Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968
Nude Descending the Staircase / Nu descendant l'escalier
In order to view a large number of videos and slideshows on Duchamp, see Dada Movies.
MARCEL DUCHAMP - Journal Entries by Marvin Lazarus, 1959 - 1960
From the exhibition catalog 'INVENTING DUCHAMP', National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.See the beautiful photos of Duchamp at the time.
Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York at the Whitney through February 23, 1996
by John Perrault
Old but good.
Marcel Duchamp Slept Here
by Francis M. Naumann
During the winter of 2008 – 2009, the city of Buenos Aires hosted the first exhibition devoted to Marcel Duchamp held in Argentina, meant, essentially, to commemorate the artist's nine-month sojourn there in 1918 –-19. In 2010, the quiet Swiss hamlet of Cully, Switzerland, located on the north shore of Lake Geneva, hosted a symposium of Duchamp scholars to celebrate Duchamp's brief visit there and the inspiration he derived from a nearby waterfall that he incorporated into his last great work, the Etant donnés. In the year 2013, the seaside resort community of Herne Bay in Kent, England, is planning a three-week celebration to mark the centennial of Duchamp's stay there, where, during the summer of 1913, he served as a chaperone for his sister Yvonne who was studying English. And during the summer of 2012, the city of Munich, Germany, celebrated Duchamp's memorable visit to that city exactly 100 years earlier—with a discrete, elegant, and tasteful exhibition mounted at the Lenbachhaus, located just a few blocks from where Duchamp rented a room during his three visit to the Bavarian capital during the summer of 1913.
Putting modern art on the map
Will Gompertz
The story of modern art is in many ways the story of the 20th century. Art shaped and was shaped by events, people, ideas and innovations far beyond the narrow confines of its world. The modern skyscrapers of Manhattan, TS Eliot, Monty Python, the Sex Pistols, the iPhone and the great political, philosophical and social movements of the last hundred years all owe something to the art produced by Manet, Monet and those pioneering artists who followed in their wake. [...]
But there is perhaps one person above all others whose influence and personality dominate 21st-century artistic activity and critical thinking – an individual who was able to impose his will on the world without recourse to courting the media, becoming a celebrity, or having vast amounts of money. It is an incredible story within a story that starts on 2 April 1917; on this day, the American president, Woodrow Wilson, was on his feet in Washington DC urging Congress to make a formal declaration of war on Germany – a historic and world-changing moment.
Meanwhile, in New York City, three well-dressed, youngish men had emerged from a smart duplex apartment at 33 West 67th Street and were heading out into the city. They were oblivious to Wilson's exhortations, just as they were to the fact that their afternoon stroll would also have epoch-making consequences on a global scale. Art was about to change for ever.
The three friends walked and talked and smiled, occasionally breaking into restrained laughter. For the elegant Frenchman in the middle, flanked by his two stockier American companions, such excursions were always welcome. He was an artist who had not yet lived in the city for two years: long enough to know his way around, too short a time to have become blasé about its exciting, sensuous charms. The thrill of walking southwards through Central Park and down towards Columbus Circle never failed to lift his spirits; the spectacular sight of trees morphing into buildings was, to him, one of the wonders of the world.
The trio ambled down Broadway. As they approached midtown the sun disappeared behind impenetrable blocks of concrete and glass, bringing a spring chill to the air. The two Americans talked across their friend, whose hair was swept back exposing a high forehead and well-defined hairline. As they talked he thought. As they walked he stopped. He looked into the window of a store selling household goods and raised his hands, cupping his eyes to eliminate the reflection in the glass, revealing long fingers each of which was crowned with a perfectly manicured nail.
The pause was brief. He moved away from the storefront and looked up. His friends had gone. He glanced around, shrugged, lit a cigarette and crossed the road – not to find his companions, but to seek the sun's warmth. It was now 4.50pm, and a wave of anxiety washed over the Frenchman. Soon the stores would be closed and there was something he desperately needed to buy.
He walked a little faster. Someone shouted his name. He looked up. It was Walter Arensberg, the shorter of his two friends, who had supported the Frenchman's artistic endeavours in America almost from the moment he stepped off the boat on a windy June morning in 1915. Arensberg was beckoning him to cross back over the road, past Madison Square and on to Fifth Avenue. But the notary's son from Normandy had tilted his head upwards, his attention focused on an enormous concrete wedge. The Flatiron Building had captivated the French artist long before he arrived in New York, an early calling card from a city that he would go on to make his home.
His initial encounter with the high-rise building had come when it was first built and he was still living in Paris. He had seen a photograph of the 22-floor skyscraper taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1903 and reproduced in a French magazine. Now, 14 years later, both the Flatiron and Stieglitz, an American photographer-cum-gallery owner, had become part of his new-world life.
Arensberg called again, this time with a little frustration in his voice. The other man in their party laughed. Joseph Stella was an artist too. He understood his Gallic friend's precise yet wayward mind and appreciated his helplessness when confronted by an object of interest.
United again, the three made their way south until they reached 118 Fifth Avenue, the retail premises of JL Mott Iron Works, a plumbing specialist. Inside, Arensberg and Stella chatted, while their friend ferreted around among the bathrooms and doorhandles that were on display. After a few minutes he called the store assistant over and pointed to an unexceptional, flat-backed, white porcelain urinal. A Bedfordshire, the young lad said. The Frenchman nodded, Stella raised an eyebrow, and Arensberg, with an exuberant slap on the assistant's back, said he'd buy it.
Fountain / Fontaine (1917 - 1964) In 2004, this urinal was voted the single most influential piece of art in the 20th century.
They left the store. Arensberg and Stella called a taxi while the quiet, philosophical Frenchman remained on the sidewalk holding the heavy urinal. He was amused by the plan he had hatched for this porcelain pissotière, which he intended to use as a prank to upset the stuffy American art crowd. Looking down at its shiny white surface, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) smiled to himself: he thought it might cause a bit of a stir.
Duchamp took the urinal back to his studio, laid it down on its back and rotated it 180 degrees. He then signed and dated it in black paint on the left-hand side of its outer rim, using the pseudonym R Mutt 1917. His work was nearly done. There was only one job remaining: he needed to give his urinal a name. He chose Fountain. What had been, just a few hours before, a nondescript, ubiquitous urinal was now, by dint of Duchamp's actions, a work of art.
At least it was in Duchamp's mind. He believed he had invented a new form of sculpture: one where an artist could select any pre-existing mass-produced object with no obvious aesthetic merit, and by freeing it from its functional purpose – in other words making it useless – and by giving it a name and changing its context, turn it into a de facto artwork. He called this new form of art a readymade: a sculpture that was already made.
His intention was to enter Fountain into the 1917 Independents Exhibition, the largest show of modern art that had ever been mounted in the US. The exhibition itself was a challenge to America's art establishment. It was organised by the Society of Independent Artists, a group of free-thinking, forward-looking intellectuals who were making a stand against what they perceived to be the National Academy of Design's conservative and stifling attitude to modern art (just as the impressionists had done in a very similar fashion over 40 years earlier).
They declared that any artist could become a member of their society for the price of $1, and that any member could enter up to two works into the 1917 Independents Exhibition as long as they paid an additional charge of $5 per artwork. Duchamp was a director of the society and a member of the exhibition's organising committee. Which, at least in part, explains why he chose a pseudonym for his mischievous entry. Then again, it was Duchamp's nature to play on words, make jokes and poke fun at the pompous art world.
The name Mutt is a play on Mott, the store from which he bought the urinal. It is also said to be a reference to the daily comic strip Mutt and Jeff, which had first been published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907 with just a single character, A Mutt. Mutt was entirely motivated by greed, a dim-witted spiv with a compulsion to gamble and develop ill-conceived get-rich-quick schemes. Jeff, his gullible sidekick, was an inmate of a mental asylum. Given that Duchamp probably intended Fountain to be a critique of greedy, speculative collectors, it is an interpretation that would appear plausible. As does the suggestion that the initial R stands for Richard, a French colloquialism for moneybags. With Duchamp nothing was ever simple; he was, after all, a man who preferred chess to art.
Marcel Duchamp by Man Ray
Duchamp had other targets in mind when selecting a urinal as a readymade sculpture. He wanted to question the very notion of what constituted a work of art as decreed by academics and critics, whom he saw as the self-elected and largely unqualified arbiters of taste. His position was that if an artist said something was a work of art, having influenced its context and meaning, then it was a work of art, or at least demanded to be judged as such. He realised that although this was a fairly simple proposition to grasp, it would revolutionise art if accepted.
Until this point, the medium – canvas, marble, wood or stone – had dictated to an artist how he or she could go about making a work of art. The medium always came first, and only then would the artist be allowed to project his or her ideas on to it via painting, sculpting or drawing. Duchamp wanted to flip the hierarchy. He considered the medium to be secondary: first and foremost was the idea. Art could be constructed from, and mediated through, anything. That was a big idea.
The hidden meanings contained within Fountain don't end in Duchamp's wordplay and provocation. He specifically chose a urinal because as an object it has plenty to say, much of it erotic, an aspect of life that Duchamp frequently explored in his work. It doesn't, for example, take much imagination to see its sexual connotations when presented upside down. That allusion may or may not have been understood by those who sat alongside Duchamp on the organising committee; either way his co-directors were unimpressed. Fountain was rejected and banned from the 1917 Independents Exhibition. The feeling among the majority of the society's directorate (there were some, including Arensberg and Duchamp, who argued passionately in its favour) was that Mr Mutt was taking the piss.
Which of course he was. Duchamp was challenging his fellow society directors and the organisation's constitution, which he had helped to write. He was daring them to realise the idea that they had collectively set out, which was to take on the art establishment and the authoritarian voice of the conservative National Academy of Design with a new liberal, progressive set of principles. The conservatives won the battle, but as we now know, spectacularly lost the war. R Mutt's exhibit was deemed too offensive and vulgar on the grounds that it was a urinal, a subject that was not considered a suitable topic for discussion among America's puritan middle classes. Team Duchamp immediately resigned from the board. Fountain was never seen in public, or ever again. Nobody knows what happened to the Frenchman's pseudonymous work. It has been suggested that it was smashed by one of the disgusted committee, thus solving the problem of whether to show it or not. Then again, a couple of days later, at his 291 gallery, Stieglitz took a photograph of the notorious object, but that might have been a hastily remade version of the readymade. That too has disappeared.
But the great power of ideas is that you cannot uninvent them. The Stieglitz photograph was crucial. Having Fountain photographed by one of the art world's most respected practitioners, who also happened to run an influential gallery in Manhattan, was important. It was an endorsement of the work by the avant garde, and provided a photographic record: documentary proof of the object's existence. No matter how many times the naysayers smashed Duchamp's work, he could go back down to JL Mott's, buy a new one and simply copy the layout of the R Mutt signature from Stieglitz's image. And that's exactly what happened. There are 15 Duchamp-endorsed copies of Fountain to be found in collections around the world.
When one of those copies is put on display it is weird to see people taking it so seriously. You see hordes of earnest exhibition visitors craning their heads around the object, staring at it for ages, standing back, looking at it from all angles. It's a urinal! It's not even the original. The art is in the idea, not the object.
The reverence with which Fountain is now treated would have amused Duchamp, who chose it specifically for its lack of aesthetic appeal (something he called anti-retinal). The original readymade sculpture was really only ever intended as a provocative prank, but has gone on to become perhaps the single most influential artwork of the 20th century. The ideas it embodied directly influenced several major art movements, including dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art and conceptualism. Duchamp is unquestionably the most revered and referenced artist among today's contemporary artists, from Jeff Koons to Ai Weiwei. [...]
guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 August 2012 21.35 BST
The Influence of Marcel Duchamp on Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton & Peter Blake
The Barbican's current blockbuster show, "The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns", focuses on Marcel Duchamp's cultural legacy by tracing his relationship to four great modern masters; composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The show has inspired us to take at look at other great Duchamp-ions...
The art and ideas of French painter, sculptor and writer Marcel Duchamp, perhaps more than those of any other 20th century artist, have radically altered our understanding of what constitutes an object of art. From his early experiments with Cubism and his association with Dada and Surrealism, to his conception of the ready-made, Duchamp refused to accept the standards and practices of an established art system. Refusing to repeat himself or develop a recognizable style, Duchamp paved the way for later movements such as Pop Art.
Artrepublic, March 23. 2013
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Happy 125th Birthday Marcel Duchamp!
Well illustrated article from the Huffington Post. July 28, 2012
Anne Sanouillet and Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1963
Perhaps no one was less dogmatically dadaist, yet more spiritually dada, than Marcel Duchamp. While the dada-surrealist explosion was for many the catalytic agent of a discovery -- for example, for the prime movers of the review Littérature -- and was for so many others a break which gave them a literary life rather cheaply, it is evident that, through dada and surrealism, Duchamp has remained himself. His interior evolution, begun even before cubism, bears the mark of no known influence. In Duchamp are joined the essential elements of the dada revolt: a total absence of principles or prejudices, things moveover being equal and permitted. "There is no solution," says Duchamp, "because there isn't any problem." This sense of "umor" is dada, as well as the affection for puns and spoonerisms which are so perfectly suited to transcending the comic. "My irony," says Duchamp, "is that of indifference: meta-irony."
Michel Sanouillet, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, 1989
Marcel Duchamp - 1917
Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. It was intimately and consciously involved with 'literature.' It was a sort of nihilism to which I am still very sympathetic. It was a way to get out of a state of mind--to avoid being influenced by one's immediate environment, or by the past: to get away from cliches—to get free. The 'blank' force of dada was very salutary. It told you 'don't forget you are not quite so "blank" as you think you are.' Usually a painter confesses he has his landmarks. He goes from landmark to landmark. Actually he is a slave to landmarks—even to contemporary ones.
Dada was very serviceable as a purgative. And I think I was thoroughly conscious of this at the time and of a desire to effect a purgation in myself. I recall certain conversations with Picabia along these lines. He had more intelligence than most of our contemporaries. The rest were either for or against Cézanne. There was no thought of anything beyond the physical side of painting. No notion of freedom was taught.
Marcel Duchamp, in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946.
Two years before Marcel Duchamp's death in 1968, the Belgian director, Jean Antoine, filmed an interview with the artist in his Neuilly studio in the summer of 1966.
Apart from being broadcast on Belgian television, the interview has been shown several times to the mainly student audience of the association, but the text has never been published.
This transcript, edited for The Art Newspaper, is the most faithful rendering possible of the way Marcel Duchamp expressed himself. It is a remarkable document that gives us a fresh and immediate insight into his mind.
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Marcel Duchamp at 125
In celebration of the 125th anniversary of Marcel Duchamp's birth - he was born in Normandy on July 28, 1887 - we look back at curator Joan Rothfuss' essay on the Dadaist provocateur from our 2005 publication, Bits & Pieces Put Together To Present A Semblance Of A Whole: Walker Art Center Collections.
Among the most radical aspects of Marcel Duchamp's practice - which is a fountainhead in the history of twentieth-century art - was his insistence that the most interesting art springs from a nimble mind rather than a skilled hand. Operating out of a spirit of serious play he used chance techniques and quasi-mechanical processes to create his works, sidestepping the personal and the handmade.
He made so many variations, versions, and replicas of his objects that conventional distinctions between "original" and "reproduction" collapse like a house of cards. This activity was taken to its logical limits in his notorious "readymades" functional objects without aesthetic pretension (such as a urinal), which he simply purchased and designated as his artwork (and which, today, exist only as copies, since all the "original" readymades have been lost). Duchamp's work developed alongside and against the formal explorations of Cubism, clearing an alternate conceptual path that has been followed by artists from Jasper Johns to members of Fluxus to Robert Gober.
In 1935 Duchamp wrote to a patron that he was thinking of making "an album of approximately all the things I produced." The next year he embarked on the project, which lasted more than thirty years, and produced nearly 300 albums containing dozens of two– and three-–dimensional reproductions of his works an artist's version of a salesman's sample kit. The albums, which he titled De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy), are like miniature retrospectives of his career in personal, portable museums. When opened, the box becomes architectural, with three vertical "walls" and a "floor," and its unbound contents can be examined in any order the viewer wishes. The reproductions were supervised by Duchamp but made by others, using techniques (such as collotype, a labor-intensive process used to reproduce photographs) that reside somewhere between the mechanical and the handmade.
La Boîte-en-valise, 1936-1941/1968
Authorship is confused by the work's ambiguous attribution (to either Duchamp or his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy), and we are even given two ways to think about its creation: the passive "from" and the active "by." This work is often cited as the catalyst for artists' burgeoning interesting in multiples during the 1960s, and it certainly inspired Fluxus artist George Maciunas to create unorthodox anthologies like the Fluxkit, which was packaged in a briefcase. Although made in multiple copies, such works were not seen as secondary documents. As Duchamp noted drily in 1952, "Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase."
Joan Rothfuss in Walker Magazine (July 25, 2012)
Some Ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp
Bottle-rack - Porte-bouteilles (1914/1964)
Bicycle Wheel - Roue de bicyclette (1913/1964)
Hidden Noise / A bruit secret
In Advance of the Broken Arm
Comb / Peigne - 1916: "Quelques gouttes de hauteur n'ont rien à faire avec la sauvagerie"
Underwood
Marcus Moore: Marcel Duchamp: "Twisting Memory for the Fun of It" or a Form of Retroactive Interference? — Recalling the Impacts of Leaving Home on the Ready-made
In the 1960s, Marcel Duchamp, arguably the most influential artist of the twentieth-century, came into real prominence and unprecedented fame. During this period he gave many interviews in which he often took a capricious stance. One topic was crucial: his comments concerning the origin of readymade works of art—mass-produced everyday objects that he first selected in 1913-1914 in Paris, and then after leaving in 1915 to New York he located other examples.
In interviews he referred to the ready-made as "a happy idea, but as material objects they signify and embody Duchamp's leaving home. When leaving home, an individual works through an acculturation process during which they are never truly settled. This article considers the fate of material objects in relation to the veracity of Duchamp's memory 50 years after the fact in the 1960s, a time when the artist was also the progenitor of a postmodern position.
Some of Duchamp's Works
Le Grand verre (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even / La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même)
The Green Box / La Boîte verte (whose contents have been published in Duchamp du signe suivi de Notes)
Tonsure. Photo by Man Ray - 1919
Elena Filipovic:
One could say that everything begins and ends in Marcel Duchamp's studio. His first New York studio is perhaps best known from a series of small and grainy photos, some of them out of focus. They were taken sometime between 1916 and 1918 by a certain Henri-Pierre Roché, a good friend of Duchamp. Roché was a writer, not a professional photographer, clearly. He was the same guy who would go on to write Jules et Jim, arguably a far better novel than these are photographs. But their aesthetic quality was not really what mattered. Duchamp was attached to those little pictures. He kept them and went back to them years later, working on them and then leaving them out for us like his laundry in the picture. Or like clues in a detective novel.
Elena Filipovic is a writer and independent curator. She was co-curator, with Adam Szymczyk, of the 5th Berlin Biennial, When things cast no shadow (2008) and co-edited The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe (2006). Recently she curated the first major solo exhibition of Marcel Duchamp's work in Latin America, at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paolo and the Fundacion Proa in Buenos Aires (2008-2009). She is tutor of theory/exhibition history at De Appel postgraduate curatorial training program and advisor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She is also currently guest curator of the Satellite Program of the Jeu de Paume in Paris for 2009-2010 and is completing a PhD at Princeton University on Marcel Duchamp's exhibition and installation practice.
Sophie Stévance - Les opérations musicales mentales de Duchamp. De la "musique en creux"
(Marcel Duchamp World Community)
Photo : Julian Wasser
This famous photo of the chess match between the very properly dressed elder Marcel Duchamp and a nude Eve Babitz at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 has become an emblem of the Pacific Standard Time Festival. Not only had Duchamp attended the famous 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" in Paris, which had caused a riot, but the artist's young, buxom Pasadena chess opponent was the daughter of Sol Babitz, a violinist who was a pioneer in the early music movement, another close member of Stravinsky's Los Angeles circle and an important figure in Los Angeles musical lore.
About thirty of Duchamp's works.
Self Portrait (1958)
From Notes on the Infra-Slim
a transformer designed to utilise the slight, wasted energies such as:
the excess of pressure on an electric switch
the exhalation of tobacco smoke
the growth of hair, of other body hair and of the nails
the fall of urine or excrement
movements of fear, astonishment, boredom, anger
laughter
dropping of tears
demonstrative gestures of hand, feet, nervous ticks
forbidding glances
falling over with surprise
stretching, yawning, sneezing
ordinary spitting and of blood
vomiting
ejaculation
unruly hair, cowlicks
the sound of nose-blowing, snoring
fainting
whistling, singing
sighs, etc [...]
Dust Raising - Elevage de poussière (Photo by Man Ray - 1920)
Why Not Sneeze?
Marcel Duchamp - John Cage: Reunion
Actually, Cage hadn't lost every single match with Duchamp. There was one that he definitely won, after a fashion. It happened in Toronto, in 1968. Cage had invited Duchamp and Teeny to be with him on the stage. All they had to do was play chess as usual, but the chessboard was wired and each move activated or cut off the sound coming live from several musicians (David Tudor was one of them). They played until the room emptied. Without a word said, Cage had managed to turn the chess game (Duchamp's ostensive refusal to work) into a working performance. And the performance was a musical piece. In pataphysical terms, Cage had provided an imaginary solution to a nonexistent problem: whether life was superior to art. Playing chess that night extended life into art –or vice versa. All it took was plugging in their brains to a set of instruments, converting nerve signals into sounds. Eyes became ears, moves music. Reunion was the name of the piece. It happened to be their endgame.
Teeny Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage in Toronto, March 5, 1968
 Unpublished poster of the meeting. (Private collection)
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The year 1999 marks the thirty-first anniversary of Reunion, a performance in which games of chess determined the form and acoustical ambience of a musical event. The concert—held at the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto, Canada— began at 8:30 on the evening of 5 March 1968, and concluded at approximately 1:00 the next morning. Principal players were John Cage, who conceived (but did not actually "compose") the work; Marcel Duchamp and his wife Alexina (Teeny); and composers David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor and I, who also designed and constructed the electronic chessboard, completing it only the night before the performance. Except for a brief curtain call with Merce Cunningham and Dance Company in Buffalo, NY the following month [1], Duchamp made his last public appearance in the role of chess master— in Reunion.
Misconceptions
In the intervening 31 years, more fiction than fact regarding Reunion has appeared in documents about Cage and Duchamp, even from the pens of authors with prestigious reputations. Nicolas Slonimsky wrote in the 1978 edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians: He [Cage] also became interested in chess and played demonstration games with Marcel Duchamps [sic], the famous painter turned chessmaster, on chessboards designed by Lowell Cross to operate on aleatory principles with the aid of a computer and a system of laser rays. [2]
By Lowell Cross
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Performed by Eliza McCarthy, prepared piano.
"Three Minute Wonder" by Mike Figgis. Must-see video on and about Duchamp's "Fountain".
It's definitely true that some things are funnier in English than they are in French and vice versa. I mean Duchamp was very well aware of this. Certain of his puns are totally untranslatable. Or they may be translatable but they still don't have the impact in translation because there'll be a nuance, a nuance or maybe just through French usage that will not translate or will be not come across.
Copley's relationships with the surrealists were some of the most important and formative on his development as a person and an artist. He remained close friends with René Magritte, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and of course Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp died on October 2, 1968. He had been living primarily in New York since Copley met him in 1947. Copley was a frequent visitor to Duchamp's studio on Fourteenth Street once he returned to New York after his years in France. Upon Duchamp's death The William and Noma Copley Foundation (later the Cassandra Foundation) gave Marcel Duchamp's last work, "Etant Donnée" to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it is still on view. Copley had been one of the few people who knew that Duchamp was working on such a piece, and a major supporter of the work. William Copley's moving obituary of Duchamp that appeared in the New York Times on October 13, 1968 reflects the importance that Marcel had in his life:
Because I knew him, I find it inconceivable to speak of Marcel Duchamp as no longer living. For those who missed the point of his greatest statement, he has not been among them since he officially ceased painting years ago. Though he did not die that long ago he did define eternity, and he entered immortality at the time he left the easel and took art with him into creative life.
Had he been unwilling to share the experience, this would have been a fulsome obituary- and this is not an obituary.
Rrose Sélavy (1921) by Man Ray. The name is a humorous pun on the words "Eros, c'est la vie", which means "sex, that's life".
L.H.O.O.Q.
Here is the story of this "work of art" : in 1919, at the height of Dada activities in Paris, Duchamp took an inexpensive colour reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, enhanced her smile with a moustache and goatee, on which he pencilled five letters : L.H.O.O.Q. (a pun -- "Elle a chaud au cul"), although Duchamp himself once politely translated it as "There is fire down below".
Duchamp's fellow dada co-conspirator, Francis Picabia, hoped to publish it in his magazine 391, couldn't have waited for the artifact to come back on time from New York, so he himself drew the moustache on Mona Lisa but forgot the goatee! But Picabia wrote at the bottom "tableau Dada par Marcel Duchamp". Duchamp of course was the first one to discover the missing goatee and this became a subject for his teasing of his friend.
Some twenty years passed before he would be given the opportunity to rectify this omission. In the early 1940's, the original Picabia replica of L.H.O.O.Q. mysteriously resurfaced, found in a bookstore by Jean Arp, another dada artist. Duchamp seized the opportunity to "complete" the image by carefully adding in black ink the goatee and using a blue fountain pen to write "moustache par Picabia / barbiche par Marcel Duchamp / avril 1942".
by Jeffrey Shivar
The 1913 art exhibit that scandalized New York
Article in Ephemeral New York on the Armory Show.
"Chaos at Armory Show" by Jerry Saltz
(published April 1, 2012 in New York Magazine)
Happy Birthday Eadweard Muybridge!
Interesting article + a short film about the photographer who perhaps inspired Duchamp's Nu descendant un escalier.
(April 9, 2012)
Miami Gallery Acquires Rare Marcel Duchamp Print
AffordableArt101 Fine Prints announced the acquisition of a rare lithograph by French artist Marcel Duchamp. Printed in 1938 and issued in Paris by the deluxe art revue "XXe Siecle", the piece is called "Monte Carlo Bond" and is also known as "Obligation Monte Carlo". Measuring 12 1/2 x 9 inches, the lithograph shows the infamous portrait of Duchamp taken by photographer Man Ray, superimposed onto a roulette wheel, with a casino gaming table in the background. [...]
(November 14, 2012)
Man Ray - Portraits of Marcel Duchamp (1924)
Marcel Duchamp's Dandyism : The Dandy, The Flaneur and The Beginnings of Mass Culture in New York during the 1910s
Marcel Duchamp World Community (MarcelDuchamp.Net)
The Marcel Duchamp World Community Web Site offers a neutral, unbiased, internet location for the meeting and exchange of ideas among the international community of people interested in Marcel Duchamp studies. The site welcomes news, events, publications, papers -- anything related to Marcel Duchamp and his larger circle of friends in Dada and Surrealism.
The Artworks of Marcel Duchamp
in 15 themes + a biography on WahooArt (an exceptional site).
Dada without Duchamp / Duchamp without Dada
An intelligent and well documented article by professor Marjorie Perloff.
Encounter with Marcel Duchamp
Includes a reproduction and an explanation of Étant donné, the important dates in Duchamp's life as well as other unpublished treasures.
Étant donnés (Given)
Étant Donné Marcel Duchamp
Presentation and table of contents of the excellent periodical devoted to Duchamp, Étant Donné.
Marcel Duchamp and the Machine
by Alan Foljambe
An early example of Duchamp's attraction to machine form is Chocolate Grinder.
Neuf Moules Mâlic, 1914-1915
Marcel Duchamp 'FOUNTAIN' - IS IT ART?
This is the second of four short films made for Channel 4 / Tate modern about modern and conceptual art. We took the art and put it in a different space or context and asked people to comment. In this episode we took Marcel Duchamp's 'FOUNTAIN' and placed it in a public toilet. The mandatory, 'is it art' discussion followed!
Trébuchet (Trap) - 1917
a coat rack the artist ironically nailed to the floor of his studio in reference to a critical chess position.
50 cc of Paris air - 1919
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Fresh Widow, 1920/1964
Constructed by a carpenter in accordance with Marcel Duchamp's instructions, Fresh Widow is a small version of the double doors commonly called a French window. Duchamp was fascinated by themes of sight and perception; here, the expectation of a view through windowpanes is thwarted by opaque black leather, which Duchamp insisted "be shined everyday like shoes." Windows had an important place in the work of Duchamp, who stated, "I used the idea of the window to take a point of departure, as... I used a brush, or I used a form, a specific form of expression.... I could have made 20 windows with a different idea in each one...."
Puns and wordplay were also central to Duchamp's work. By changing a few letters, Duchamp transforms "French window" -- which the work resembles in form— -- into "Fresh Widow," a reference to the recent abundance of widows of World War I fighters.
Rotoreliefs
Several editions were issued: 1935 Paris, 1953 New York, 1959 Paris, 1963 New York, 1965 Milan.
Prière de toucher, 1947
Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp
Interactive animated chronicle which brings to life the ideas and influences at the source of Duchamp's art.
Marcel Duchamp News - The New York Times
News about Marcel Duchamp, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times.
Witch's Cradle (1943)
Rare silent film by Maya Deren with Marcel Duchamp.
Part 1
Part 2
Her memoirs, published for the first time in Britain, portray a desperate liaison. Excerpts in The Independent, 11/02/08.
A website containing 9 superb photos of Marcel Duchamp or his works.
An enormous if somewhat repetitive collection of Duchampiana.
The Allen Ginsberg Project
On the occasion of the 43rd anniversary of Duchamp's death, an excellent collection of interview footage and Duchampiana.
As an artist, Marcel Duchamp is hard to classify – but he almost certainly wanted it that way. During his career, just when everyone thought they knew what he was, a Cubist, for example, or a Surrealist, he switched to another style or no-style, left town or the country or stopped being an artist and went off and played chess in tournaments.
Duchamp would have been disgusted...
This bottle of perfume « Belle Haleine - Eau de Voilette » and its cardbord container signed Marcel Duchamp were sold at auction for 7,9 million euros to the public's applause.
Duchamp's Last Ready-made
Marcel Duchamp flicked the ashes of his cigar into this urn during the Rrose Sélavy dinner on May 15, 1965. Click to see the menu.
This photo was on the inside cover of the first issue of the Revue de l'Association pour l'Etude du Mouvement Dada (October 1965). The urn is a provoked ready-made which contains Marcel Duchamp's ashes, fallen directly from his cigar during the Rrose Sélavy dinner which reunited thirty members of the association around Duchamp on Saturday, May 15, 1965 at the Victoria restaurant in Paris. Since the minutes recording the contents of the urn were read by the president, [Michel Sanouillet] and then burned in the urn at Duchamp's request, its contents remain mysterious.
Among those present were, from left to right, Jacques Fraenkel (Théodore Fraenkel's nephew), Marcel Duchamp, Mme Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia and Rodrigo de Zayas (Marius de Zayas's son).
Photo Jampierre
