Marcel Duchamp

French artist

Marcel Duchamp, in full Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp,

(born July 28, 1887, Blainville, France—died October 2, 1968,
Neuilly), French artist who broke down the boundaries between
works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused
by Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), he painted few
other pictures. His irreverence for
conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his
famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution.
Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists, and in the 1930s he
helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a U.S. citizen
in 1955.
Early years
Although Duchamp’s father was a notary the family had an artistic
tradition stemming from his grandfather, a shipping agent who
practiced engraving seriously. Four of the six Duchamp children
became artists. Gaston, born in 1875, was later known as Jacques
Villon, and Raymond, born in 1876, called himself Duchamp-
Villon. Marcel, the youngest of the boys, and his sister Suzanne,
born in 1889, both kept the name Duchamp as artists.

When Marcel arrived in Paris in October 1904, his two elder

brothers were already in a position to help him. He had done
some painting at home, and his Portrait of Marcel
Lefrançois shows him already in possession of a style and of a
technique. During the next few years, while drawing cartoons for
comic magazines, Duchamp passed rapidly through the main
contemporary trends in painting—Post-Impressionism, the
influence of Paul Cézanne, Fauvism, and finally Cubism. He was
merely experimenting, seeing no virtue in making a habit of any
one style. He was outside artistic tradition not only in shunning
repetition but also in not attempting a prolific output or frequent
exhibition of his work. In the Fauvist style Marcel painted some of
his best early work three or four years after the Fauvist movement
itself had died away. The Portrait of the Artist’s Father is a notable
example. Only in 1911 did he begin to paint in a manner that
showed a trace of Cubism. He had then become a friend of the
poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a strong supporter of Cubism and of
everything avant-garde in the arts. Another of his close friends
was Francis Picabia, himself a painter in the most orthodox style
of Impressionism until 1909, when he felt the need of complete
change. Duchamp shared with him the feeling that Cubism was too
systematic, too static and “boring.” They both passed directly from
“semirealism” to a “nonobjective” expression of movement. There
they met “Futurism” and “Abstractionism,” which they had known
before only by name.

To an exhibition in 1911 Duchamp sent Portrait (Dulcinea), which

was composed of a series of five almost monochromatic,
superimposed silhouettes. In this juxtaposition of successive
phases of the movement of a single body appears the idea for
the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. The main difference
between the two works is that in the earlier one the kangaroo-like
silhouettes can be distinguished. In the Nude, on the other hand,
there is no nude at all but only a descending machine, a
nonobjective and virtually cinematic effect that was entirely new in
painting.
When the Nude was brought to the 28th Salon des
Indépendants in February 1912, the committee, composed of
friends of the Duchamp family, refused to hang the painting.
These men were not reactionaries and were well accustomed to
Cubism, yet they were unable to accept the novel vision. A year
later at the Armory Show in New York City, the painting again was
singled out from among hundreds that were equally shocking to
the public. Whatever it was that made the work so scandalous in
Paris, and in New York so tremendous a success, prompted
Duchamp to stop painting at the age of 25. A widely held belief is
that Duchamp introduced in his work a dimension of irony, almost
a mockery of painting itself, that was more than anyone could bear
and that undermined his own belief in painting. The title alone
was a joke that was resented. Even the Cubists did their best to
flatter the eye, but Duchamp’s only motive seemed to be
provocation.

Farewell to art
In 1912, after the Nude, Duchamp did a few more paintings. Some
of these, notably Le Passage de la Vierge à la Mariée and Mariée,
both done in Munich, are among the finest works of the period.
Again they were neither Cubist, nor Futurist, nor Abstract, but
they expressed Duchamp’s typical vision of the body perceived in
its inmost impulses.

There was no question that as a painter Duchamp was on a footing

with the most gifted. What he lacked was faith in art itself, and he
sought to replace aesthetic values in his new world with an
aggressive intellectualism opposed to the so-called common-sense
world. As early as 1913 he began studies for an utterly awkward
piece: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The
Large Glass). For it, he repudiated entirely what he called retinal
art and adopted the geometrical methods of industrial design. It
became like the blueprint of a machine, albeit a symbolic one, that
embodied his ideas of man, woman, and love.

Like the Nude, The Large Glass was to be unique among works of

modern painting. Between 1913 and 1923, Duchamp worked
almost exclusively on the preliminary studies and the actual
painting of the picture itself. His farewell to painting was by no
means a farewell to work.

During this period a stroke of genius led him to a discovery of

great importance in contemporary art, the so-called ready-made.
In 1913 he produced the Bicycle Wheel, which was simply an
ordinary bicycle wheel. In 1914 Pharmacy consisted of a
commercial print of a winter landscape, to which he added two
small figures reminiscent of pharmacists’ bottles. It was nearly 40
years before the ready-mades were seen as more than a derisive
gesture against the excessive importance attached to works of art,
before their positive values were understood. With the ready-
mades, contemporary art became in itself a mixture of creation
and criticism.

When World War I broke out, Duchamp, who was exempt from

military service, was living and working in almost complete
isolation. He left France for the United States, where he had made
friends through the Armory Show. When he landed in New York in
June 1915, he was welcomed by reporters as a famous man. His
warm reception in intellectual circles as well raised his spirits. The
wealthy poet and collector Walter Arensberg arranged a studio for
him in his own home, where the painter immediately set to work
on The Large Glass. He became the centre of the Arensberg group,
enjoying a reputation that led to many offers from art galleries
eager to handle the works of the painter of the Nude. He refused
them all, however, not wanting to start a full-time career as a
painter. To support himself, he gave French lessons. He was then,
and remained, an artist whose works would have been sought after
but who was content to distribute them free among his friends or
to sell them for intentionally small amounts. He helped Arensberg
buy back as many of his works as could be found, including
the Nude. They became a feature of the Arensberg Collection,
which was left to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Besides The Large Glass, on which he worked for eight more years

until abandoning it in 1923, Duchamp did only a few more ready-
mades. One, a urinal titled Fountain, he sent to the first exhibition
of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1917. Although he was a
founder-member of this society, he had signed the work “R. Mutt,”
and therefore it was refused. His ready-mades had anticipated by a
few years the Dada movement, which Picabia introduced to New
York City in the magazine 291 (1917). As an echo of the movement,
Duchamp helped Arensberg and H.P. Roché to publish The Blind
Man, which had only two issues, and Rongwrong, which had only
one. Later, with the artist Man Ray, he published a single issue
of New York Dada in 1921.
Marcel Duchamp: Fountain
Fountain, ready-made by Marcel Duchamp, replica of the 1917 original (now lost).

art@aditi

In 1918 he sold The Large Glass, which was still unfinished, to

Walter Arensberg. With the money from this and another
painting, his last, he spent nine months in Buenos Aires, where he
heard of the armistice and of the deaths of his
brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon and of Apollinaire. In Paris in
1919 he stayed with Picabia and established contact with the first
Dada group. This was the occasion of his most famous ready-
made, a photograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and a
goatee added. The act expressed the Dadaists’ scorn for the art of
the past, which in their eyes was part of the infamy of a civilization
that had produced the horrors of the war just ended.

In February 1923 Duchamp stopped working on The Large Glass,

considering it definitely and permanently unfinished. As the years
passed, art activity of any kind interested him less and less, but the
cinema came to fulfill his pleasure in movement. His works to this
point had been only potential machines, and it was time for him to
create machines that were real, that worked and moved. The first
ones were devoted to optics and led to a short film, Anemic
Cinema (1926). With these and other products, including “optical
phonograph records,” he acted as a kind of amateur engineer. The
modesty of his results, however, was a way by which he could
ridicule the ambitions of industry. The rest of the time he was
absorbed in chess playing, even taking part in international
tournaments and publishing a treatise on the subject in 1932.

Although Duchamp carefully avoided art circles, he remained in

contact with the Surrealist group in Paris, composed of many of
his former Dadaist friends. When in 1934 he published the Green
Box, containing a series of documents related to The Large Glass,
the Surrealist poet André Breton perceived the importance of the
painting and wrote the first comprehensive study of Duchamp,
which appeared in the Paris magazine Minotaure in 1935. From
that time on there was a closer association between the Surrealists
and Duchamp, who helped Breton to organize all the Surrealist
exhibitions from 1938 to 1959. Just before World War II he
assembled his Boîte-en-valise, a suitcase containing 68 small-scale
reproductions of his works. When the Nazis occupied France, he
smuggled his material across the border in the course of several
trips. Eventually he carried it to New York City, where he joined a
number of the Surrealists in exile, including Breton, Max Ernst,
and Yves Tanguy. He was instrumental in organizing the Surrealist
exhibition in New York City in October and November of 1942.

Unlike his co-exiles, he felt at home in America, where he had

many friends. During the war, the exhibition of The Large Glass at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, helped to revive his
reputation, and a special issue of the art magazine View was
devoted to him in 1945. Two years later he was back in Paris
assisting Breton with a Surrealist exhibition, but he returned to
New York City promptly and spent most of the remainder of his
life there. After his marriage to Teeny Sattler in 1954, he lived
more than ever in semiretirement, content with chess and with
producing, as the spirit moved him, some strange and unexpected
object.
This contemplative life was interrupted in about 1960, when the
rising generation of American artists realized that Duchamp had
found answers for many of their problems. Suddenly tributes came
to him from all over the world. Retrospective shows of his works
were organized in America and Europe. Even more astonishing
were the replicas of his ready-mades produced in limited editions
with his permission, but the greatest surprise was still to come.
After his death in Neuilly his friends heard that he had worked
secretly for his last 20 years on a major piece called Étant donnés:
1. la chute d’eau, 2. le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2.
The Illuminating Gas). It is now at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art and offers through two small holes in a heavy wooden door a
glimpse of Duchamp’s enigma.

Legacy of Marcel Duchamp

As artist and anti-artist, Marcel Duchamp is considered one of the

leading spirits of 20th-century painting. With the exception of
the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, however, his works were
ignored by the public for the greater part of his life. Until 1960
only such avant-garde groups as the Surrealists claimed that he
was important, while to “official” art circles and sophisticated
critics he appeared to be merely an eccentric and something of a
failure.

He was more than 70 years old when he emerged in the United

States as the secret master whose entirely new attitude toward art
and society, far from being negative or nihilistic, had led the way
to Pop art, Op art, and many of the other movements embraced by
younger artists everywhere. Not only did he change the visual arts,
but he also changed the mind of the artist.