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Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968

Anne Sanouillet and Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1963

Marcel Duchamp in Andy Warhol's studio

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

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.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – The Collection –––- An impressive slideshow of 38 works by Duchamp.


Marcel Duchamp - Tonsure. Photo par Man Ray - 1921

Marcel Duchamp's Work

Educational Dossiers - Collections of the Centre Pompidou

Sophie Stévance - Les opérations musicales mentales de Duchamp. De la "musique en creux"


Trébuchet - 1917

Duchampian Images

(Marcel Duchamp World Community)


Slideshows on Duchamp

(+ on Dadaismo, etc. in Spanish)


Jeu d'échecs avec Marcel Duchamp

This film records an in-depth interview with Duchamp which took place five years before his death, at the time of his first ever one-man show (at the Pasadena Art Museum). It records for posterity Duchamp talking in French about his life, his ideas on art, why he chose to continue living in America after fleeing France in 1915, and why he virtually abandoned his work as an artist in 1923. An engaging dialogue takes place between Duchamp and film-maker Jean-Marie Drot as they go around the Pasadena show, with the artist commenting on the exhibits and using them to explain the various stages of the development of his work. This is punctuated by the games of chess, which were for Duchamp a passion and a metaphor for the mental discipline he applied to his art. In this film we gain a rare glimpse of him talking with humour and insight about his ideas, and living up to the myth of the artist-philosopher that has grown up around him.

Jeu d'échecs avec Marcel Duchamp was filmed late 1963 in Pasadena and New York for the Radio Télévision Française (RTF); first broadcast on 8 June 1964 and then shown at the International Festival of Artistic Films and Films of Art (Bergamo, 19 September 1964). The English version was presented in a television broadcast in September 1964 in the 'Art and Man' Series.

"The goal of chess is to mate. We can thus see this picture as the record of a tableau vivant of a word play. Since Freud, vulgar theorists have held that chess and art, to pick two examples, are sublimations of sex. Given Duchamp's attitude towards wordplay versus theory, it is better to see his life long interest in chess and eroticism as a sublimation of this picture's wordplay! Given that the double meaning of "mate" does not exist in French, at last we have a satisfactory explanation of why Duchamp had to emigrate to America. In other words: in the beginning was the word; in the center the pun."

From: A Pun Among Friends by Steven B. Gerrard
Marcel Duchamp (1963) in UbuWeb Sound

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.

Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic

MoMA | The Collection | Marcel Duchamp

About thirty of Duchamp's works.


Marcel Duchamp Interviews

An impressive collection of extraordinary videos on or about or with Duchamp (and sometimes Maya Deren! in "Witch's Cradle") on YouTube.


Marcel Duchamp in his Own Words (1978)

Part 1 from the Ideologic atelier liber de idei

Duchamp's comments on his life, ideas and "art", a feast for the eye and for the ear.


Marcel Duchamp in his Own Words, Even

Another incredible link to several short films on, by, or about Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Maya Deren and even Salvador Dali: TVClip.BIZ


Marcel Duchamp's Fountain

Segment from Making Sense of Modern Art, a guide to modern and contemporary works in SFMOMA's permanent collection. The program's rich-media format enables you to "zoom in" on full-screen details of individual artworks, explore excerpts from archival videos and films, and listen to commentary by artists, art historians, critics, and collectors.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art


Marcel Duchamp

Distant mirrors and more than a dozen YouTube video clips about Duchamp and other dada subjects.


Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum

A podcast from the Norton Simon Museum.


Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia at Tate Modern

Video from YouTube.


Marcel Duchamp - Various Statements and Interviews

The Creative Act (7:28)
A paper presented to the convention of the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas, April 1957


The Creative Act (3:54)
Background by Marcin Stanislaw Góralski (Diploma A.S.P. 2009 with distinction) on YouTube with links to several other videos on Duchamp.


Bottlerack

Marcel Duchamp discusses Bottlerack (1914), one of his well-known readymades.
SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

Some Texts from à l'infinitif (4:06)
Written 1912-20. Read in New York 1967

An Interview (11:04)
By George Heard Hamilton, 1959

An Interview (21:24)
By Richard Hamilton, London 1959

Interview, 1961 (French)
Alain Jouffroy, Marcel Duchamp: rencontre.

"I don't care about the word art"
Marcel Duchamp interviewed by Joan Bakewell in 1966.


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 [...]


Anemic Cinema

Google Videos


"Why Not Sneeze"

Silent video with Duchamp (YouTube)


The Secret of Marcel Duchamp

Short YouTube video from OvationTV on the life and anti-art of M.D.


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.

John J. McNulty
Teeny Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage in Toronto, March 5, 1968

Unpublished poster of the meeting. (Private collection)

Rogue urinals: Has the art market gone Dada?

Marcel Duchamp - Fountain

Arty U.S. duo Brittany Powell and Tae Kitakata used loaves to concoct works of art on slices of bread. Not so tasty: "Fountain" from 1917 signed by the mysterious R. Mutt is recreated for 2012 in sandwich form.

Critics tend to declare that Marcel Duchamp's urinal, entitled Fountain, is the most important artwork of the 20th century. Yet its standing as a collectable object has always lagged behind its value as an idea. The work questioned notions of authenticity when Duchamp first purchased the mass-produced plumbing fixture and signed it "R. Mutt" in 1917. Now, over 40 years after the artist's death, the problem of legitimacy remains relevant as unauthorised urinals have been discovered circulating in Italy. The art world loves paradoxical conceptual gestures, but it seems that someone might be taking the piss.

"Fountain" was the first ready-made that Duchamp engineered for scandal. The artist was a member of the board of the Society of Independent Artists, whose exhibition had no jury and was set to be the largest in America. He knew that most people would perceive the work as a prank, particularly if submitted by an unknown Richard Mutt from Philadelphia. When the board duly voted against it, Duchamp and his chief patron, Walter Arensberg, resigned in protest—a story that was swiftly leaked to the New York papers.

The ready-made had its public debut a few weeks later in an art magazine called the Blind Man. A photo of the urinal by Alfred Stieglitz was published alongside the founding manifesto of conceptual art, which included the words: "Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it." The urinal then went the way of many of Duchamp's early ready-mades; it was smashed or trashed. So insignificant was the porcelain pissoir at the time that no one can remember exactly what happened to it.

"Fountain" was not a coveted art object until well after the second world war, when Duchamp became a cult figure among Pop artists. In response to the art world's desire to see his legendary lavatory, Duchamp authorised curators to purchase urinals in his name in 1950, 1953 and 1963. (The first is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the second is lost and the third sits in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.) Then in 1964, in association with Arturo Schwarz, a Milan art dealer, historian and collector, the artist made the momentous decision to issue 12 replicas (an edition of eight with four proofs) of his most important ready-mades, including the urinal. Mr Schwarz, now 86, went on to write the artist's catalogue raisonné—a scholarly book meant to document the complete works of Duchamp.

As one who had painted moustaches on postcards of the Mona Lisa, Duchamp understood the power of reproductions to render a work iconic and consolidate an artist's international reputation. Indeed, nine of the 12 official Schwarz "Fountains" have been included in museum collections around the world. Of the three in private hands, one is in Bel Air, California, another is in Manhattan with the Mugrabi family, and the last, owned by Dimitris Daskalopoulos in Athens, will be exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London this summer.

One of the many ironies of the Schwarz urinals is that they are carefully crafted earthenware sculptures modelled on the Stieglitz photo of the "original". Every edition has a story, but there is no beating the provenance of the 13th one. Dubbed "the prototype" and bearing Duchamp's signature, it slipped quietly onto the market in 1973 at the then fledgling gallery of Ronald Feldman in New York. Andy Warhol, who visited the gallery repeatedly, pressed Mr Feldman to trade the urinal for some of his own portraits. "Duchamp didn't sell well in those days," says Mr Feldman, "but Andy knew what multiples meant because he made them."

When Warhol died in 1987, his urinal was consigned to Sotheby's as part of his giant five-volume estate sale. "Fountain" was buried in a volume devoted to prints and given a lowly estimate of $2,000-2,500. It sold for $65,750 to Dakis Joannou, a Greek-Cypriot construction tycoon, and is now enshrined in the front hall of his main home in Athens. "I couldn't believe that we could actually own it," says Mr Joannou. "People didn't appreciate its historical importance, so we got a bargain." In the following decade, Duchamp's renown increased yet again, as did the marketing of his work. In 1999 Sotheby's put an official Schwarz urinal on the cover of its Contemporary Art evening sale catalogue; it commanded $1.8m.

Collectors of contemporary art are comfortable acquiring individual works in series, but they don't relish unlimited editions or dodgy authorship. Some may be dismayed to learn that there are at least three more "Duchamp urinals". Gio di Maggio, a collector whose Fondazione Mudima is in Milan, and Luisella Zignone, a Duchamp collector based in Biella, both have "Fountains" that Mr Schwarz says he gave as gifts. Sergio Casoli, a Milan dealer, is also thought to own one. (He declined to comment.)

Mr Schwarz claims that these works were made in 1964 under Duchamp's direction, but were not included in the original edition due to "imperfections". (It is unlikely that more than 17 urinals could have survived from this edition, but only Mr Schwarz knows for sure.) None of the newly discovered pieces have the "Marcel Duchamp" signature of official ready-mades. Nevertheless, the "Fountains" owned by Mr Di Maggio and Mrs Zignone have been shown in public institutions in Basel and Buenos Aires. In interview, Mr Schwarz reluctantly confirmed that he is trying to sell a fourth "Fountain" for an undisclosed sum, which one source says is $2.5m. (When pressed, Mr Schwarz says the asking price depends on whether the purchaser is a museum, a well-reputed collector or a speculator.)

The artist's estate is not pleased. Jacqueline Matisse Monnier, the head of the Association for the Protection and Conservation of works by Marcel Duchamp, says that "neither my mother nor I ever sanctioned the sale of unauthorised ready-mades." Mrs Monnier's mother, "Teeny", was married to Pierre Matisse, the dealer son of the Henri, before she married Duchamp, making her an heir to both the Henri Matisse and Duchamp estates. She sees Mr Schwarz's activities as curious given that "Arturo was a great friend of Marcel."

Some Duchamp connoisseurs are outraged. Francis M. Naumann, a scholar and dealer who has published widely on Duchamp, argues that these urinals cannot be considered Duchamps at all. "For Duchamp, the signature was everything," he argues. "It is the single most important element in the process of transforming an ordinary everyday object into a work of art."

Others appear more ambivalent. Daniella Luxembourg, co-owner of Luxembourg & Dayan, a New York gallery that recently held a Duchamp mini-retrospective, says the artist's market has "the atmosphere of relics in a religion," adding that "with globalisation, the differences between what was signed by Duchamp and what was in his vicinity will become smaller and smaller."

Duchamp's relationship to commerce was not naive. Although he preferred to give away his work rather than sell it, he made a living as an art dealer for many years. Duchamp was also an able chess player who could think a good few moves ahead. One wonders whether the Dada master, who challenged the notion of the authentic artwork, might not be amused by the way these questionable "Fountains" muddy the waters of his current market. "My production," he once said, "has no right to be speculated upon."

March 24th 2010 | From The Economist online

"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.


Duchamp's Urinal Tops Art Survey

A white gentlemen's urinal has been named the most influential modern art work of all time.

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts in the run-up to this year's Turner Prize which takes place on Monday.
Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) was second, with Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych from 1962 coming third.
Duchamp shocked the art establishment when he took the urinal, signed it and put it on display in 1917.
"The choice of Duchamp's Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock," said art expert Simon Wilson.

Ahead of time

"But it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing - the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form."
Picasso's Spanish Civil War painting, Guernica, came fourth, while Matisse's The Red Studio was fifth.
Duchamp has influenced many contemporary artists, including Tracey Emin - her unmade bed was inspired by the French artist.

BBC News - Wednesday, 1 December, 2004

William N. Copley and Marcel Duchamp

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.

If Marcel Duchamp ever dies, his Phoenix Rrose Selavy (a name having endless possibilities of punning transformation) mushroomed from the remains of a past he unshrouded when he inked in a moustache on the Mona Lisa, creating for himself and all of us a present in which the nouns "art" and "poetry" are forged into a single word.

The word was lying around for a long while, and it should not be suggested that he invented it. He was the first to discover how to articulate it, and the word is Yes.

"Art may be bad, good or indifferent, but whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion."

Or: "There is no solution because there is no problem. This was his way of saying "Yes" to the universe, the galaxies, the magno-microcosms, the explosions, the implosions, nature.

I like to think that hearing him say this with his own lips once saved my life. This may be mere sentimentality but I gladly risk saying it. Isn't the universe too grandiose, or don't the movements of the stars lack time to hear us therapeutically? Can vastness tolerate something as ridiculous as a solution?

Later it became "Yes" and "Chess" (fun and games with the laws of chance). Like Mallarmé, he recognized the implications of a single throw of the dice. Like Lautréamont he saw the beauty of mathematics. The Large Glass penetrates considerably beyond these implications to "canned chance" or "meta irony".

Freedom, wherever it may lead, was the revelation of his phoenix. Marcel Duchamp was long since with the Milky Ways.

(Published in the New York Times, October 13, 1968)

Biography of Marcel Duchamp

by Jeffrey Shivar


Marcel Duchamp by Man Ray

Stock Certificate Sells for over One Million $

An unusual stock certificate from 1924 from a company called Roulette de Monte Carlo, handsigned by Marcel Duchamp, was hammered at a Christie's auction for $1,082,500 including buyers premium. The certificate features a portrait of Duchamp by Man Ray, with Duchamp's face almost completely covered in shaving cream, and his hair pointed into horns like a devil.

There have been plenty of other old stock certificates, such as Houdini Picture Company stock certificates signed by Houdini, which sells for several thousand dollars, and even fairly modern worthless stock certificates, such as Enron, which sells for around $100. But the Duchamp certificate has achieved the highest price of any antique stock certificate by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

billionaireslife.com


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).

L.H.O.O.Q. - 1919

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 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.


Marcel Duchamp in His Own Words

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

Duchamp comments in English in three consecutive clips on his evolution in painting and his implication in the iconoclastic ideas of Dada. Why did he take up chess? "Playing chess is like designing or constructing something." Of course his remarks stop before Étant Donné was revealed to the public in Philadelphia -- after his death.


Marcel Duchamp's Work
An excellent illustrated presentation of Duchamp's life and work from the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Bicycle Wheel

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


Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, The Marcel Duchamp I married
Her memoirs, published for the first time in Britain, portray a desperate liaison. Excerpts in The Independent, 11/02/08.


Bits & Bites Duchamp
A website containing 9 superb photos of Marcel or his works.


Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
The Allen Ginsberg Project
On the occasion of the 43rd anniversary of Duchamp's death, an excellent collection of interview footage and Duchampiana.


Was Marcel Duchamp the Anti-Artist?
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.