Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp (pronounced ) (July 28, 1887 – October 2, 1968) was a French-American artist whose work and ideas had considerable influence on the development of post-World War II Western art, and his advice to modern art collectors helped shape the tastes of the Western art world. His influence continues into the 21st century.

While he is most often associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements, his participation in Surrealism was largely behind the scenes, and after being involved in New York Dada, he barely participated in Paris Dada.

Thousands of books and articles attempt to interpret Duchamp's work and philosophy, but in interviews and his writing Duchamp only added to the mystery. The interpretations interested him as creations of their own, and as reflections of the interpreter.

A playful man, Duchamp prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much with words, but with actions such as dubbing a urinal art and naming it Fountain, and by "giving up" art to play chess. He produced relatively few artworks, as he quickly moved through the avant-garde rhythms of his time.

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.

— Marcel Duchamp

Living and working in a studio in Montparnasse, Marcel Duchamp's early works were Post-Impressionist in style but he would become perhaps the most influential of the Dada artists. A student at the Académie Julian, his influence is still strongly felt to this day by contemporary artists.

At his eldest brother Jacques' home, in 1911 the Duchamp brothers organized a regular discussion group with artists and critics such as Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger and others that soon was dubbed the Puteaux Group.

In early years, Duchamp had some contact with the Salon Cubists of Paris, but aesthetic as well as political differences precluded closer affiliation. In 1912, he painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, in which motion was expressed by successive superimposed images, as in motion pictures. The work was originally slated to appear in Paris, but the Salon Cubists demanded that Duchamp retitle it to avoid possible scandal. Duchamp removed the work from the exhibition entirely, and, in 1913, it went on to create a scandal at the Armory Show in New York City instead; it also spawned dozens of parodies in the years that followed.

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Personal life

Born Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp in Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the Haute-Normandie Region of France, he came from an artistic family. Of the six children of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp, four would become successful artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of:

Jacques Villon (1875-1963), painter, printmaker
Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918), sculptor
Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889-1963), painter

On June 8 1927, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor. They divorced six months later on 25 January 1928. It had been gossipped at the time that it was a marriage of convenience for Duchamp, whose "plump" new bride was the daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer, and her marriage contract was to have supplied him with a steady source of income while he painted and pursued his interests in chess. In that, however, he was disappointed, for a few weeks before their wedding day her father informed him that Lydie would be given an allowance of 2,500 francs a month, only enough for a modest apartment. During their brief marriage, Duchamp spent most of his time playing chess in various tournaments in and around Nice. So frustrated did his bride become with his "chess absences," that one night while he slept she glued all of his chesspieces to the board. Early in January 1928 Duchamp told Lydie that he could no longer bear the responsibility and confinement of marriage, and a little over three weeks later they were divorced. (Hulten, Pontus. "Marcel Duchamp, Work and Life: Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, 1887-1968." Pages 8-9 June (1927) to 25 January (1928). ISBN 026208225X. Duchamp made a brief appearance in Rene Clair's film Entr'acte (1924) as a chess player.

In 1954, he and Alexina "Teeny" Sattler married, and they remained together until his death. In 1955, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. The last surviving member of the Duchamp family of artists, in 1967, in Rouen, France, Marcel helped organize an exhibition called "Les Duchamp: Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp." Some of this family exhibition was later shown at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Marcel Duchamp died on October 2 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and is buried in the Rouen Cemetery, in Rouen, Normandy, France. His grave bears the epitaph, "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent;" or "Anyway, it's always other people that die."

Mockery of art

Marcel Duchamp took aim at conventional notions of "high art," "culture" and commodities by presenting mass-produced objects such as a bottle rack or a snow shovel as sculpture. He coupled his visual assaults on "art" with verbal puns: he signed his Fountain, "R. Mutt," and named a Mona Lisa defaced by a drawn-on goatee beard and moustache L.H.O.O.Q., a coarse French pun: when the letters are pronounced in French they sound like the phrase "elle a chaud au cul", which literally translated, means "she has a hot arse". Idiomatically the phrase means "she's a prick-teaser". In 1919 it would have been very shocking to bourgeois society.Hudson, Alexis Maitland (1970), A Coarser French Course, Wolfe.

Readymades

Duchamp developed the term "readymade" in 1915 to refer to found objects chosen by the artist as art. Duchamp assembled the first readymade, a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool entitled Bicycle Wheel (1913), the same time as his Nude Descending A Staircase was attracting the attention of critics at the International Exhibition of Modern Art. Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, is considered to be the first "pure" readymade. Prelude to a Broken Arm (Nov. 1915), a snow shovel, followed soon after. His Fountain, a urinal which he signed with the pseudonym "R. Mutt", shocked the art world in 1917. The piece was rejected when he submitted it to the unjuried 1917 Society of Independent Artists. Fountain was a ceramic urinal laid on its back.

Doubts over readymades

Research published in 1997 by art historian Rhonda Roland Shearer claims that Duchamp's supposedly "found" objects may actually have been created by Duchamp. Her research of items like snow shovels and bottle racks in use at the time has failed to turn up any identical matches to photographs of the originals. However, there are accounts of Walter Arensberg and Joseph Stella being with Duchamp when he purchased the original Fountain at J. L. Mott Iron Works. Such investigations are hampered by the fact that few of the original "readymades" survive, having been lost or destroyed. Those which exist today are predominantly reproductions authorized or designed by Duchamp in the final two decades of his life. Shearer also asserts that the artwork "L.H.O.O.Q." which is supposedly a poster-copy of the Mona Lisa with a moustache drawn on it, is not the true Mona Lisa, but Duchamp's own slightly-different version that he modelled partly after himself. The inference of Shearer's viewpoint is that Duchamp was creating an even larger joke than he admitted. ^*

The Large Glass

In 1923 he concluded work on his The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), a piece he began construction of in 1915. The work is documented through his numerous notes and studies, as well as preliminary works, and would be, for the piece.

A stage play by Merce Cunningham's A Walk Around the Park was presented in 1968 in Buffalo, New York. The set design was based on Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), supervised by Jasper Johns. "Marcel Duchamp; ed. by Anne d'Harnoncourt & Kynaston McShine, ISBN 3.7913.1018.6 (Munich, 1989), P. 30

Société Anonyme

Escaping service in the First World War on the pretext of a dubious heart condition, he travelled to the United States, where he befriended Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, with whom he founded the Société Anonyme in 1920. Duchamp's circle also included Louise and Walter Arensberg, Henri-Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood and fellow Frenchman, Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures.

Collaboration with Surrealists

After 1923 he devoted much of his time to chess but from the mid-1930s onwards he collaborated with the Surrealists and participated in their exhibitions. Duchamp settled permanently in New York in 1942. From then until 1944, together with Max Ernst, Eugenio Granell and André Breton, he edited the Surrealist periodical VVV, in New York.

Perhaps in tribute, surrealist Salvador Dalí wrote a preface to Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, a transcription of interviews between Cabanne and Duchamp. In it, Dalí oddly writes "Marcel Duchamp spoke to me, during the course of the Second World War (traveling between Arcachon and Bordeaux) of a new interest in the preparation of shit, of which the small excretions from the navel are the "deluxe" editions. To this I replied that I wished to have genuine shit, from the navel of Raphael. Today Pop artist Verona sells artists' shit in very sophisticated packaging as a luxury item.

Abandons art for chess

During 1923, Duchamp virtually abandoned his career as an artist to play chess, which he played for the rest of his life to the near exclusion of all other activity. Duchamp's obsessive fascination with chess can be traced back much earlier to the themes of his major art pieces. The most immediately obvious of these is the chess position known as "trébuchet" (the trap), which gave its title to the Readymade of 1917: a coat rack with four hooks, which is nailed to the floor, hooks uppermost.

Not only did he design the 1925 Poster for the Third French Chess Championship, but he finished the event at fifty percent (3-3, with 2 draws), and thus earned the title of chess master. During this period his fascination with chess distressed his first wife so much that she glued his pieces to the board, which possibly contributed to their divorce four months later. He went on to play in the French Championships and also in the Olympiads from 1928-1933, favoring hypermodern openings like the Nimzo-Indian. In spite of his efforts he was unable to move from the rank of a strong French master to the rank of a strong international grand master. Sometime in the early 1930s, Duchamp realized that he had reached the height of his ability and had no real chance of winning recognition in top-level chess. Over the following years, the intensity of his participation in chess tournaments declined but he discovered correspondence chess and became a chess journalist writing weekly newspaper columns.

In 1932 Duchamp teamed up with fellow chess theorist Halberstadt to publish "L'opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées" (Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled). This pataphysical treatise describes the Lasker-Reichelm position, a unique and extremely rare position that can arise in the endgame of a chess match. In conclusion, the authors observe that the most Black can hope for is a draw. Given accurate play by White, Black can only succeed in delaying the progress of events, ultimately losing to White. They demonstrate this fact by plotting the game play on enneagram-like charts that fold in upon themselves. Grasping the central theme of this work, the endgame, is an important key to understanding Duchamp's complex attitude towards his artistic career. While his contemporaries were achieving spectacular success in the art world by selling their visions to high society collectors and trend setters, Duchamp observed "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." Duchamp can be seen, very briefly, playing chess with Francis Picabia in the short film Entr'acte (1924) by Rene Clair.

During his later years, many people attempted to lure Duchamp back into the art world.

His theme of the endgame was picked up by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett who used it as the narrative device for his commercially successful 1957 play of the same name, "Endgame". One of Duchamp's most notable chess games occurred in 1968, at a concert called "Reunion" at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto. His opponent was the avant-garde composer and event organizer John Cage. The music was produced by a series of photoelectric cells underneath each square of the chessboard which were sporadically triggered during normal game play.

On choosing a career in chess Duchamp had this to say: "If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him - as if anyone could - but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted."

Political views

Politically, Duchamp opposed World War I and identified with Individualist Anarchism, in particular with Max Stirner's philosophical tract The Ego and Its Own, the study of which Duchamp considered the turning point in his artistic and intellectual development.

The notorious antiartist seems to have made a significant break with his former concerns just when he was formulating his work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), which was, according to the best reconstructions that have been attempted, already in his mind several years earlier when certain commentators, perhaps most notably the Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann, believe Duchamp first encountered the work of Stirner.

Legacy

Duchamp is usually considered to have a negative attitude to later artists who developed the ideas he had initiated, because of this quote which is widely attributed to him:

This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

However, it had actually been written in a letter to him in 1961 by fellow Dadaist Hans Richter, but in the second person not the first, i.e. "You threw... etc". In the margin next to it, Duchamp had written, "Ok, ça va très bien" ("that's fine"). Richter did not make this clear for many years. ^*

Duchamp's attitude is actually far more favourable as his words in 1964 evidence:

Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since Courbet, in favour of retinal painting... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.

In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 of the most powerful people in the British art world. This is testimony to the influence of Duchamp's work, and the mark he has left on the art world. In early January 2006, a replica of Fountain was attacked by Pierre Pinoncelli.

Selected works and genres

Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'echecs) 1911. Oil on canvas 108 x 101 cm. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un Escalier. No. 2)
Readymades
Fountain
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Often called The Large Glass.
The Green Box (La Mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires même). Notes and studies for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even''.
50 cc of Paris Air
Rrose Sélavy
Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy?
Rotoreliefs
Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. (Etant donnés: 1. la chute d'eau/2. le gaz d'éclairage)^*

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Image:Duchamp LargeGlass.jpg|The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915-1923. Image:Duchamp_Marcel_Rotative plaques verre_1920.jpg|Rotative plaques verre (1920) Image:Duchamp_Marcel_Fresh_Widow_1920.jpg|Fresh Widow (1920)

Footnotes

References

External links

Duchamp works

Essays by Duchamp

The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp. (1957)

Essays about Duchamp

Duchamp in the news

BBC news story about the lasting influence of Fountain.

Audio and video

Resources

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