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Marcel Duchamp: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born on the 28th of July 1887 in Rouen, France, into a family that would produce four successful artists out of seven children. While his brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon and his sister Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti pursued traditional careers in painting and sculpture, Marcel took a different path that would eventually redefine the very definition of art. He began his formal education at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille at the age of eight, where he formed lasting friendships with fellow students Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont, both of whom would also become well-known artists. By 1904, he enrolled at the Académie Julian, yet he spent more time playing billiards than attending classes, a habit that foreshadowed his lifelong preference for intellectual games over conventional discipline. His early exposure to typography and printing processes while working for a printer in Rouen during his compulsory military service in 1905 provided him with technical skills he would later employ in his artistic practice. The influence of Fauvism and Paul Cézanne's proto-Cubism shaped his early paintings, though critic Guillaume Apollinaire initially dismissed his nudes as very ugly, even as he prophesied that Duchamp could eventually reconcile art with the people. This early period was marked by a fascination with transition, change, movement, and distance, concepts that would become central to his mature work.
The Rejection of Retinal Art
The turning point in Duchamp's career arrived in 1912 when he submitted his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. The work depicted the mechanistic motion of a nude figure with superimposed facets, combining elements of Cubist fragmentation with Futurist dynamism. Although there was no jury at the Salon des Indépendants to officially reject the piece, Albert Gleizes asked Duchamp's brothers to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting or paint over the title. Duchamp refused and quietly took the painting home in a taxi, a moment he later described as a turning point in his life that made him realize he would not be very much interested in groups after that. This incident marked his departure from the collective avant-garde circles and signaled his shift away from what he termed retinal art, which he believed was intended only to please the eye. Instead, he sought to use art to serve the mind, a philosophy he developed after reading Max Stirner's philosophical tract The Ego and Its Own. While in Munich in 1912, he painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings and began work on The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass, a project that would take over a decade to complete. He was influenced by the works of Lucas Cranach the Elder in Munich's Alte Pinakothek, and the subdued ochre and brown color range he later employed can be traced back to this visit. The same year, he attended a performance of a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel's novel Impressions d'Afrique, which featured plots that turned in on themselves and humanoid machines, radically changing his approach to art.
When and where was Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp born?
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born on the 28th of July 1887 in Rouen, France. He was born into a family that produced four successful artists out of seven children.
What year did Marcel Duchamp submit Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 to the Salon des Indépendants?
Marcel Duchamp submitted his painting Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 to the Salon des Indépendants in 1912. The work depicted the mechanistic motion of a nude figure with superimposed facets and combined elements of Cubist fragmentation with Futurist dynamism.
Which artwork did Marcel Duchamp create in 1917 that shocked the art world?
Marcel Duchamp created the artwork Fountain in 1917 which shocked the art world when it was rejected from the Society of Independent Artists exhibit. Fountain is a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt and was selected in 2004 as the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 renowned artists and historians.
When did Marcel Duchamp die and where is he buried?
Marcel Duchamp died suddenly and peacefully in the early morning of the 2nd of October 1968 at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. He is buried in the Rouen Cemetery in Rouen, France with the epitaph D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meures.
What is the title of Marcel Duchamp's final major artwork and when was it installed?
The title of Marcel Duchamp's final major artwork is Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage. The work was posthumously and permanently installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969 after Duchamp's death.
In 1913, Duchamp installed a bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool in his studio, an idea originally conceived by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, though it was never submitted for any art exhibition and was eventually lost. This installation was not intended as art but rather to create atmosphere, as Duchamp stated he enjoyed looking at it just as he enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. The concept of the Readymade did not fully develop until 1915, when Duchamp began to question the very notion of art and the adoration of art, which he found unnecessary. Bottle Rack, a bottle-drying rack signed by Duchamp in 1914, is considered to be the first pure readymade, followed by Advance of the Broken Arm, a snow shovel also called Prelude to a Broken Arm, in 1915. The most famous of these works, Fountain, a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, shocked the art world in 1917 when it was rejected from the Society of Independent Artists exhibit despite the show's claim to be open to all. Duchamp resigned from the board of the Independent Artists in protest, and the controversy led to the publication of multiple Dada magazines in New York, including The Blind Man and Rongwrong. Fountain was selected in 2004 as the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 renowned artists and historians. Duchamp's approach to art was deeply influenced by the theoretical writings of Henri Poincaré, who postulated that the laws believed to govern matter were created solely by the minds that understood them. Duchamp's own art-science experiments, such as 3 Standard Stoppages, involved dropping three 1-meter lengths of thread onto prepared canvases from a height of 1 meter, varnishing them into place, and attaching them to glass, creating a piece that literally followed Poincaré's School of the Thread.
The Chess Master and the Pseudonym
Duchamp's fascination with chess began in 1918 when he took leave of the New York art scene and went to Buenos Aires, where he remained for nine months and often played chess. He carved his own chess set from wood with help from a local craftsman who made the knights. Upon his return to Paris in 1919, and then back to the United States in 1920, Duchamp was, in essence, no longer a practicing artist. Instead, his main interest was chess, which he studied for the rest of his life to the exclusion of most other activities. He reached the height of his ability in the early 1930s but realized that he had little chance of winning recognition in top-level chess, so he discovered correspondence chess and became a chess journalist, writing weekly newspaper columns. In 1932, he teamed with chess theorist Vitaly Halberstadt to publish L'opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées, a treatise that describes the Lasker-Reichhelm position, an extremely rare type of position that can arise in the endgame. Duchamp's pseudonym Rrose Sélavy, a pun that sounds like the French phrase Eros, such is life, emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray showing Duchamp dressed as a woman. He used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it, including Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy, a sculpture that consists of an oral thermometer, a couple of dozen small cubes of marble resembling sugar cubes, and a cuttlefish bone inside a birdcage. The inspiration for the name Rrose Sélavy has been thought to be Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's librarian at The Morgan Library & Museum, who worked there for a total of forty-three years. Duchamp's attitude toward his artistic career was complex, as he famously stated that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.
The Secret Final Masterpiece
Duchamp's final major art work, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage, surprised the art world, which believed he had given up art for chess 25 years earlier. He had worked secretly on the piece from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio while even his closest friends thought he had abandoned art. The tableau is visible only through a peep hole in a wooden door, revealing a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden, legs spread, and one hand holding a gas lamp in the air against a landscape backdrop. The torso of the nude figure is based on Duchamp's lover, the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, with whom he had an affair from 1946 to 1951. The work was posthumously and permanently installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, after Duchamp's death. Until 1969, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed Étant donnés, The Large Glass was thought to have been his last major work. Duchamp's secret work on Étant donnés was a testament to his belief that the creative act is not performed by the artist alone, but that the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications. This philosophy was expressed in his 1957 statement that the spectator adds his contribution to the creative act. Duchamp's final work was a culmination of his lifelong exploration of chance, mechanics, and the intersection of art and life, and it remains one of the most enigmatic and influential works of the 20th century.
The Legacy of the Anti-Artist
Duchamp died suddenly and peacefully in the early morning of the 2nd of October 1968 at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, after collapsing in his studio following an evening dining at home with his friends Man Ray and Robert Lebel. He is buried in the Rouen Cemetery, in Rouen, France, with the epitaph D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meures, which translates to Besides, it's always the others who die. Many critics consider Duchamp to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and his output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and rejected the emerging art market, through subversive anti-art. In 1958, Duchamp said of creativity that the creative act is not performed by the artist alone, but that the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications. The Prix Marcel Duchamp, established in 2000, is an annual award given to a young artist by the Centre Georges Pompidou. In 2004, as a testimony to the legacy of Duchamp's work to the art world, a panel of prominent artists and art historians voted Fountain the most influential artwork of the 20th century. Duchamp's influence extends beyond visual art to music, with his 1968 concert Reunion with John Cage, where they played a game of chess and composed Aleatoric music by triggering a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard. His attitude toward art was more favorable in his later years, as evidenced by his 1964 statement that the word art etymologically means to do, and that it is our society that creates purely artificial distinctions of being an artist. Duchamp's legacy is preserved in the open-access, interdisciplinary online journal Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, which was launched in 1999 and is published by CyberBOOK+ Publications, the digital publishing arm of the New York-based nonprofit Art Science Research Laboratory.