Marcel Duchamp

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcel Duchamp walked into a New York exhibition hall in 1917 and submitted a urinal for display. He had signed it with a pseudonym, "R. Mutt", and titled it Fountain. The show committee declared it was not art and turned it away. Duchamp resigned from the board in protest. Nearly ninety years later, a panel of five hundred prominent artists and historians voted Fountain the most influential artwork of the 20th century.

  How does a man build that kind of legacy while spending most of his adult life playing chess? What was he actually doing during those decades when the art world thought he had retired? And why did he seem to spend so much energy trying to destroy the very idea of art?

  Duchamp was born Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp on the 28th of July 1887, in a family that would produce no fewer than four working artists. He died on the 2nd of October 1968, after a quiet dinner with friends Man Ray and Robert Lebel, having completed a secret major work just two years before, one that astonished an art world certain he had long since stopped. The full arc of that life, from a schoolboy in Rouen to a figure whose epitaph reads "Besides, it's always the others who die," is one of the stranger stories in modern culture.

• 2. A Family of Artists

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  Eugene and Lucie Duchamp had seven children, and of those, four went on to become successful artists. Jacques Villon, born in 1875, became a painter and printmaker. Raymond Duchamp-Villon, born in 1876, became a sculptor. Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, born in 1889, became a painter. Marcel was the middle of these four, and he was particularly close to his sister Suzanne.

  At eight years old, Duchamp began attending the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen. Two classmates from that school became lasting friends and well-known artists in their own right: Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont. The coincidence of talent in that classroom is striking.

  He studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, though he preferred billiards to attending classes. In 1905, he began compulsory military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment, working for a printer in Rouen. That stint at the print shop was not wasted time. He learned typography and printing processes that would surface again in his later work. His eldest brother Jacques held membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, and through that connection, Duchamp's work appeared in the 1908 Salon d'Automne and the following year in the Salon des Indépendants.

• 3. The Staircase Scandal

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  Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, completed in 1912, was the work that first brought Duchamp real controversy. The painting layered superimposed facets to suggest mechanistic motion, drawing on the fragmentation of the Cubists and the dynamism of the Futurists at once.

  When Duchamp first submitted it to the Cubist Salon des Indépendants, Albert Gleizes asked Duchamp's brothers to persuade him to withdraw the piece or at least paint over its title and rename it. The brothers brought the message, and Duchamp refused quietly. Art historian Peter Brooke later argued that the real dispute was not whether to hang the work at all, but whether it belonged with the Cubist group. Duchamp's own memory of the moment was sharp: "I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that."

  The painting had its public debut at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in 1912, the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain. Duchamp then submitted it to the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, where American audiences, accustomed to realistic art, were scandalized. The controversy at the Armory Show helped secure the sale of all four of his paintings in that exhibition, and the proceeds financed his move to the United States in 1915.

• 4. Readymades and the Object as Idea

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  The concept of the Readymade grew from a simple question: what if the act of selection was the artistic act, rather than the act of making? Bottle Rack, a bottle-drying rack signed by Duchamp in 1914, is considered the first pure Readymade. In Advance of the Broken Arm, a snow shovel, followed in 1915. The idea was to choose objects, as Duchamp explained, that would attract neither by beauty nor by ugliness. "To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see."

  In 1913, before the concept had a name, Duchamp had already mounted a bicycle wheel upside down on a stool in his studio. He placed it there not as art but as atmosphere: "I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace." The wheel was eventually lost. The idea behind it was not.

  In 1919, Duchamp made a parody of the Mona Lisa by adding a mustache and goatee to a cheap reproduction, then inscribed it L.H.O.O.Q. When spoken aloud quickly in French, the letters sound like "Elle a chaud au cul," which translates roughly as "She has a hot ass." Duchamp gave a loose translation of the inscription as "there is fire down below" in a late interview with Arturo Schwarz. Researcher Rhonda Roland Shearer later argued that the reproduction itself was not a standard copy but one modeled partly on Duchamp's own face.

  Fountain's commercial afterlife tells its own story. On the 17th of November 1999, a version owned by critic and gallerist Arturo Schwarz sold at Sotheby's New York for $1,762,500. The record was later surpassed at Christie's Paris, where Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, the readymade perfume bottle in its original box, sold for $11.5 million.

• 5. The Large Glass

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  Duchamp worked on The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, known as The Large Glass, from 1915 to 1923. He executed the piece on two panes of glass using lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. The work combines chance procedures with meticulous perspective studies.

  The seeds of the piece reached back to a 1912 performance of a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel's 1910 novel Impressions d'Afrique, which Duchamp attended in Paris. The production featured plots that turned in on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets, and humanoid machines. Duchamp credited the drama with having radically changed his approach and having inspired the Large Glass directly.

  To work on the piece without financial pressure, Duchamp took a job as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris in 1913. He studied math and physics during this period. The theoretical writings of Henri Poincaré particularly drew him in. Poincaré had written in 1902 that science can reach only the relations between things, not the things themselves, and that no theory could be considered true in any absolute sense. Duchamp absorbed this: he came to regard any interpretation of his art as the creation of the person formulating it, not as truth. After immigrating to the United States in 1915, he worked on the piece with financial support from art patrons Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, who had agreed to accept The Large Glass as payment in lieu of rent for his studio.

  The work was formally declared "Unfinished" in 1923. When it was returned from its first public exhibition, the glass cracked inside its shipping crate. Duchamp repaired the major crack but left the smaller cracks intact, accepting the chance element as part of the piece. A companion publication, The Green Box, containing notes Duchamp had written for the work, was published separately and intended to complement the visual experience. Until the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed Étant donnés in 1969, most believed The Large Glass was his last major work.

• 6. Chess Above All Else

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  In 1918, Duchamp left New York and went to Buenos Aires for nine months. He carved his own chess set from wood while he was there, getting help from a local craftsman to shape the knights. When he returned to Paris in 1923, chess had effectively displaced art as his central activity. He studied the game for the rest of his life to the exclusion of most other pursuits.

  He designed the poster for the 1925 Third French Chess Championship and competed in it, finishing at fifty percent with a 3-3 record plus two draws, earning the title of chess master. He went on to compete in French Championships and in the Chess Olympiads from 1928 to 1933, favoring hypermodern openings such as the Nimzo-Indian. His first wife found his absorption so distressing that she glued his chess pieces to the board.

  By the early 1930s, Duchamp concluded that he had little chance of reaching the top level of competitive play. He shifted toward correspondence chess and chess journalism, writing weekly newspaper columns. He was direct about the appeal: "Chess is much purer than art in its social position. It cannot be commercialized." In 1932, he and chess theorist Vitaly Halberstadt published a treatise, L'opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées, analyzing the Lasker-Reichhelm position, an extremely rare endgame configuration, using enneagram-like charts that fold upon themselves.

  In 1943, Duchamp composed an endgame problem included in the announcement for a gallery exhibition, printed on translucent paper with the inscription "White to play and win." Grandmasters and endgame specialists have since studied it, with most concluding that the problem has no solution. The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, an associate of Duchamp, used the theme of the endgame as the narrative device for his 1957 play of the same name.

• 7. Alter Egos and Hidden Rooms

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  In 1921, a series of photographs by Man Ray showed Duchamp dressed as a woman. From this emerged a persona he called Rrose Sélavy, a name that functions as a pun on the French phrase Eros, c'est la vie, meaning "Eros, such is life." The name has also been read as arroser la vie, meaning "to make a toast to life," and as a loose anagram for "Sorry, Elsa." Throughout the 1920s, Man Ray and Duchamp continued to photograph Sélavy together. The persona appeared on at least one sculpture, Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? from 1921, an assemblage containing an oral thermometer, marble cubes shaped to look like sugar cubes, and a cuttlefish bone inside a birdcage. Sélavy also appeared on the label of the readymade perfume bottle Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, and as the byline on the film Anémic Cinéma in 1926.

  From 1922, the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos incorporated the Sélavy name into a series of aphorisms and puns. Desnos tried to portray Rrose Sélavy as a long-lost aristocrat and rightful queen of France. Aphorism 13 paid direct homage: "Rrose Sélavy knows the merchant of salt well," a phrase whose French pronunciation approximates "Marcel Duchamp" in reverse syllables. In 1939, a collection of these aphorisms was published under the Sélavy name as Poils et coups de pieds en tous genres.

  While friends and the wider art world believed he had given up art entirely, Duchamp was working in secret in his Greenwich Village studio from 1946 to 1966 on his final major piece, Étant donnés. The tableau is visible only through a peephole in a wooden door. The nude figure inside is based on the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, with whom Duchamp had a relationship from 1946 to 1951. When the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed the work in 1969, a year after his death, it astonished critics who had assumed his artistic life had ended decades earlier. He and his second wife, Alexina Sattler, whom he married in 1954, had kept the secret until the end.

• 8. What Art Was For

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  In a 1968 BBC interview conducted by Joan Bakewell, just months before his death, Duchamp compared art with religion and said he wished to do away with art the same way many had done away with religion. He told Bakewell that the word art, etymologically, simply means "to do," that it refers to any activity at all, and that the distinction of calling someone an artist was a purely artificial creation of society.

  This was consistent with a definition he had worked out over decades. For his talk "On the Creative Act," delivered to the American Federation of the Arts in Houston, Duchamp described what he called the art coefficient: "an arithmetic relationship between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed." He located the completing act of any artwork not in the artist but in the spectator: "The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

  He argued that the artist functions as a medium rather than a conscious decision-maker: "All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out."

  Duchamp had little appetite for the art market that formed around his work and around the movements he influenced. He once turned down an offer of $10,000 per year from an art gallery in exchange for all of his yearly production, preferring to keep working on The Large Glass on his own terms. The Prix Marcel Duchamp, established in 2000, is now an annual award given by the Centre Georges Pompidou to a young artist, and the journal Tout-Fait, launched in 1999, continues to publish peer-reviewed research on his work and circle, emphasizing the connections between art, science, and media studies that Duchamp spent a lifetime drawing together.