Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp resisted categorization and embraced self-contradiction. Fascinated by themes of time and motion, eroticism, and technology, he was not only an artist, but also an art advisor, curator, conservator, inventor, writer, and chess master. While exerting a critical, enduring, and frequently provocative influence on avant-garde tendencies, from Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism to Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, he was fond of referring to himself as simply a respirateur (“breather”), his epitaph reading “D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent” (“Besides, it’s always the others who die”). Duchamp was born in Blainville-Crevon, France, in 1887, and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, in 1968. His brothers Jacques Villon (1875–1963) and Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918), and sister Suzanne Duchamp (1889–1963), were all also artists. Duchamp studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905—though he preferred playing billiards to attending classes—then undertook compulsory military service, working for a printer in Rouen, where he learned typography and printing processes. He moved between France and New York repeatedly, finally settling in the United States in 1942 and working in New York thereafter. Duchamp began his artistic career by painting family portraits and local landscapes, later producing portraits and imagined scenes in a quasi-Fauvist manner. He first exhibited in 1909 at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in Paris and moved to the French capital in the early 1910s, settling on a Cubist style characterized by machinelike interpretations of the body that is evident in such paintings as Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), whose abstract form and erotic theme scandalized New York’s Armory Show in 1913. In the same year, Duchamp created the first of his “readymades,” elevating ordinary, sometimes altered objects to the status of art simply by presenting them as such. Reimagining the role of the artist as one of informed selector rather than skilled artisan, he aimed to push art beyond the “retinal.” The earliest readymade is Bicycle Wheel (1913) and the most notorious is Fountain , a urinal that Duchamp signed “R. Mutt” and submitted to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. Others include In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), a snow shovel, and L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), an “assisted” readymade comprised of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa onto which he penciled a mustache, goatee, and the title, which, when pronounced in French, sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul” (“she has a hot ass” or “there is fire down below”). From 1915 to 1923, Duchamp worked on The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) , which was shown at the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 1926–27, but later (likely on its return journey) damaged, and in the process (according to its maker) completed. Duchamp repaired and partially remade it in 1936 and collaborated with Richard Hamilton on a replica in 1965–66. The Large Glass depicts an encounter between an abstracted “bride” and nine “bachelors” who communicate using obscure contraptions, the workings of which are documented in notes that form part of The Green Box (1932). Collaboration, game-playing, and transgression were fundamental to Duchamp’s practice. In 1920, he established the experimental arts organization Société Anonyme with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray. In the same year, he questioned gender identity by creating Rrose Sélavy, a female alter ego whose name, when spoken aloud, sounds like “Eros, c’est la vie” (“Eros, that’s life”). Duchamp credited Sélavy with several works, including the kinetic sculpture Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925) (a predecessor of which almost killed Man Ray when its glass plates detached at speed) and the film Anémic Cinéma (1926). From 1946 until 1966 Duchamp worked in secret on Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage ( Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas ), a dioramic extrapolation of The Large Glass in which a female mannequin is visible through peepholes, manipulating the viewer into a voyeuristic encounter.