Marcell Duchamp relaxing in his apartment behind a chessboard with pieces designed by fellow artist Max Ernst. Photo by Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Images Collection.
Three Duchamp brothers, left to right: Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon in the garden of Jacques Villon's studio in Puteaux, France, in 1914.
Study for "Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. Illuminating Gas"
L.H.O.O.Q
(Mona Lisa with Moustache)
Mona Lisa with Moustache
Rotorelief n°11 - Total Eclipse / Rotorelief n°12 - White spiral
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors
To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour
book
The Writings of Marcel Duchamp
(The most part of the book is made up of Duchamp's experim...)
The most part of the book is made up of Duchamp's experimental writings, which he called Texticles, the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Sélavy.
Marcel Duchamp was a French-American artist and sculptor who dealt with painting, sculpture, collages, short films, body art, and found objects. Associated with Cubism, Dadaism, and conceptual art, he went down in the history of the 20th-century art as revolutionary artist due to his strong resistance to conventional aesthetic standards.
Background
Marcel Duchamp, in full Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp, was born on July 28, 1887 in Blainville-Crevon, Normandy, France. He was the son of Eugene Duchamp, a notary, and Lucie, an amateur landscapist. Duchamp had five siblings, three of whom, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Suzanne Duchamp, also became artists.
Although Marcel Duchamp's father was a notary, the life of Duchamps family was filled with various cultural activities, like reading, painting, playing music and chess. Besides, Marcel's maternal grandfather had dealt with art too, taking up engraving professionally.
In 1895, Marcel entered the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen where his brothers had studied. Artists-to-be Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont were among his classmates. Though Marcel Duchamp was an average student, his lifelong fascination with mathematics and physics which became evident during the eight years of his studies at the lycée was proved by a couple of mathematic prizes he received. From the other hand, two prizes for drawing in 1903-1904 demonstrated his burning aspiration to become an artist.
Unsatisfied with too academic manner of teaching drawing which aimed to turn away the students from all avant-garde influences, Duchamp explored modern art movements through the works of his brother Jacques Villon by imitating his style. He was supported by Jacques while being trained in art at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1904 to 1905.
The start of Marcel Duchamp's career can be counted from the early 1900s when he contributed drawing cartoons for comic magazines while studying in Paris. Under the influence of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, Duchamp produced boldly colored pictures that demonstrated a mastery of post impressionist color theory. In 1905, he was called up for a compulsory military service in the 39th Infantry Regiment, serving for a printer in Rouen. Some of Duchamp's early works were featured at the 1908 Salon d'Automne and at the Salon des Indépendants the next year.
Continuing his experiments with such major contemporary trends in painting as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism (Portrait of the Artist’s Father, 1910), and Cubism, he seemed to have no habit of any of them. He was outside artistic tradition not only in shunning repetition but also in not attempting a prolific output or frequent exhibition of his work. It was at this time when Duchamp got acquainted with Guillaume Apollinaire, a strong proponent of Cubism, and Francis Picabia. Together, they began to elaborate a highly novel and even mocking approach to art making.
The experiments with the forms and colors of cubism led Duchamp to produce one of his most controversial works, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, in 1912. A figure on the canvas was depicted in motion by means of successive overlapping planes. Banned from that same year Salon des Indépendants, it was well received at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.
By the time of the Show, Marcel Duchamp, still only 25, felt that he had exhausted the possibilities of easel painting. From then on till 1923, he concentrated on the preliminary studies and the actual painting of the picture itself. Such farewell to painting didn't stop his artistic activity at all. The first so called ready-made, the Bicycle Wheel, which appeared in 1913, is a vivid proof of that fact. The subsequent ready-mades by Duchamp included a urinal (Fontain), a snow shovel, a hat rack, and a bottle rack. They anticipated the absurdist constructions of the dada movement and the "found objects" of the surrealists.
Other works in the years immediately following 1913 featured objects that were more like precision instruments than art. Three Standard-Stoppages, Chocolate Grinder, and Nine Malic Molds are among the keen examples.
At the outbreak of the World War I, Marcel Duchamp, exempt from military service, was living and working in almost complete isolation. In 1915, the artist traveled to the United States where he was immediately warmly accepted by the local art circles. Extremely popular in the country, Duchamp rejected all the galleries' offers of cooperation and earned his living by giving French lessons.
The wealthy poet and collector Walter Arensberg established him a studio in his own home. Duchamp, who had already produced his ready-mades, continued his experiments in the production of objects. The monumental glass construction entitled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or, as it is sometimes known the Large Glass, was begun in that studio. The work was left incomplete in 1923, and the glass was cracked three years later.
The painting of a mustache and beard on a reproduction of the "Mona Lisa" and the failed attempt to exhibit a urinal, entitled Fountain, in the 1917 debut exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists were also among his outrageously anti-establishment, anti-art gestures at this time.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp whose ready-mades had anticipated by a few years the Dada, introduced the New York audience to the movement in the magazine 291. The artist also contributed to the publication of The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada (1921).
After the end of the First World War, Duchamp shared his time between New York City and Europe. He renounced the formal practice of art in 1923, explaining that art had fallen under the influence of businessmen and, just as bad, had been accepted by the middle class. With the course of time, he developed interest in the cinema through which he received possibility to fulfill his artistic ambitions in movement. Hs first short film, Anemic Cinema, was released in 1926. The rest of the time the artist was preoccupied with chess playing. He participated in international tournaments and published a treatise on the subject in 1932.
Although Marcel Duchamp carefully avoided art circles, he maintained contact with the Surrealist group in Paris, composed of many of his former Dadaist friends. In 1934, he published the Green Box, consisting of a series of documents related to The Large Glass.
Right after the occupation of France by the Nazis, Marcel Duchamp joined the Surrealists in exile in New York City, including André Breton, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy. From 1938 to 1959, Duchamp helped Breton to manage all the Surrealist exhibits, both in Paris and in New York City, where he mostly stayed the remainder of his life.
Marcel Duchamp experienced notable growth of the interest to his art from the part of the rising generation of American artists during the last decade of his life. The major retrospectives of his works were largely organized in America and Europe, and many replicas of his ready-mades were issued with his permission.
Cover for "Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares"
drawing
Portrait of Jacques Villon
With My Tongue in My Cheek
installation
Given
(1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas)
Bicycle Wheel
In Advance of the Broken Arm
Rotary Demisphere
With Hidden Noise
Glider Containing a Water Mill in Neighboring Metals
Genre Allegory (George Washington)
50 cc of Paris Air
Rotary Demisphere
Bottlerack
Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics)
The Brawl at Austerlitz
Why not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy
Fresh Widow
Fountain
painting
Parva Domus, Magna Quies
Network of Stoppages
Church at Blainville
Portrait of Yvonne Duchamp
Standing Nude
Paradise, Adam and Eve
Transition of Virgin into a Bride
Sad Young Man in a Train
Landscape, Study for Paradise
Two Nudes
Portrait of Dr. Ferdinand Tribout
Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel
Bride
Portrait of the Artist's Father
Portrait of Yvonne Duchamp
Chauvel
About Young Sister
Chess Game
Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2
Landscape at Blainville
Laundry Barge
Disks Bearing Spirals
Nude with black stockings
Baptism
Yvonne (in kimono)
Standing Nude
Selected Details after Rodin
Portrait (Dulcinea)
Portrait of Gustave Candel's Mother
The Chess Players
King and Queen
The Bush
Man Seated by a Window
Sonata
Play
Japanese Apple Tree
Chocolate Grinder
Young Girl and Man in Spring
Yvonne and Magdeleine Torn in Tatters
King and Queen Surrounded by swift nudes
Portrait of Chess Players
print
After Love
Selected Details After Ingres II
Selected Details after Ingres I
Selected Details after Courbet
The Bec Auer
Bare Stripped Bride
Selected Details after Cranach
sculpture
Hat Rack
Religion
Marcel Duchamp was an atheist.
Views
Quotations:
"I am interested in ideas – not merely the visual products. I want to put painting once again to the service of the mind."
"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."
"Painting is over and done with. Who could do anything better than this propeller? Look, could you do that?"
"If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases, it creates a new image of the unit of length."
"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art – and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."
Membership
A member of the Dada group, Marcel Duchamp was also among the founders of the Society of Independent Artists in 1916.
Four years later, along with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, he founded an art organization Societe Anonyme.
Societe Anonyme
,
France
1920
Society of Independent Artists
,
United States
1916
Personality
For many years Marcel Duchamp had an underground reputation, with few exhibitions of his works. Only surrealists, including André Breton, perceived him as a legendary hero whose life and character were as important as his actual artistic productions.
Duchamp maintained amicable if slightly ironic contacts with many contemporary artists. He became internationally popular on a public level only in the 1960s , when many American artists sought him out and studied his works and ideas, because for them he had a far more contemporary relevance, than Pablo Picasso.
Duchamp used many pen names throughout his life, including the feminine one, Rrose Sélavy, sometimes spelled as Rose Sélavy. The name had at least two interpretations, phrase Eros, c'est la vie which sounds in English like "Eros, such is life," and another French collocation, "arroser la vie" which means "to make a toast to life." Duchamp wearing feminine clothes was portrayed as Rrose Sélavy by Man Ray in a series of photographs produced through the 1920s. Duchamp signed several of his written and visual art works by the pseudonym.
Quotes from others about the person
Willem de Kooning: "And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp – for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to – a movement for each person and open for everybody."
Jasper Johns: "Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object"."
Interests
chess
Artists
Odilon Redon
Connections
Marcel Duchamp was married twice. A French writer Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor became his wife in June 1927. Quite unhappy, their marriage ended in divorce six months later.
Duchamp's love affair with a Brazilian visual artist Maria Martins lasted from 1946 to 1951.
In 1954, the artist married Alexina Sattler, former daughter-in-law of Henri Matisse. They lived together until Duchamp's death.
Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare
Octavio Paz claims in this essential work that the two painters who had the greatest influence on the twentieth century were Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. If that conjunction surprises at first, Paz makes a convincing case with his analysis and by contrasting the two artists.
2014
Duchamp: A Biography
The celebrated, full-scale life of the century's most influential artist by Calvin Tomkins.
Marcel Duchamp
A catalog documenting an exhibition of Marcel Duchamp's editioned readymades at Gagosian Gallery, New York City, replicating his American debut at Cordier & Ekstrom in the same building in 1965 and including new essays.
2015
The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp
A new understanding of Marcel Duchamp and his significance as an artist through an investigation of his non-art activities – archiving, art-dealing, and, most persistently, curating.
2016
Duchamp: By Hand, Even
In this essay, curator Helen Molesworth pinpoints the significance of the return of the handmade in the later years of Duchamp's oeuvre, positioning this paradigmatic shift away from the readymade as the focal point of academic debate for the very first time.
2018
Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life
The book is designed as a double-faced publication:the part entitled Works contains a catalogue reproducing Duchamp's paintings, sculptures, and miscellaneous objects (150 illustrated in color). The part entitled Ephémérides unfolds a day-by-day account of the artist's life, organized by astrological sign.
1993
Duchamp
The study addresses the myth and reveals the compelling charisma of Duchamp who has been an enigma to art historians and a great source of inspiration to other artists.