Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp the French-American artist (1887-1968), one of the most influential and disruptive figures in twentieth-century art. By exhibiting ordinary manufactured objects as works of art and by questioning the very nature of the artwork, he transformed the terms of modern art and laid the foundation for conceptual practices that followed.

Family and Early Work

Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 at Blainville-Crevon in Normandy into a cultured bourgeois family, several of whose children became artists. He was a gifted draughtsman and demonstrated an early facility for caricature and humour, and he followed his brothers to Paris, where he studied painting and came under the influence of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist currents of the day.

He experimented with Fauvism and Cubism and exhibited in the Salon des Independants and the Salon d'Automne. His painting Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912, which showed a figure in successive phases of motion through a series of overlapping planes, was a sensation and a scandal, rejected by the Cubist circle and celebrated abroad.

The controversy convinced him that painting as such, and the institutions that governed it, were exhausted, and he began to move toward a radically different conception of the artist's activity. His interest shifted from the making of pictures to the question of what art is.

The Readymades

From about 1913 Duchamp began to select ordinary manufactured objects and present them as works of art, a procedure he called the readymade. Bicycle Wheel, a wheel mounted on a stool, was followed by Bottle Rack and other examples. In each case the artist's gesture consisted not in craftsmanship but in choosing an object and removing it from its usual function.

The most notorious readymade is Fountain, a porcelain urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt and submitted in 1917 to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, which had promised to show any work by a member. The piece was hidden from view during the exhibition, and its rejection became a landmark in the history of modern art.

The readymades attacked the assumption that art required skill, beauty or authorship, and they proposed that the concept behind a work could matter more than its execution. They were also, as Duchamp's later writings made clear, a form of wit, an aesthetic joke and a serious inquiry into the nature of creation combined.

The Large Glass and New York

Duchamp settled in New York in 1915 and became part of a circle of artists and patrons, including Man Ray and the collector Walter Arensberg, who gave the American avant-garde much of its direction. He supported himself by teaching French and by other means, and he worked slowly and privately on his major project, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, known as the Large Glass.

The Large Glass, made on two panes of glass between 1915 and 1923, is an enigmatic allegory of desire in which a bride in the upper panel and a group of bachelors in the lower are linked by intricate machinery. Its imagery combines eroticism, mechanics and elaborate wordplay, and it resists any single interpretation. When it was accidentally cracked in transit in 1926, Duchamp accepted the damage as part of the work, lending it an element of chance that he had already prized.

He later published the Green Box, a collection of facsimile notes by which the Large Glass was to be understood, and the notes became as important as the piece. His conception of the artwork thus extended to include its documentation and its interpretation, a decisively modern idea.

Chess, Alter Ego and Later Projects

Duchamp was a passionate and accomplished chess player and represented France in international competitions. For long periods he devoted himself almost entirely to the game, and he insisted that chess and art shared a common intellectual structure. His absorption in chess has often been read as a deliberate withdrawal from art, but he regarded it as continuous with his thinking about form and chance.

He invented an alter ego, Rrose Selavy, an invented female persona through whom he signed works, appeared in photographs and issued pronouncements. The device allowed him to disturb the notion of a stable artistic identity and to extend his interest in signification and wordplay into the presentation of the artist himself.

His last major work, made secretly over many years and revealed after his death in 1968, was Etant donnes, an installation seen through a peephole in a door, showing a nude figure lying on a bed of twigs in a landscape. It is a final unsettling union of the erotic, the mechanical and the theatrical, and it has become one of the most discussed works of the century.

Influence and Legacy

Duchamp's influence on later art is difficult to overstate. By asserting that the concept, the context and the institution are as important as the object, he made possible an art that is primarily intellectual and critical, and he supplied the intellectual foundation for Conceptual art, Pop art, Minimalism and much of the art of the present day.

The readymades altered the relation between artist and viewer, and they posed questions about originality, reproduction and the market that remain central to debates about art. His wit and his refusal of conventional ambition made him a model of the artist as critic, a figure who works by provocation and reflection rather than by craft alone.

His influence was felt within his lifetime by the Dada and Surrealist movements, whose members prized him as a forebear, and it continued to grow as artists and theorists returned to his ideas. Whatever view is taken of him, the history of art cannot be written without accounting for what he did.

See also

• Readymades
• Conceptual art
• Dada
• The Large Glass