Marcel Duchamp


Marcel Duchamp (July 28, 1887 - October 2, 1968) was a French artist born
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp in Blainville-Crevon, Normandy, France who came
from an artistic family. Of the six children of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp,
four would become successful artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of:

   * Jacques Villon (1875-1963), painter, printmaker
   * Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918), sculptor
   * Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889-1963), painter

Living and working in a studio in Montparnasse, Marcel Duchamp's early works
were Post-Impressionist in style but he would become perhaps the most
influential of the Dada artists. A student at the Acadˇmie Julian, his
influence is still strongly felt to this day by contemporary artists.

At his eldest brother Jacques' home, in 1911 Marcel and brother Raymond
organized a regular discussion group with artists and critics such as
Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger and others that soon was
dubbed the Puteaux Group.

In early years, Duchamp had some contact with the Salon Cubists of Paris,
but aesthetic as well as political differences precluded closer affiliation.
In 1912, he painted "Nude Descending a Staircase," in which motion was
expressed by successive superimposed images, as in motion pictures. The work
was originally slated to appear in Paris, but the Salon Cubists demanded
that Duchamp retitle it to avoid possible scandal. Duchamp removed the work
from the exhibition entirely, and, in 1913, it went on to create a scandal
at the Armory Show in New York City instead; it also spawned dozens of
parodies in the years that followed. It was at that show that he met the
Dadaist painter Jean Crotti who later married his sister Suzanne.

Politically, Duchamp opposed the first world war and identified with
Individualist Anarchism, in particular with Max Stirner's philosophical
tract The Ego and Its Own, the study of which Duchamp considered the turning
point in his artistic and intellectual development.

Duchamp was one of the first artists to use found objects as the basis for
his artworks. His work "Fountain" consisted mostly of a ceramic urinal. His
work "In advance of a broken arm" consisted of an old snow shovel. Another
displayed a bicycle wheel.

Escaping service in the First WOrld War on the pretext of a dubious heart
condition, he travelled to the United States, where he befriended Katherine
Dreier and Man Ray, with whom he founded the Sociˇtˇ Anonyme in 1920.
Duchamp's circle also included Louise and Walter Arensberg, Beatrice Wood
and fellow Frenchman, Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures.

Marcel Duchamp took aim at conventional notions of "high art," "culture" and
commodities by presenting mass-produced objects such as a bottle rack or a
snow shovel as sculpture. He coupled his visual assaults on "art" with
verbal puns: he signed his urinal "R. Mutt," or "armut," German for poverty,
and named another piece "L.H.O.Q.," a coarse French pun. When the Jury at
the 1917 Independents exhibition in New York rejected his urinal as not
being art, Beatrice Wood defended him: "The only works of art America has
given are her plumbing and her bridges."

After 1923 he devoted much of his time to chess but from the mid-1930s
onwards he collaborated with the Surrealists and participated in their
exhibitions. Duchamp settled permanently in New York in 1942. From then
until 1944, together with Max Ernst and Andrˇ Breton, he edited the
surrealist periodical "VVV", in New York.

The last surviving member of the Duchamp family of artists, in 1967, in
Rouen, France, Marcel helped organize an exhibition called "Les Duchamp:
Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp."
Some of this family exhibition was later shown at the Musˇe National d'Art
Moderne in Paris.

Marcel Duchamp died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and is buried in the Rouen
Cemetery, in Rouen, Normandy, France.