Duchamp, Marcel

Duchamp, Marcel
born July 28, 1887, Blainville, France
died Oct. 2, 1968, Neuilly

French artist and art innovator.

In 1913 he caused a sensation at the Armory Show with his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which combined the principles of Cubism and Futurism. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards then led him to devise his famous ready-mades: in 1913 he exhibited Bicycle Wheel, which was simply an ordinary bicycle wheel displayed as a work of art, and in 1917 he exhibited a urinal he entitled Fountain. Intended as a derisive gesture against the excessive importance attached to works of art, the ready-mades ushered in an era when contemporary art became in itself a mixture of creation and criticism. In Paris in 1919 he established contact with the Dada group of artists, whose nihilistic ideas he had anticipated. During this period he exhibited a photograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee added, a gesture that expressed the Dadaists' scorn for the art of the past. He greatly influenced the Surrealists, and his attitude toward art and society led to Pop art and other modern and postmodern movements. A legend in his lifetime, he is considered one of the leading spirits of 20th-century art.

* * *

▪ French artist
Introduction
born July 28, 1887, Blainville, Fr.
died Oct. 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 (Villon, Jacques), 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—Postimpressionism, 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 (Picabia, Francis), 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.

      The “Nude.” To an exhibition in 1911 Duchamp sent a “Portrait” that 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” (Philadelphia Museum of Art), 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 Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.” 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 entitled “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 painter Man Ray, he published a single issue of New York Dada in 1921.

      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 Guillaume 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.

Assessment
      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.

Robert Lebel

Additional Reading
Monographs and catalogues raisonnés. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (1959, reprinted with an addenda to the catalogue raisonné and an updated bibliography, 1967), is the first major biography and critical study. The catalog includes a list of replicas, editions, working studies and documents, single copies or reconstructions, and variations on Duchamp's projects. Arturo Schwarz (ed.), The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1969), is the most extensive catalogue raisonné and includes Duchamp's last works.

Studies.
Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes (1913; The Cubist Painters, 2nd ed., 1949); Calvin Tomkins, The World of Marcel Duchamp (1966); Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (1967; Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 1971), and Les 3 Duchamp (The Brothers Duchamp, 1976); Arturo Schwarz, The Large Glass, and Related Works, 2 vol. (1967–68) and Marcel Duchamp (1970; Eng. ed. 1975); Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp (1968), in Spanish; and Sarane Alexandrian, Marcel Duchamp (1976; Eng. trans. 1977).

Major exhibition catalogs.
Marcel Duchamp, Pasadena Art Museum: A Retrospective Exhibition, October 8 Through November 3, 1963 (1963), the first major exhibition of Duchamp's works; The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp: Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Tate Gallery 18 June–31 July 1966 (1966); Paris, Musée National D'art Moderne, Marcel Duchamp (1967), the first comprehensive exhibition of Duchamp's works in France; Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, Marcel Duchamp (1973), published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, the most complete collection assembled to date.

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужно решить контрольную?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Duchamp, Marcel — (7/28/1887 Blainville 10/2/ 1968 Neuilly sur Seine) (France / USA)    Painter, sculptor, and writer. From a family of artists, studied at the Academie Julian in Paris. A major figure in early 20th century art, especially influential as proponent… …   Dictionary of erotic artists: painters, sculptors, printmakers, graphic designers and illustrators

  • Duchamp, Marcel — (1887 1968)    painter    Marcel Duchamp, who has had a major influence on modern art, was born in Blainville Crevon, the brother of the artists Raymond duchamp villon, suzanne duchamp, and jacques villon. His early works, which he began at age… …   France. A reference guide from Renaissance to the Present

  • Duchamp, Marcel — ► (1887 1968) Pintor francés. Impresionista hasta 1913, cuando llegó a una acentuada disolución de las formas y se hizo famoso con su Desnudo bajando una escalera. Influido por el surrealismo, creó los ready made, la transformación de objetos… …   Enciclopedia Universal

  • Duchamp,Marcel — Du·champ (do͞o shäɴʹ, dü), Marcel. 1887 1968. French born modernist artist and a leader of the Dada movement in New York City who was the first to exhibit commonplace objects as art. His paintings include Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). * * * …   Universalium

  • Duchamp, Marcel —  (1887–1968) French painter …   Bryson’s dictionary for writers and editors

  • Duchamp — Duchamp, Marcel …   Enciclopedia Universal

  • Marcel Duchamp — Duchamp redirects here. For other uses, see Duchamp (disambiguation). Marcel Duchamp Marcel Duchamp playing chess in 1952. (Kay Bell Reynal photo in the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.) Birth name …   Wikipedia

  • Marcel Duchamp — (* 28. Juli 1887 in Blainville Crevon; † 2. Oktober 1968 in …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Marcel Duchamps — Marcel Duchamp Pour les articles homonymes, voir Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp Naissance …   Wikipédia en Français

  • Marcel Duchamp — «Duchamp» redirige aquí. Para otras acepciones, véase Duchamp (desambiguación). Marcel Duchamp Nacimiento 28 de julio de 1887 …   Wikipedia Español

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”