Marcel Duchamp

Why Duchamp matters

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.”

Marcel Duchamp, illustrated

Paris, and the scandal of the Nude

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.

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.

The readymade, and the Fountain scandal

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.

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.

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.

The Large Glass, and Rrose Sélavy

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.

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.

Chess, and a retirement that wasn't

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.

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.