Birth Year : 1887
Death Year : 1968
Country : France
Marcel Duchamp, born in Blainville, near Rouen, is the brother of painters
Jacques Villon and Suzanne Duchamp, and of the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon.
He began his career in 1909 at the Salon des Indépendants, and by
1912 he had passed rapidly through Impressionist, Fauvist, and Expressionist
phases to arrive at a form of Cubist Futurism in "Nude Descending a Staircase",
one of the most triumphantly successful works at the New York Armory Show
of 1913. Duchamp settled in New York and earned his living giving French
lessons, preferring his personal liberty to orders for paintings. When
Francis Picabia came to New York in 1915, the two men met and their common
ideals sparked the Dada movement (1915-22), based on principles of inversion,
negation, and anti-aestheticism, and a rebellion of international scope
against contemporary morality and the senselessness of war. Between 1915
and 1923, Duchamp worked leisurely on his masterpiece, "The Bride Undressed
by Her Bachelors": painted on glass and adorned with bits of painted, cutout
tin. When the painting was completed, Duchamp laid down his brush and did
not paint again, "in order not to repeat" himself.
He devoted his time to playing chess and to the creation of "ready-mades":
ordinary objects raised to the level of fine art by chance association
and by the addition or elimination of detail. Duchamp 's twenty-odd paintings
are psychologically meaningful, humorous, and curiously disquieting, with
witty punning titles that add to our perplexity and enjoyment. Such titles
are also attached to his "ready-mades," whose principle is that the creation
of a work of art is not limited to manual dexterity but may stem from the
imagination and vision of the artist. Although Duchamp had given up painting,
his influence on the Dadaists was enormous, and he continued to exert an
influence upon all forms of contemporary art. In fact, Marcel Duchamp has
become a veritable legend in himself: a man with a brilliant mind, a sense
of humor, and a spirit of freedom. His death, in Paris, in October, 1968,
deprived the world of one of the most original personalities of the twentieth
century.
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Marcel
Duchamp
Nude
Descending a Staircase
Marcel
Duchamp
Chocolate
Grinder, No. 2
Marcel
Duchamp
Nude
Descending a Staircase No. 2
Marcel
Duchamp
La Joconde aux Moustaches (L.H.O.O.Q.)
Marcel
Duchamp
Nude
Descending a Staircase, No. 2
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