The century's quietest revolutionary — readymades, the abandonment of painting, chess on a Paris rooftop in Entr'acte, and one anemic film of spinning puns signed Rrose Sélavy.
Marcel Duchamp did more than put strange objects in galleries; he changed the question a work of art is meant to answer. Earlier painting asked to be looked at. Duchamp asked who decides that a thing is art at all — the hand that makes it, the eye that sees it, or the institution that shows it. A French-born artist who became an American citizen in 1954, he passed through Cubism, Dada and Surrealism without settling into any of them.
His central invention was the readymade: a manufactured object, chosen and titled, presented as art with little or no alteration. It is the idea most of twentieth-century art has had to argue with, and the reason conceptual art, Pop and installation all trace a line back to him. He began as a painter and stayed a fine draftsman; what he rejected was art made only for the eye, which he called “retinal.”
Duchamp was born in 1887 at Blainville-Crevon in Normandy, into a family that produced artists: his older brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and his sister Suzanne Duchamp, all painted or sculpted. He moved to Paris in 1904, spent about a year at the Académie Julian, and was otherwise largely self-taught, drawing for the satirical press while his brothers drew him into the Puteaux circle of Cubist painters.[1]
In 1912 he painted Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), a figure broken into overlapping planes of motion. His own Cubist associates asked him to withdraw it from a Paris exhibition, and he took it down without argument. A year later it was the succès de scandale of the 1913 Armory Show in New York, ridiculed in the American press and, almost overnight, the most famous modern painting in the country — in a place Duchamp had not yet set foot.[2]
By 1913 he had mounted a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool, and the next year he bought a bottle-drying rack and called it a work. These were the first readymades — objects he selected rather than made. A snow shovel followed, titled In Advance of the Broken Arm. The change was small and total at once: the art was now in the artist's decision rather than in his craft.[3]
In 1917 he pushed the idea to its limit. Under the name “R. Mutt” he submitted a porcelain urinal, titled Fountain, to the Society of Independent Artists in New York, whose rules promised to show any work whose maker paid the fee. The committee refused it; Duchamp, who sat on that committee, resigned. Alfred Stieglitz photographed the piece, the little magazine The Blind Man defended it, and the argument it started — about who or what confers the status of art — has never quite closed.[4]
The original Fountain was lost almost at once; the urinals in museums today are later versions Duchamp authorized. Its authorship has itself become a question: some writers propose that the Dada poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven supplied or made it, while other scholars regard the claim as unproven. We record the attribution as contested, not settled.[2]
Alongside the readymades Duchamp spent eight years on The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even — the Large Glass — a work in lead foil and dust on two panes of glass, part diagram and part erotic machine. He declared it “definitively unfinished” in 1923, and when it cracked in transit years later he accepted the cracks as part of it. It stands today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose Duchamp holdings, built from the collection of his patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg, are the richest anywhere.[2]
Around 1920 he acquired a second self: Rrose Sélavy, a feminine alter ego Man Ray photographed and whose punning name signed objects and wordplay. The same taste for the double meaning produced L.H.O.O.Q., a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa to which he added a moustache and goatee. He worked with Man Ray on optical machines and the 1926 film Anémic Cinéma, and with Francis Picabia in the Paris Dada circle around André Breton.[5]
From the late 1910s Duchamp gave more and more of himself to chess — entering tournaments, representing France, and in 1932 co-writing a specialist study of rook-and-pawn endgames with Vitaly Halberstadt. He let the world believe he had given up art for the game. He had not. Through those decades he designed Surrealist exhibitions, issued editions and reproductions, and assembled the Boîte-en-valise, a portable museum of miniature copies of his own work.[3]
The larger deception was Étant donnés, a tableau of a nude figure in a landscape glimpsed through peepholes in a wooden door, which he built in secret between 1946 and 1966; the Brazilian sculptor María Martins was his lover, his advisor on its casting and a model for the body. He left an illustrated manual so it could be rebuilt after his death. Duchamp married Alexina “Teeny” Sattler in 1954 and died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1968; the next year Étant donnés was installed, to general astonishment, in Philadelphia. The artists who most shaped the century after him — John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol — had been reading him all along.[2]
Born 28 July at Blainville-Crevon in Normandy, into a family of artists — his brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon and his sister Suzanne Duchamp all painted or sculpted.
Moves to Paris, spends about a year at the Académie Julian, and otherwise teaches himself, drawing for the satirical press.
Paints Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2); his own Cubist associates ask him to withdraw it from the Salon des Indépendants, and he takes it down without argument.
Painting · in the catalogNude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)The Nude is the succès de scandale of the Armory Show in New York, making him famous in a country he had not yet visited. In Paris he mounts a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool — the first readymade.
Arrives in New York and begins The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even — the Large Glass — which would occupy him for eight years.
Painting · in the catalogThe Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)Under the name “R. Mutt” he submits a porcelain urinal titled Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists in New York; the committee refuses it and Duchamp, a committee member, resigns.
Sculpture · in the catalogFountainAdopts a feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, photographed by Man Ray — a punning identity that signs objects and wordplay thereafter.
Declares the Large Glass “definitively unfinished” and leaves it; later, when it cracks in transit, he accepts the cracks as part of the work.
Makes the film Anémic Cinéma with Man Ray — turning spirals of pun and optical illusion.
Film · in the catalogAnémic CinémaCo-writes a specialist study of rook-and-pawn endgames with Vitaly Halberstadt, and lets the world believe he has given up art for chess. He had not.
Designs the installations for the largest Surrealist exhibitions — twelve hundred coal sacks hung over the 1938 Paris show, a mile of string strung through the 1942 New York one.
Builds Étant donnés in secret over twenty years — a tableau glimpsed through peepholes in a wooden door — leaving an illustrated manual so it could be rebuilt after his death.
Becomes an American citizen and marries Alexina “Teeny” Sattler.
Dies 2 October at Neuilly-sur-Seine; the next year Étant donnés is installed, to general astonishment, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; 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.
I like living, breathing, better than working. I don't think that the work I've done can have any social importance whatsoever in the future. Therefore, if you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a sort of constant euphoria.
In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.
Painting · Cubism
A descending body translated into overlapping ochre planes and repeated stages of motion. Its withdrawal from a Paris exhibition in 1912 and hostile reception at New York's 1913 Armory Show made it an early test of where Cubism ended and a new mechanized image began.
Painting
Duchamp's monumental construction on two panes of glass, made over eight years as an erotic machine, technical diagram, and experiment in transparent pictorial space. He stopped in 1923, later accepted its transit cracks, and treated the work as permanently incomplete.
Sculpture · Dada · Readymade
A mass-produced porcelain urinal, turned on its back, signed “R. Mutt 1917,” and submitted to an open New York exhibition that refused to show it. The lost original survives through Alfred Stieglitz's photograph and later replicas authorized by Duchamp.
Sculpture · Readymade
A bicycle wheel with no tyre, mounted upside down on a painted wooden stool. Marcel Duchamp put the two together in his Paris studio in 1913 for his own amusement, years before he had a word for what he had done. The original is lost, and every example in a museum today is a later version.
Drawing · Dada · Readymade
The Mona Lisa with a pencilled moustache and a small beard, and five capital letters that make a crude sexual pun when read aloud in French. Marcel Duchamp made the first version in Paris in 1919. He made this larger replica in 1930 for the poet Louis Aragon. The Centre Pompidou holds it on deposit from the French Communist Party.
Collaborated with · 1926
The Centre Pompidou credits Anémic Cinéma as 'réalisé par Marcel Duchamp avec Man Ray et Marc Allégret' — Man Ray filming Duchamp's turning spirals as an exercise in purely optical speed. The claim is scoped to the film; the friendship ran far longer.
Collaborated with
Duchamp and Picabia were close from around 1911 and central to Dada in New York and Paris, sharing its machine imagery and its attack on artistic seriousness. Picabia's review 391 and the pair's transatlantic activity carried Dada between the two cities.
Collaborated with
Duchamp and Breton were lifelong friends who designed Surrealist exhibitions together, Duchamp providing the installations — the twelve hundred coal sacks hung over the 1938 Paris show and the mile of string strung through the 1942 New York exhibition.
Collaborated with
With Roché and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp produced the short-lived New York Dada magazine The Blind Man in 1917; its second issue carried the defense of Fountain after the work was rejected.
Met
A leader of the Puteaux Cubists in Duchamp's orbit. In 1912 Gleizes was among those who asked Duchamp to withdraw Nude Descending a Staircase from the Salon des Indépendants, judging it off-message for the group.
Met
Close friends from the early 1910s — it was with Brâncuși and Léger that Duchamp visited the 1912 aviation salon. Duchamp later organized exhibitions of Brâncuși's sculpture and brokered its sale to American collectors.
Met
In 1912 Duchamp visited the Salon de la Locomotion Aérienne with Léger and Brâncuși, where — standing before a propeller — he remarked that painting was finished and asked who could make anything better.
Met
Apollinaire moved in the same Puteaux and Section d'Or circle and wrote about Duchamp in Les Peintres cubistes (1913), predicting that he might reconcile art and the public.
Met
A central Puteaux Cubist and co-author of Du «Cubisme» (1912), part of the circle that gathered around Duchamp and his brothers at Puteaux.
Met
Both were regulars at the Arensberg salon in New York during the First World War, the milieu that became New York Dada.
Met
The two knew each other across decades of the Paris and New York avant-garde. The relationship was respectful rather than close; each measured himself against the other as the century's rival model of what a modern artist could be.
Supported by
With her husband Walter, Louise Arensberg supported Duchamp and assembled the collection, rich in his work, that passed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Supported by
Walter and Louise Arensberg were Duchamp's principal patrons; their New York apartment was his base in America, and the collection they built — later given to the Philadelphia Museum of Art — held the Large Glass and Nude Descending a Staircase.
Met · 1939
In Paris in 1939 Duchamp took over the practical organisation of the Mexique exhibition after Breton left it undone, and Kahlo stayed at the home he shared with Mary Reynolds while she was ill. She called him the only one of the artists there with his feet on the ground and his brain in the right place.
Met · 1934
When the Kandinskys left Germany after the Bauhaus closed, the new building they moved into at Neuilly-sur-Seine in January 1934 was one Duchamp had pointed out to them. Kandinsky lived there until his death in 1944.
Met · 1937
Among the artists Beckett fell in with on settling in Paris in 1937. They were chess partners before they were anything else — Duchamp had largely abandoned art for competitive chess — and they played in Paris and again at Arcachon in 1940, where both had gone ahead of the German advance. Chess as a game of dwindling pieces and forced moves became a structure Beckett used, most openly in Fin de partie ("Endgame"), whose title is the chess term for a game's closing phase.
Met · 1942
Tanguy and Duchamp belonged to the Surrealist community in exile in New York; Tanguy later participated in Le Surréalisme en 1947, the Galerie Maeght exhibition organized by Breton and Duchamp.
Duchamp saw the 1912 stage adaptation of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique and repeatedly named it a decisive influence on the conception of the Large Glass, crediting Roussel with showing him a way out of retinal painting.
Duchamp's most famous engagement with Leonardo is L.H.O.O.Q. (1919): a cheap postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa on which he pencilled a moustache and a goatee and wrote the five-letter title beneath. The gesture — turning the Louvre's most reverent object into a Dada readymade — depended entirely on Leonardo's picture being the century's yardstick for what a masterpiece was. Duchamp returned to the same image several times over the next fifty years.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
Duchamp came out of Dada and never formally joined the Surrealists, but was closely associated with them: André Breton championed him, and Duchamp designed the installations for their two largest exhibitions — the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris and the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism in New York.
Art movement · 1907–1914
Duchamp painted through Cubism around 1911–12 — Portrait of Chess Players, and the Nude Descending a Staircase — and moved in the Puteaux circle with his brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The Cubists' request that he withdraw the Nude in 1912 marked his break with conventional painting.
Art movement · c. 1916–1924
Ran the New York wing of the revolt with Francis Picabia from 1915; his readymades remain Dada's most consequential idea.
Historical period and art category · circa 1860s–1970s
A manufactured urinal signed “R. Mutt” was submitted to the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. The organisation advertised no jury, withheld the work anyway, and Duchamp resigned. The original disappeared; the question it raised — whether selecting and presenting an object can be artistic creation — did not.
The readymade — the idea that an ordinary manufactured object, selected and titled by an artist, can be a work of art. His best-known pieces are Fountain (a urinal, 1917), Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) and the Large Glass (1915–23).
A mass-produced object that an artist chooses and presents as art, sometimes with a title, inscription or small change. Duchamp coined the term; his Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack and Fountain are the defining examples.
It was lost soon after Duchamp submitted it in 1917. The urinals in museums today are later replicas he authorized in the 1950s and 1960s. Alfred Stieglitz's photograph is the main record of the lost original.
Duchamp's feminine alter ego, adopted around 1920 and photographed by Man Ray. The name is a pun sounding out roughly as “Eros, c'est la vie.” He signed works and wordplay under it — an artistic identity and a running joke about authorship more than a biographical disguise.
No, though he encouraged the impression. He played competitively and co-wrote a chess book in 1932, but he kept making and organizing art the whole time — and secretly built his last major work, Étant donnés, between 1946 and 1966.
Both, and neither exactly. He took part in Dada in New York and Paris and designed major Surrealist exhibitions, but never committed to a movement; the Centre Pompidou describes him as passing through Cubism, Dada and Surrealism without belonging to any.
Collaborated with · 1926
The Centre Pompidou credits Anémic Cinéma as 'réalisé par Marcel Duchamp avec Man Ray et Marc Allégret' — Man Ray filming Duchamp's turning spirals as an exercise in purely optical speed. The claim is scoped to the film; the friendship ran far longer.
Associated with
Duchamp came out of Dada and never formally joined the Surrealists, but was closely associated with them: André Breton championed him, and Duchamp designed the installations for their two largest exhibitions — the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris and the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism in New York.
Associated with · 1911–1912
Duchamp painted through Cubism around 1911–12 — Portrait of Chess Players, and the Nude Descending a Staircase — and moved in the Puteaux circle with his brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The Cubists' request that he withdraw the Nude in 1912 marked his break with conventional painting.
Collaborated with
Duchamp and Picabia were close from around 1911 and central to Dada in New York and Paris, sharing its machine imagery and its attack on artistic seriousness. Picabia's review 391 and the pair's transatlantic activity carried Dada between the two cities.
Collaborated with
Duchamp and Breton were lifelong friends who designed Surrealist exhibitions together, Duchamp providing the installations — the twelve hundred coal sacks hung over the 1938 Paris show and the mile of string strung through the 1942 New York exhibition.
Collaborated with
With Roché and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp produced the short-lived New York Dada magazine The Blind Man in 1917; its second issue carried the defense of Fountain after the work was rejected.
Met
A leader of the Puteaux Cubists in Duchamp's orbit. In 1912 Gleizes was among those who asked Duchamp to withdraw Nude Descending a Staircase from the Salon des Indépendants, judging it off-message for the group.
Met
Close friends from the early 1910s — it was with Brâncuși and Léger that Duchamp visited the 1912 aviation salon. Duchamp later organized exhibitions of Brâncuși's sculpture and brokered its sale to American collectors.
Met
In 1912 Duchamp visited the Salon de la Locomotion Aérienne with Léger and Brâncuși, where — standing before a propeller — he remarked that painting was finished and asked who could make anything better.
Met
Apollinaire moved in the same Puteaux and Section d'Or circle and wrote about Duchamp in Les Peintres cubistes (1913), predicting that he might reconcile art and the public.
Met
A central Puteaux Cubist and co-author of Du «Cubisme» (1912), part of the circle that gathered around Duchamp and his brothers at Puteaux.
Met
Both were regulars at the Arensberg salon in New York during the First World War, the milieu that became New York Dada.
Met
The two knew each other across decades of the Paris and New York avant-garde. The relationship was respectful rather than close; each measured himself against the other as the century's rival model of what a modern artist could be.
Associated with
Ran the New York wing of the revolt with Francis Picabia from 1915; his readymades remain Dada's most consequential idea.
Associated with · 1917–1968
A manufactured urinal signed “R. Mutt” was submitted to the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. The organisation advertised no jury, withheld the work anyway, and Duchamp resigned. The original disappeared; the question it raised — whether selecting and presenting an object can be artistic creation — did not.
Supported by
With her husband Walter, Louise Arensberg supported Duchamp and assembled the collection, rich in his work, that passed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Influenced by
Duchamp saw the 1912 stage adaptation of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique and repeatedly named it a decisive influence on the conception of the Large Glass, crediting Roussel with showing him a way out of retinal painting.
Supported by
Walter and Louise Arensberg were Duchamp's principal patrons; their New York apartment was his base in America, and the collection they built — later given to the Philadelphia Museum of Art — held the Large Glass and Nude Descending a Staircase.
Influenced by · 1919
Duchamp's most famous engagement with Leonardo is L.H.O.O.Q. (1919): a cheap postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa on which he pencilled a moustache and a goatee and wrote the five-letter title beneath. The gesture — turning the Louvre's most reverent object into a Dada readymade — depended entirely on Leonardo's picture being the century's yardstick for what a masterpiece was. Duchamp returned to the same image several times over the next fifty years.
Met · 1939
In Paris in 1939 Duchamp took over the practical organisation of the Mexique exhibition after Breton left it undone, and Kahlo stayed at the home he shared with Mary Reynolds while she was ill. She called him the only one of the artists there with his feet on the ground and his brain in the right place.
Met · 1934
When the Kandinskys left Germany after the Bauhaus closed, the new building they moved into at Neuilly-sur-Seine in January 1934 was one Duchamp had pointed out to them. Kandinsky lived there until his death in 1944.
Met · 1937
Among the artists Beckett fell in with on settling in Paris in 1937. They were chess partners before they were anything else — Duchamp had largely abandoned art for competitive chess — and they played in Paris and again at Arcachon in 1940, where both had gone ahead of the German advance. Chess as a game of dwindling pieces and forced moves became a structure Beckett used, most openly in Fin de partie ("Endgame"), whose title is the chess term for a game's closing phase.
Met · 1942
Tanguy and Duchamp belonged to the Surrealist community in exile in New York; Tanguy later participated in Le Surréalisme en 1947, the Galerie Maeght exhibition organized by Breton and Duchamp.
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