which no longer satisfies us. There are ways of formulating an image or integrating it but the elements will be taken from differing and distant spheres. Logic guides us no longer and its commerce, easy, impotent, a deceptive glimmer scattering the coins of a sterile relativism, is extinguished for us forever.
It is a credit to Croom that she persevered through Duchamp’s taciturn communication style, providing the intellectual momentum to solicit, at times assertively, his intent concerning his creations. “Tell me about ‘Bicycle Wheel.’ ¹¹ What did you think as you made it? I see joy.” In the same paragraph, she admitted a “heretical break with church doctrine, just between us”—before going on to write that “creation is not monolithic. I do not see this as a failure on God’s part, but as an expression of His love. What I want to know is, that when God creates through you, do you feel a single impulse, or does your initial idea develop into the thing that in the end you call art?” ¹² She resisted using the word ‘evolution,’ charged as it was, but she barely disguised her belief that God’s creation and evolution were compatible. The way she described her observations of the artistic process, “randomness, guided by intent” was also a blueprint for creation.

Sister Croom cited the work of Jean Arp (this time not crediting Duchamp) and, in particular, ‘Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance).’ ¹³ This piece consists of a series of blue and white torn paper squares arranged on a grey background. How Arp incorporated the laws of chance was not made explicit, but while there is no apparent consistency in the size or order of the squares, the squares also do not overlap, and the distance between the squares is relatively stable. Two words in the title of the work demonstrate the important dichotomy that Croom was proposing as a guiding principle: ‘Arranged’ as intent, and ‘Chance’ as randomness.
“In this context,” Croom wrote, “Arp’s squares were not arranged by chance, but rather by necessity. This is what I find so stimulating about Dada. It makes us ask the question—by whose necessity?” She answered was that it could not be man’s necessity because these works were anti-utilitarian from man’s perspective. Presenting what appears to be an original example, Croom describes a sign which reads ‘free sign.’ “This object would have no purpose because one cannot express ownership over something that advertises itself as free. The object itself expresses its agency. And what use does man have for something for which he cannot possess? Even ideas are owned—‘I have an idea,’ etc.” Dada, she concludes, is the purest artistic expression of God’s power of creation.

Their discussions of chance and randomness became central to their correspondence in 1925 and 1926. This was the most productive period of the Duchamp-Croom correspondence, as measured by the frequency of their letters. The excitement was palpable as the pace quickened, with postmarks on the letters only a few weeks apart, indicating that each must have responded immediately to the message received from the other—and then sometimes the gap was less, suggesting that they could not wait to receive a letter before mailing the next.
It is best to summarize this discussion as a dialogue between two persons sharing a common interest across a café table, constructed using quotes from their letters.
Duchamp, explaining Arp’s artistic choices: “Chance is the only way to avoid control of the rational.”
Croom: “Why do you think of chance as irrational?”
Duchamp: “Chance is a thing that people have and don’t have. Bad luck or good luck—in general, bad or good is the property of each individual.”
Croom: “It sounds like you’re talking about free will versus determinism. I don’t see why these must be mutually exclusive. It doesn’t have to be all of one or all of the other—you could have free will within a deterministic framework. Artistic choices are rational choices.”
Duchamp: “Art cannot be rational. Rationality is a death knell for the creative.”
Croom: “Art takes familiar forms and venues. That’s how we recognize it as art. If I spend an hour arranging fruit on a table in my home, that isn’t art—but if I faithfully reproduce that vision in paint, it is. Likewise, a sunset.”
Duchamp: “This is the point of Dada, though—to break those forms.”
Croom: “Dada only works because of those forms. You took a bicycle wheel and presented it as a sculpture. You applied an artistic norm.”
Duchamp: “‘Bicycle Wheel’ is a poor example, and maybe I’m damning myself here, but that piece is all about intent and presentation—but when we talk about chance, like with Arp, there is an absence of rationality there. The internal can be controlled, but not the external. Opening up the work to external influences means that the artist is giving up control.”
Croom: “The combination of internal and external influences is simply collaboration. This well predates the invention of Dada. None of you invented chance; you made a market for it. You called chance out explicitly as an element, but you place it within tight bounds. The impressionists weren’t exact, and that’s how they derived beauty.”
Duchamp: “Choice is an expression of free will—the artist chooses their constraints.”
Croom: “Yes, within certain bounds expressed by social and creative norms. They are limited before they consciously limit. Even their limits are a selection.”
Duchamp: “The minute you choose something, generally, you are valuing the artistic facets of it or aesthetic essence of it.”
Croom: “From where does the artist derive their aesthetic sense? How is it developed?”
Duchamp: “I think you want me to cry ‘uncle,’ yet say ‘God.’ I refuse to give in to religion simply because I’ve run out of argument. An argument I see, by the way, as circular, but am nonetheless unable to exit. Nor even, due to the shape, to hide in a corner as you have me trapped.”
Croom seemed to realize that she was in danger of losing her sparring partner. Her next letter was postmarked four weeks after Duchamp’s, indicating that she had taken the time to choose her words carefully, and even throw him a bone by using chess as an example: “Chess is played on a grid of 64 ordered squares, with sixteen playing pieces on each side. Different types of pieces have different allowable paths, but each player has the same number of pieces that can move in those distinct paths. It should be then that chess is a very orderly game and not at all subject to chance. Yet each game is distinctly different, presenting new problems to each player and the entropy at mid-game is astounding.” Croom allowed complexity as a perspective on why choice could appear as chance, but still be entirely rational.
Duchamp, meanwhile, selected the term ‘causality’ as a stand-in for their now loaded ‘determinism’ in attempting to explain his defensiveness: “The concept of causality to me is very dubious. It has a questionable character. It’s a convenient form of making life possible. And all these religious concepts that come out of causality—the idea of God being the first one to do everything is another illusion of causality.”
What Duchamp failed to realize is that, to Croom, in her world, ‘causality’ was an even more loaded term that ‘determinism’ was in his, and his remark triggered another flurry of letters.

The “first cause” or “unmoved mover,” as Aristotle referred to it in Book 12 of his Metaphysics, is the reductive argument that something or someone must have set the universe in motion, must have created all matter. Religions ascribe that cause to one or more gods, but the idea itself, independent of religious context, is understood to be universally accepted, and therefore a starting point for all arguments. Duchamp’s broadside seemed to call into question even that most basic platform, the common denominator between science and religion.
It is not clear whether Duchamp meant “illusion of causality” to equate to “causality is an illusion,” but Croom read it that way: “I feel like your disregard of the notion of causality is without basis—a shortcut to nihilism. Is this a philosophical stance or an artistic one? If philosophical, I find it without basis in logic. If artistic, I find it to be ludicrous and as such very much outside of your character.”
Duchamp seemed only partially chastened by Croom’s letter: “I took this stance structurally, in opposition, reflexively. Reflecting on this position, I can apply neither logic nor art to the elimination of causality. But I hold you to the same standard—not to accept the notion of God simply because you have run out of room on your page for tracing back transitive relationships.”
As measured by the three-month gap after Duchamp’s reply, there seemed to be a mutual recognition that they’d ruffled one another’s feathers. In the summer of 1926, Croom reopened their discussions with a comment on the weather using a quote from Aristotle’s Physics: “We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do.” It was not unusual for Croom to quote classical philosophers, but she did not need to lean on their scholarship—instead selecting passages that agreed with a point she had already made through rigorous proof.
How then, to reconcile her vocation with her much broader scholarship? How did a cloistered Dominican nun have the time and resources to study not only religion, but art and philosophy as well? Croom implies that she found context to be a necessity in studying the Bible. “The outside world, in what little I see from the cloisters, is a mirror to God’s word. I am like a sponge, for I know that whatever I can find, books or journals, I am seeing because God wants me to appreciate the bounty of His gifts.”
Throughout several letters, she laid out for Duchamp her analysis of the parable about a rich man entering heaven. ¹⁴ There’s a trite summary of this story, that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to pass into the kingdom of God.” The takeaway? If you’re rich, you must get rid of all of your worldly wealth. This brief neglects the complicating explanation that follows. According to Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples: “‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible’” (Matthew 19:26 NIV). In other words, passage into the kingdom of God is not determined by man, but by God. However, as Mark tells it, Christ is making a broader point: “‘With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God’” (Mark 10:27 NIV). ¹⁵
The last phrase was key to Croom: “all things are possible with God.” This is what she connects to Bishop Tempier’s Condemnations of 1277. Tempier, the Bishop of Paris at the time, found it necessary to reign in particular strains of religious thought in response to a warning from Pope John XXI concerning rumors of heretical stirring in Paris. Tempier’s reaction was to issue what is more or less a policy document. Among the 219 heretical statements Tempier condemned was that “what is impossible absolutely speaking cannot be brought about by God or by another agent.” Mark said it better, but Tempier’s legalese is precise. A later condemnation, the one Croom cited in her 1923 Secession letter, reads in full that “nothing happens by chance, but everything comes about by necessity, and that all the things that will exist in the future will exist by necessity, and those that will not exist are impossible, and that nothing occurs contingently if all causes are considered.” ¹⁶
For his part, Duchamp seemed to accept this premise:
I, with my Cartesian mind, refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, if I wanted to produce anything, I had to find something that gave me no doubt because it didn’t exist before. Having invented them, there was no doubt about them, ever. All along, I had that search for what I had not thought of before. When I had done one ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ I would not do another one.
Croom, careful not to criticize Duchamp in a way that might cause another gap in their ongoing dialogue, wrote: “I have the impression, not from any one statement, but the bolus of our discussions—your perspective, in particular—that you see religion as rote. The memorization of scripture, ritual prayer, scripted mass, etc. I see religion as constrained, to be sure, but also free. The recitation of the rosary, for example, frees the unconscious mind by occupying the conscious mind. Devotion is more surprising than you might imagine.”
Duchamp wisely avoided re-entering a discussion of religion with a nun, and instead stuck to his area of expertise in his reply. “The poor Mona Lisa is gone because no matter how wonderful her smile may be, it’s been looked at so much that the smile has disappeared. I believe that when a million people look at a painting, they change the thing by looking alone.” He went on to paraphrase from Vers Une Architecture¹⁷ , in which modernist architect Le Corbusier advises keeping paintings in storage, and only taking them out when one is ready to look at them.
Croom replied that “devotion takes consistent effort. Contrary to Le Corbusier and his collection of paintings, I find that the more I study the word of God, the more it speaks to me.”
Duchamp: “All art occurs in the interaction between the object and the onlooker.”
Croom: “The father, the son, and the holy ghost. Not in the sense that there are direct parallels, of course—the Trinity is both one and distinct—but nothing stands on its own.”

By 1927, their correspondence seemed to have run its course, mainly due to Duchamp’s gradual shift in interest away from art, towards chess. In late 1926, he even tried to bait Croom into a game, signing off with his signature and below it the notation “e4.” It’s not clear whether Croom did not understand that Duchamp was attempting to initiate a game, or whether she ignored it, but she did not reply with a move of her own. After that aborted attempt, Duchamp took longer and longer to respond to Croom’s intrigues, and his replies became briefer and briefer, until he stopped altogether. Croom did not mention this trend in her letters, sent just after she would have received his, brimming with ideas expounded at length. When his letters stopped—his last letter was postmarked May 13, 1927—so did hers.
None of Duchamp’s correspondence, other than the letters she received, mention his exchanges with Croom, and those who were close to him in that period who were still alive when the letters surfaced denied having heard Duchamp mention her. ¹⁸ The one exception to this was the unmailed letter that Signholden mentions in his Modern Art Times footnote. ¹⁹ The letter is dated June 7^th 1936, while Duchamp was holed up at Katherine Dreier’s West Redding, Connecticut, farm, repairing “The Large Glass,” which had broken in shipping.
This letter struck an unusually melancholy tone for Duchamp—one of regret. It begins with an apology: “I am sorry that I have not kept up with our correspondence.” (It had been nine years since his last letter to Croom.) Duchamp continues—“I have had an opportunity of late to reflect on chance, and also on loss—on those things that will no longer exist. The irreversibility of entropy with a normal amount of energy. But, as you have told me, ‘all things are possible with God.’ My energy is not limitless, nor is my time, so my task must be made manageable, or it will not be accomplished. What has existed will no longer.”
Duchamp appears, in his way, to be allowing for the possibility of God. ²⁰ He likely felt that he could share this insight with no one other than Sister Amia Croom. Even so, he did not finish this letter or even sign it.
Marcel Duchamp died on October 2, 1968, aged 81, in Neuilly, France.
According to public records, Sister Amia Croom passed on November 4, 1985. The Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary declined to comment on her life or the cause of her death, but one fact is certain—she existed by necessity. ²¹