Marcel Duchamp

French painter

• Born: July 28, 1887
• Birthplace: Blainville, France
• Died: October 2, 1968
• Place of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Duchamp became the most controversial, provocative, and enigmatic figure in modern art of the twentieth century. A maverick, he began as a painter but spent the rest of his life questioning and testing every convention and premise for art known.

Early Life

Marcel Duchamp (mahr-sehl dew-shah) was born in the Normandy community of Blainville. He was one of six children of Justin-Isidore Duchamp and Marie-Caroline-Lucie Duchamp. Four of the children pursued careers in art despite the heated disapproval of their father. The exact nature of Justin-Isidore’s disapproval of professions in art is not clear. Nevertheless, Marcel had an artist precedent in Émile-Frédéric-Nicolle, a maternal grandfather who painted and made prints. No doubt Marcel knew of his grandfather’s oeuvre composed of handsome views of Paris. Duchamp began painting landscapes in and around Blainville by 1902, while a student in Rouen. His subjects woods, marshes, churches, houses, and orchards were interpreted through the still controversial style of Impressionism. The works are remarkably perceptive and mature, especially since Duchamp was then in his teens and his only contact with Impressionism was limited to reproductions and book illustrations.

In 1904, Duchamp was graduated from the École Boussuert in Rouen and moved to Paris to join his elder brothers. He studied painting at the Académie Julian but was easily distracted, for example, by billiards. Still, his paintings, which were of acquaintances and rural scenery, were quite competent and marked by an assimilation of post-Impressionist applications of thick textures.

Between 1906 and 1913, the artist lived and painted in both Paris and Neuilly. In both places his assimilation of post-Impressionism continued, in particular, of the portraits and figure compositions of Paul Cézanne. Perhaps Duchamp also sought the underlying structure of forms in nature, yet such studies were balanced by vibrant paintings of nudes in the Fauve manner as well as the pre-cubist work of Georges Braque. One result was nearly objective abstraction, while, ironically, traces of the subjective pensive expressions and unstable color of the Pont-Aven Symbolists were present too.

During the year 1910, Duchamp met a number of artists with whom he would interact more or less regularly over the next few years. Among them were Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, and the critic Guillaume Apollinaire. As a group, they met weekly at the studio of the elder Duchamp brothers located in Puteaux, another suburb of Paris, and eventually were known as the Puteaux cubists. Duchamp also met the artist Francis Picabia that year, who along with Apollinaire and Duchamp discussed radical concepts regarding the art of their time. Their discussions had long-lasting ramifications for Duchamp.

The year 1911 proved to be just as precipitous as 1910 for Duchamp’s development. Cubism in its first or analytical phase erupted onto the Paris art world, producing an explosive outcry among critics and the art-viewing public alike. Nevertheless it engaged many artists’ minds, as it did that of Duchamp. He executed at least six studies and nearly as many paintings involving imagery of chess players in the cubist style. Just as important were his painted works then exploring implied movement via overlapping or successive images of a single figure based in part on the pioneering chronolithographs of Jules Marey.

Life’s Work

In February of 1912, Duchamp made the first of several visits to the premiere exhibition of Italian Futurism held at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. With his own explorations of sequential movement fresh in his mind, Duchamp found similar effects in the Futurists’ obsession with movement. In fact, their works may have immediately recalled his self-portrait of the previous year entitled Sad Eyed Man in a Train or his first studies for Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 .

The latter subject in its second version was submitted to the Salon des Indépendents in March of 1912, but the bewildered installation committee asked the artist to retitle the painting. Instead, Duchamp withdrew it in disappointment. The painting, exhibited about two months later in Barcelona, presents an abstractly fragmented figure walking down a flight of stairs. Its splintered forms and basically monochromatic color scheme were in keeping with analytical cubism. It departed from the narrow cubist mien of attempting simultaneous viewpoints of a static subject by pondering the illusion of motion through sequential overlapping. Several members of the cubist movement apparently misunderstood Duchamp’s intentions and believed that he was insincere, even mocking. Whatever the case, their reaction was mild compared with the painting’s reception in 1913 at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, better known as the Armory Show. There, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was the butt of jokes, editorial derision, and even an art-journal-sponsored contest to find the nude in Duchamp’s painting. Duchamp’s painting became the most controversial piece in the exhibit. Such critical and popular reactions to his work were the beginnings of a career of confrontational art and posturing.

The same year, the artist innocently began to appropriate nonart materials and objects and place them in his studio or a gallery where they might be presented as they were found or combined with other materials. Their selection and recombination were based on spontaneous but disinterested chance. Among the now legendary alterations were an inscribed bottle rack, a coat rack bolted to the artist’s studio floor to trip visitors and himself, a snow shovel hung from a ceiling and entitled In Advance of the Broken Arm , and a male urinal entitled Fountain . By 1915, such items were called ready-mades, because of their industrial and commercial origins, and as such they were intended to challenge the conventions of the permanent nature of art versus a temporary existence and the originality or uniqueness of art.

Coinciding with Duchamp’s ready-mades, the antiart movement called Dada was emerging in Zurich. There, artists, poets, and others gathered in the safe neutrality of Switzerland, recoiling from the horrors of World War I, and soon denounced its vicious mechanized savagery, the middle class, which they perceived as monied and comfortable, and all traditional forms of the fine arts, government, economic structure, and religion. About 1920, Duchamp was again in Paris, where he collaborated with key figures of Dada (the movement had spread across Europe). He shared their healthy disrespect for rules, premises, rational approaches, and conventional forms of beauty. Barely two years prior to his stay in Paris, he had painted Tu m’, a collection of visual puns concerning the craft of painting done for his American patron Katherine Dreier. After this work, he stopped making easel works for the rest of his life, another seemingly spontaneous, arbitrary gesture.

Also overlapping Duchamp’s commitment to ready-mades and certain planks of free expression in Dada was his long development of the sculptural work called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even . Beginning in 1913 with notes on scraps of paper and a series of mechanical drawings, the concept of an enigmatic, complicated work involving panes of glass and symbolic but obtuse imagery slowly emerged. Duchamp worked on the project in bouts of intense concentration intermittently until 1923 when, out of boredom, he abandoned further progress.

By the mid-1920’s, Duchamp’s production of art slowed to a trickle and never accelerated again. He mostly made reproductions of earlier works, often in reduced sizes. He furthermore organized exhibitions of modern art for various galleries, edited or contributed to short-lived, esoteric art journals, gave French lessons to Americans in Paris, bought and sold art as an investment, and played chess at nearly every opportunity. In fact, he became a French champion and won other tournaments too.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, after decades of apparent inactivity, Duchamp was rediscovered by critics and elevated by historians, museum curators, and many important artists of those decades. The general public was less familiar with Duchamp and his art until 1954, when a permanent installation of the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From that time until his death, Duchamp found himself in increasing demand as a juror and lecturer on art. Duchamp died in early October of 1968 in Neuilly while on a vacation. He was buried beside members of his family in the Cimétière Monumental in Rouen.

Significance

Duchamp had the talent and facility to be as productive as Pablo Picasso. Like Picasso, he assimilated the major progressive post-Impressionist art movements during young adulthood. Furthermore, like Picasso, he soon realized the superiority of art-as-idea over art-as-object. However, while Picasso seemed driven by almost endless lateral exploration, Duchamp pursued economy of means coupled with the element of chance and humor.

Eventually he further economized art activity by ending it altogether, at least in the external sense. To Duchamp, painting did not cease; it was simply confined to his mind. Chess tournaments filled much of the void and to him became a more rarefied art form than painting: an invisible beauty comparable to poetic thought. Surprisingly, Duchamp became one of the most admired and influential artists of the twentieth century.

No single movement could contain Duchamp’s variety of visual production, sparse though it was. He changed directions not from insincerity but because it was natural for him to question traditional and avant-garde art alike. Emerging artists of the 1950’s and 1960’s who then became major figures themselves have acknowledged a considerable debt to Duchamp.

Bibliography

Demos, T. J. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. Demos examines how the act of exile, or what Duchamp described as the “spirit of expatriation,” informed Duchamp’s art.

D’Harnoncourt, Anne, and Kynaston McShine, eds. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973. A stimulating collection of essays exploring topics such as Duchamp and the machine aesthetic, the artist and the French intellectual tradition, Duchamp and his alter-ego Rose Selavy, Duchamp and André Breton, and Duchamp’s influence on subsequent art movements, especially in the United States. Includes an incomplete catalog of works that surveys Duchamp’s career.

Hopps, Walter, Ulf Linde, and Arturo Schwarz. Marcel Duchamp: Ready-Mades, Etc., 1913-1964. Milan: Galerie Schwarz, 1964. This exhibition catalog focuses on the delightfully wacky topic of ordinary household or commercial objects removed from their original contextual environments then placed in traditional art viewing spaces such as a gallery, whereupon the issue of their status as art is forced on the viewer. It is a clearly illustrated volume that is inclusive of helpful Duchamp postulates and other topics.

Kuenzli, Rudolf, and F. M. Naumann, eds. Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. A collection of penetrating essays, good note sections, rarely seen illustrations of photographs, plus a thirty-three-page bibliography make this underfunded book valuable for Duchamp scholars. The essay topics are selective, but more would seem merited for the “artist of the century.” Duchamp’s letters to his patrons, the Arensbergs, reveal a frank and easily distracted artist.

Lebel, Robert, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and H. P. Roché. Marcel Duchamp. Translated by George Heard Hamilton. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Another disguised monograph, covering landmark artwork and antiart. A pleasant surprise, though, are the short but provocative chapters by Duchamp and Breton. Duchamp is credited with design and layout of the book as well as supervision of the color and black-and-white plates. Thus the book offers devotees of Duchamp a mass-produced example of his design concepts for the book arts.

Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare A Biography. Boston: MFA, 2002. Marquis’s examines Duchamp’s life and artistic legacy. Includes illustrations.

Moffitt, John F. Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. In his analysis of Duchamp’s art, Moffitt maintains that Duchamp’s interest in alchemy was the key to his work.

Schwarz, Arturo. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969. This book is divided into three major sections: The first part presents early pieces, the second deals exclusively with The Large Glass and related works, and the third addresses source material and includes excerpts from Duchamp’s writings, lectures, and interviews.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Marcel Duchamp: Sixty-six Creative Years from the First Painting to the Last Drawing. Milan: Galleria Schwarz, 1973. Includes 260 entries from the collection of the Milanese dealer Schwarz, and is useful to collectors of Duchamp’s works.

Tomkins, Calvin, and Time-Life editors. The World of Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968. Rev. ed. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1977. The text is a monograph interwoven with cultural history and an attempt to ascertain Duchamp’s importance among other modern masters.