Artbrain!

society and culture

July 28, 1887 - October 2, 1968

Marcel Duchamp was a French/American artist.

Born Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp in Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the Haute-Normandie Region of France, he came from an artistic family. Of the six children of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp, four would become successful artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of:

Jacques Villon (1875-1963), painter, printmaker
Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918), sculptor
Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889-1963), painter
Living and working in a studio in Montparnasse, Marcel Duchamp's early works were Post-Impressionist in style but he would become perhaps the most influential of the Dada artists. A student at the Académie Julian, his influence is still strongly felt to this day by contemporary artists.

At his eldest brother Jacques' home, in 1911 Marcel and brother Raymond organized a regular discussion group with artists and critics such as Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger and others that soon was dubbed the Puteaux Group.

In early years, Duchamp had some contact with the Salon Cubists of Paris, but aesthetic as well as political differences precluded closer affiliation. In 1912, he painted "Nude Descending a Staircase," in which motion was expressed by successive superimposed images, as in motion pictures. The work was originally slated to appear in Paris, but the Salon Cubists demanded that Duchamp retitle it to avoid possible scandal. Duchamp removed the work from the exhibition entirely, and, in 1913, it went on to create a scandal at the Armory Show in New York City instead; it also spawned dozens of parodies in the years that followed. It was at that show that he met the Dadaist painter Jean Crotti who later married his sister Suzanne.

Politically, Duchamp opposed World War I and identified with Individualist Anarchism, in particular with Max Stirner's philosophical tract The Ego and Its Own, the study of which Duchamp considered the turning point in his artistic and intellectual development.

Duchamp was one of the first artists to use found objects as the basis for his artworks. His work "Fountain" consisted mostly of a ceramic urinal. His work "In advance of a broken arm" consisted of an old snow shovel. Another displayed a bicycle wheel.

Escaping service in the First World War on the pretext of a dubious heart condition, he travelled to the United States, where he befriended Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, with whom he founded the Société Anonyme in 1920. Duchamp's circle also included Louise and Walter Arensberg, Beatrice Wood and fellow Frenchman, Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures.

Marcel Duchamp took aim at conventional notions of "high art," "culture" and commodities by presenting mass-produced objects such as a bottle rack or a snow shovel as sculpture. He coupled his visual assaults on "art" with verbal puns: he signed his urinal "R. Mutt," or "armut," German for poverty, and named another piece "L.H.O.O.Q.," a coarse French pun. When the Jury at the 1917 Independents exhibition in New York rejected his urinal as not being art, Beatrice Wood defended him: "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges."

After 1923 he devoted much of his time to chess but from the mid-1930s onwards he collaborated with the Surrealists and participated in their exhibitions. Duchamp settled permanently in New York in 1942. From then until 1944, together with Max Ernst and André Breton, he edited the surrealist periodical "VVV", in New York.

The last surviving member of the Duchamp family of artists, in 1967, in Rouen, France, Marcel helped organize an exhibition called "Les Duchamp: Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp." Some of this family exhibition was later shown at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.

Marcel Duchamp died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and is buried in the Rouen Cemetery, in Rouen, Normandy, France.

Marcel Duchamp

That's not to say that art didn't have ideas and concepts before him, but Marcel Duchamp elevated the idea above everything else, making the art object a visual idea rather than a metaphor, however mixed. With humour and great accuracy he removed aesthetics from discussion - he didn't regard his great works as equals to others he merely remarked that they were equally relevant and should be allowed an equal position. He didn't claim that there was equal aesthetic beauty, just that aesthetic beauty was irrelevant.

The last laugh is of course his, as what he tried to do to take art out of itself and into the real world has come full circle. Today people will try and see beauty in conceptuakl pieces in galleries that are just oversized ideas. Duchamp would be laughing at the pomposity and seriousness of an art world that he tried to deflate with 'In advance of a broken arm' - a snow shovel on the all and all his other marvellous pieces.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "duchamp".