Marcel Duchamp

Born 28 July 1887Died 2 October 1968

Duchamp, a French artist, whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist, Surrealist movements and conceptual art.

Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Henri Matisse and Pablo

Picasso, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Plastic arts

• Plastic arts are art forms which involve physical manipulation of a plastic medium by molding or modeling such as sculpture or ceramics. The term has also been applied more broadly to all the visual (non-literary, non-musical) arts.

• Materials for use in the plastic arts, in the narrower definition, include those that can be carved or shaped, such as stone or wood, concrete, or metal. "Plastics" meaning certain synthetic organic resins have been used ever since they were invented, but the term "plastic arts" long preceded them.

Plastic arts

Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (like Henri Matisse) as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to put art back in the service of the mind.

Duchamp was painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

• Oil on canvas, 1912 • The work is widely regarded as a

Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time.

• In its first presentation at the Parisian Salon des Indépendants, it was rejected by the Cubists and caused a huge stir during its exhibition at the 1913 Armory Show in New York.

• The work is now found in permanent exhibition at the Louis and Walter Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia.

Changing The Definition of Art

• Fountain 1917, replica 1964

• Submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, Fountain was rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee.

• Fountain was displayed and photographed at Alfred Stieglitz’s studio, and the photo published in The Blind Man, but the original has been lost.

• The work is regarded by some art historians and theorists of the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger, as a major landmark in 20th century art.

• Replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s are now on display in a number of different museums.

Readymades

L.H.O.O.Q.• 1919.• The work is one of what Duchamp

referred to as readymade, or more specifically an assisted ready-made. Pioneered by him, the readymade involves taking mundane, often utilitarian objects not generally considered to be art and transfoming them, by adding to them, changing them, or (as in the case of his most famous work Fountain) simply renaming them and placing them in a gallery setting.

• In L.H.O.O.Q. the objet trouvé ("found object") is a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinici’s Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.

Miniature Replicas

Box in a Valise, 1966, mixed-media assemblage: red leather box containing miniature replicas, photographs, and color reproductions of eighty works by Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise, or box in a suitcase, is a portable miniature monograph including sixty-nine reproductions of the artist's own work

Between 1935 and 1940, he created a deluxe edition of twenty boxes, each in a brown leather carrying case but with slight variations in design and content.

A later edition consisting of six different series was created during the 1950s and 1960s; these eliminated the suitcase, used different colored fabrics for the cover, and altered the number of items inside.

Each box unfolds to reveal pull-out standing frames displaying Nude Descending a Staircase and other works, diminutive Readymades hung in a vertical "gallery," and loose prints mounted on paper. Duchamp included in each deluxe box one "original."

Surrealism and Conceptual Art

Photograph by Man Ray

Miniature Air de Paris 1939Reproduction ofAire de Paris 1919 for Boîte-en-valise

Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String, 1942, New York

Chess

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Evenalso know as The Large Glass

• Duchamp carefully created The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, working on the piece from 1915 to 1923. He executed the work on two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship.

• Duchamp's ideas for the Glass began in 1913, and he made numerous notes and studies, as well as preliminary works for the piece. The notes reflect the creation of unique rules of physics, and myth which describes the work. He published the notes and studies as The Green Box in 1934.

• The notes describe that his "hilarious picture" is intended to depict the erotic encounter between the "Bride," in the upper panel, and her nine "Bachelors" gathered timidly below in an abundance of mysterious mechanical apparatus in the lower panel.

• The Large Glass was exhibited in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum before it was broken during transport and carefully repaired by Duchamp. It is now part of the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

• Duchamp sanctioned replicas of The Large Glass, the first in 1961 for an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and another in 1966 for the Tate Gallery in London. The third replica is in Komaba Museum, University of Tokyo.