DUCHAMP, MARCEL (1887–1968)

French artist.

Marcel Duchamp became one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century for a succession of provocative works that helped reorient the production and reception of art. Duchamp's turn from painting to a range of procedures, his designation of everyday objects as art, and an insistent lack of stylistic unity challenged assumptions about the status of the original and the relevance of aesthetic judgment.

Born in the Normandy region of France, Duchamp grew up in a family rich in artists, including two older brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, who participated in the cubist movement, and a younger sister, Suzanne Duchamp, who also painted. Duchamp's early paintings, produced after joining his brothers in Paris in 1904, demonstrate his interest in Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), fauvism, and then cubism. Several of these were included in a key cubist exhibition of 1911, but the next year he withdrew his 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 from the Salon des Indépendants after cubists on the hanging committee objected to the painting's subject (indicated, unavoidably, by the title painted directly on the canvas). The work was nonetheless included in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where popular press responses to this major exhibition of advanced European art singled out Duchamp's work for particular derision.

When Duchamp himself came to New York in 1915, his avant-garde credentials were firmly established by his Armory Show scandal. In 1913, however, Duchamp had turned away from cubist painting in favor of investigations of chance, optics, and theories of geometry exploring the concept of a fourth dimension, all of which reflected his engagement with an increasingly theoretical rather than a visual or "retinal" artistic experience. These ideas, as well as an overlay of sexual and machine imagery, were the basis for the two panels of a complex work on glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), also known as The Large Glass, divided vertically between the bride's section on top and the domain of the bachelors below. Begun the year of Duchamp's arrival in New York and declared definitively unfinished by the artist in 1923, this work was in another sense completed with the publication of a series of related notes in 1934, La mariée mise ànu par ses célibataires, même, or The Green Box, which appeared as an edition of unbound facsimiles, and a later set of notes, A l'infinitif, issued in 1966. And the work received another final touch in 1936, when Duchamp reassembled the pieces that had shattered during shipping in 1927.

In 1913 Duchamp also mounted a bicycle wheel on a wooden stool, but even he required time to recognize the gesture's significance, adopting the term readymade only in 1915. By simply selecting everyday objects and designating them works of art, Duchamp redirected making from a physical to a conceptual act and also drew attention to the surrounding institutional conventions that allow the gesture to register. The series came to include such objects as a bottle rack, snow shovel, and an altered reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, but the most famous was the urinal that Duchamp turned on its back, signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, entitled Fountain, and submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York. After the work's rejection from an event that was supposed to be open to all who paid the entrance fee, Duchamp orchestrated a sequence of responses, including a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) that provides the only visual record of an object that, like most of the other readymades, was lost soon after it was initially chosen.

At the time of his ostensible rejection of art in favor of chess in 1923, Duchamp's reputation was largely confined to avant-garde circles associated with Dada and surrealism. Yet over the course of the century his reputation burgeoned, gathering momentum particularly during the 1960s as a modernist aesthetic was supplanted by postmodernism in the context of Pop Art's engagement with everyday objects or images and as conceptual art began to emphasize the primacy of idea over physical entity.

Duchamp contributed to his reception through his Box in a Valise, a kind of miniature museum composed of small-scale reproductions of extant work as well as lost readymades that first appeared in 1941. Postwar attention was prompted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's 1954 installation of a major collection of Duchamp's work acquired from Louise and Walter Arensberg and Robert Lebel's 1959 monograph, Marcel Duchamp, published in French and English editions. These were followed by a 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, limited edition versions of previously lost readymades issued in 1964, and, immediately following Duchamp's death, the public unveiling of his final, secret work, Given: 1° The Waterfall; 2° The Illuminating Gas, or Étant donnés, 1946–1966, which presents a startling tableau of a nude woman, head invisible and legs spread, that can only be seen through holes in a wooden door installed in an alcove near the Large Glass at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Yet even if the complexity of Duchamp's work as a whole is one reason for his ever expanding reputation, the deceptively simple gesture of the readymade raised questions about the nature of artistic authorship, originality, and aesthetic judgment that continue to reverberate through art of the present day.

See alsoAvant-Garde; Cubism; Degenerate Art Exhibit; Modernism; Pop Art; Postmodernism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ades, Dawn, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins. Marcel Duchamp. London, 1999.

Buskirk, Martha, and Mignon Nixon, eds. The Duchamp Effect. Cambridge, Mass., 1996.

Naumann, Francis M. Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York, 1999.

Sanouillet, Michel, and Elmer Peterson, eds. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. New York, 1989. Translation of Marchand du sel: Écrits de Marcel Duchamp (1958).

Martha Buskirk