Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp, (born July 28, 1887, Blainville, Fr.—died
Oct. 2, 1968, Neuilly), French artist who broke down the
boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After
the sensation caused by “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2”
(1912), he painted few other pictures. His irreverence for
conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his
famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution.
Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists, and in the 1930s he
helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a U.S.
citizen in 1955.
Early years
Although Duchamp’s father was a notary the family had an
artistic tradition stemming from his grandfather, a shipping
agent who practiced engraving seriously. Four of the six
Duchamp children became artists. Gaston, born in 1875, was
later known as Jacques Villon, and Raymond, born in 1876,
called himself Duchamp-Villon. Marcel, the youngest of the
boys, and his sister Suzanne, born in 1889, both kept the
name Duchamp as artists.
When Marcel arrived in Paris in October
1904, his two elder brothers were already in a position to
help him. He had done some painting at home, and his
“Portrait of Marcel Lefrançois” shows him already in
possession of a style and of a technique. During the next
few years, while drawing cartoons for comic magazines,
Duchamp passed rapidly through the main contemporary trends
in painting—Postimpressionism, the influence of Paul
Cézanne, Fauvism, and finally Cubism. He was merely
experimenting, seeing no virtue in making a habit of any one
style. He was outside artistic tradition not only in
shunning repetition but also in not attempting a prolific
output or frequent exhibition of his work. In the Fauvist
style Marcel painted some of his best early work three or
four years after the Fauvist movement itself had died away.
The “Portrait of the Artist’s Father” is a notable example.
Only in 1911 did he begin to paint in a manner that showed a
trace of Cubism. He had then become a friend of the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire, a strong supporter of Cubism and of
everything avant-garde in the arts. Another of his close
friends was Francis Picabia, himself a painter in the most
orthodox style of Impressionism until 1909, when he felt the
need of complete change. Duchamp shared with him the feeling
that Cubism was too systematic, too static and “boring.”
They both passed directly from “semirealism” to a
“nonobjective” expression of movement. There they met
“Futurism” and “Abstractionism,” which they had known before
only by name.
The “Nude.” To an exhibition in 1911
Duchamp sent a “Portrait” that was composed of a series of
five almost monochromatic, superimposed silhouettes. In this
juxtaposition of successive phases of the movement of a
single body appears the idea for the “Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2.” The main difference between the two works
is that in the earlier one the kangaroo-like silhouettes can
be distinguished. In the “Nude,” on the other hand, there is
no nude at all but only a descending machine, a nonobjective
and virtually cinematic effect that was entirely new in
painting.
When the “Nude” was brought to the 28th
Salon des Indépendants in February 1912, the committee,
composed of friends of the Duchamp family, refused to hang
the painting. These men were not reactionaries and were well
accustomed to Cubism, yet they were unable to accept the
novel vision. A year later at the Armory Show in New York
City, the painting again was singled out from among hundreds
that were equally shocking to the public. Whatever it was
that made the work so scandalous in Paris, and in New York
so tremendous a success, prompted Duchamp to stop painting
at the age of 25. A widely held belief is that Duchamp
introduced in his work a dimension of irony, almost a
mockery of painting itself, that was more than anyone could
bear and that undermined his own belief in painting. The
title alone was a joke that was resented. Even the Cubists
did their best to flatter the eye, but Duchamp’s only motive
seemed to be provocation.
Farewell to art
In 1912, after the “Nude,” Duchamp did a few more
paintings. Some of these, notably “Le Passage de la Vierge à
la Mariée” and “Mariée” (Philadelphia Museum of Art), both
done in Munich, are among the finest works of the period.
Again they were neither Cubist, nor Futurist, nor Abstract,
but they expressed Duchamp’s typical vision of the body
perceived in its inmost impulses.
There was no question that as a painter
Duchamp was on a footing with the most gifted. What he
lacked was faith in art itself, and he sought to replace
aesthetic values in his new world with an aggressive
intellectualism opposed to the so-called common-sense world.
As early as 1913 he began studies for an utterly awkward
piece: “The Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even.” For it, he repudiated entirely what he
called retinal art and adopted the geometrical methods of
industrial design. It became like the blueprint of a
machine, albeit a symbolic one, that embodied his ideas of
man, woman, and love.
Like the “Nude,” “The Large Glass” was to
be unique among works of modern painting. Between 1913 and
1923, Duchamp worked almost exclusively on the preliminary
studies and the actual painting of the picture itself. His
farewell to painting was by no means a farewell to work.
During this period a stroke of genius led
him to a discovery of great importance in contemporary art,
the so-called ready-made. In 1913 he produced the “Bicycle
Wheel,” which was simply an ordinary bicycle wheel. In 1914,
“Pharmacy” consisted of a commercial print of a winter
landscape, to which he added two small figures reminiscent
of pharmacists’ bottles. It was nearly 40 years before the
ready-mades were seen as more than a derisive gesture
against the excessive importance attached to works of art,
before their positive values were understood. With the
ready-mades, contemporary art became in itself a mixture of
creation and criticism.
When World War I broke out, Duchamp, who
was exempt from military service, was living and working in
almost complete isolation. He left France for the United
States, where he had made friends through the Armory Show.
When he landed in New York in June 1915, he was welcomed by
reporters as a famous man. His warm reception in
intellectual circles as well raised his spirits. The wealthy
poet and collector Walter Arensberg arranged a studio for
him in his own home, where the painter immediately set to
work on “The Large Glass.” He became the centre of the
Arensberg group, enjoying a reputation that led to many
offers from art galleries eager to handle the works of the
painter of the “Nude.” He refused them all, however, not
wanting to start a full-time career as a painter. To support
himself, he gave French lessons. He was then, and remained,
an artist whose works would have been sought after but who
was content to distribute them free among his friends or to
sell them for intentionally small amounts. He helped
Arensberg buy back as many of his works as could be found,
including the “Nude.” They became a feature of the Arensberg
Collection, which was left to the Philadelphia Museum of
Art.
Besides “The Large Glass,” on which he
worked for eight more years until abandoning it in 1923,
Duchamp did only a few more ready-mades. One, a urinal
entitled “Fountain,” he sent to the first exhibition of the
Society of Independent Artists, in 1917. Although he was a
founder-member of this society, he had signed the work “R.
Mutt,” and therefore it was refused. His ready-mades had
anticipated by a few years the Dada movement, which Picabia
introduced to New York City in the magazine 291 (1917). As
an echo of the movement, Duchamp helped Arensberg and H.P.
Roché to publish The Blind Man, which had only two issues,
and Rongwrong, which had only one. Later, with the painter
Man Ray, he published a single issue of New York Dada in
1921.
In 1918 he sold “The Large Glass,” which
was still unfinished, to Walter Arensberg. With the money
from this and another painting, his last, he spent nine
months in Buenos Aires, where he heard of the armistice and
of the deaths of his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon and of
Guillaume Apollinaire. In Paris in 1919 he stayed with
Picabia and established contact with the first Dada group.
This was the occasion of his most famous ready-made, a
photograph of the “Mona Lisa” with a moustache and a goatee
added. The act expressed the Dadaists’ scorn for the art of
the past, which in their eyes was part of the infamy of a
civilization that had produced the horrors of the war just
ended.
In February 1923 Duchamp stopped working
on “The Large Glass,” considering it definitely and
permanently unfinished. As the years passed, art activity of
any kind interested him less and less, but the cinema came
to fulfill his pleasure in movement. His works to this point
had been only potential machines, and it was time for him to
create machines that were real, that worked and moved. The
first ones were devoted to optics and led to a short film,
Anemic Cinema (1926). With these and other products,
including “optical phonograph records,” he acted as a kind
of amateur engineer. The modesty of his results, however,
was a way by which he could ridicule the ambitions of
industry. The rest of the time he was absorbed in chess
playing, even taking part in international tournaments and
publishing a treatise on the subject in 1932.
Although Duchamp carefully avoided art
circles, he remained in contact with the Surrealist group in
Paris, composed of many of his former Dadaist friends. When
in 1934 he published the Green Box, containing a series of
documents related to “The Large Glass,” the Surrealist poet
André Breton perceived the importance of the painting and
wrote the first comprehensive study of Duchamp, which
appeared in the Paris magazine Minotaure in 1935. From that
time on there was a closer association between the
Surrealists and Duchamp, who helped Breton to organize all
the Surrealist exhibitions from 1938 to 1959. Just before
World War II he assembled his Boîte-en-valise, a suitcase
containing 68 small-scale reproductions of his works. When
the Nazis occupied France, he smuggled his material across
the border in the course of several trips. Eventually he
carried it to New York City, where he joined a number of the
Surrealists in exile, including Breton, Max Ernst, and Yves
Tanguy. He was instrumental in organizing the Surrealist
exhibition in New York City in October and November of 1942.
Unlike his co-exiles, he felt at home in
America, where he had many friends. During the war, the
exhibition of “The Large Glass” at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York City, helped to revive his reputation, and a
special issue of the art magazine View was devoted to him in
1945. Two years later he was back in Paris assisting Breton
with a Surrealist exhibition, but he returned to New York
City promptly and spent most of the remainder of his life
there. After his marriage to Teeny Sattler in 1954, he lived
more than ever in semiretirement, content with chess and
with producing, as the spirit moved him, some strange and
unexpected object.
This contemplative life was interrupted in
about 1960, when the rising generation of American artists
realized that Duchamp had found answers for many of their
problems. Suddenly tributes came to him from all over the
world. Retrospective shows of his works were organized in
America and Europe. Even more astonishing were the replicas
of his ready-mades produced in limited editions with his
permission, but the greatest surprise was still to come.
After his death in Neuilly his friends heard that he had
worked secretly for his last 20 years on a major piece
called “Étant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau, 2. le gaz
d’éclairage” (Given: 1. the waterfall, 2. the illuminating
gas”). It is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and
offers through two small holes in a heavy wooden door a
glimpse of Duchamp’s enigma.
Assessment
As artist and anti-artist, Marcel Duchamp is considered
one of the leading spirits of 20th-century painting. With
the exception of the “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,”
however, his works were ignored by the public for the
greater part of his life. Until 1960 only such avant-garde
groups as the Surrealists claimed that he was important,
while to “official” art circles and sophisticated critics he
appeared to be merely an eccentric and something of a
failure.
He was more than 70 years old when he
emerged in the United States as the secret master whose
entirely new attitude toward art and society, far from being
negative or nihilistic, had led the way to Pop art, Op art,
and many of the other movements embraced by younger artists
everywhere. Not only did he change the visual arts but he
also changed the mind of the artist.
Robert Lebel
Encyclopædia Britannica
