Marcel Duchamp

Lore & Background

Duchamp was one of seven children, four of whom became successful artists: Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, and Marcel himself. He began schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen at age eight, and later studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, though he preferred playing billiards to attending classes. In 1905 he began compulsory military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment, working for a printer in Rouen, where he learned typography and printing processes.

His first work to provoke significant controversy was Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which depicts mechanistic motion with superimposed facets. He submitted it to the Cubist Salon des Indépendants, but Albert Gleizes asked Duchamp's brothers to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting. Duchamp quietly refused, but later took the painting home in a taxi, calling it a turning point in his life. The painting was exhibited at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in 1912 and later at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, where it caused scandal.

Duchamp is notable for his work of anti-art Fountain, where he signed the name 'R. Mutt 1917' on a urinal. For his talk at the American Federation of the Arts in Houston, 'On the Creative Act,' he labeled himself a 'mere artist' and discussed the two poles of art creation: the artist and the spectator. He defined the art coefficient as 'an arithmatic relationship between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed,' laying groundwork for later appropriation artists such as Andy Warhol, Beatrice Wood, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Sturtevant.

Reader's Guide

Duchamp's significance lies in his role as a key figure in the avant-garde and a progenitor of conceptual art. His work Fountain challenged traditional notions of art by presenting a mass-produced urinal as an artwork, signed with a pseudonym. His talk 'On the Creative Act' articulated a view of the artist as a medium whose decisions rest on pure intuition, denying the artist full consciousness of their work on an aesthetic plane. This idea, along with his concept of the art coefficient, influenced later generations of artists working with appropriation. Duchamp is commonly regarded alongside Picasso and Braque as helping to establish the post-industrial perspective in art history. His legacy includes shaping the direction of conceptual art and influencing artists who question authorship and originality.

Did You Know?

• Duchamp learned typography and printing processes during his compulsory military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment, working for a printer in Rouen.
• He read Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own, which he considered a turning point in his artistic and intellectual development.
• Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was first exhibited at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in 1912, the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain.
• He credited a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel's novel Impressions d'Afrique with radically changing his approach to art and inspiring The Large Glass.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"People talk of Pablo Picasso as the leader of the Cubists but, strictly speaking, he is no longer a Cubist. Today he is a Cubist, tomorrow he will be something else. The only true Cubists are Gleizes and Metzinger." — Marcel Duchamp "To be looked at [from the other side of his art-work 'The Glass'] with one eye, close to, for almost an hour." — Marcel Duchamp "Painting is over and done with. Who could do anything better than this propeller? Look, could you do that?" — Marcel Duchamp "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." — Marcel Duchamp