Duchamp, Marcel

Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968). French-born avant-garde artist and art theorist who became an American citizen in 1955. His output was small (most of his key works are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and for long periods he was more or less inactive, but he is regarded as one of the most potent figures in modern art because of the originality and fertility of his ideas; in Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists (1986), Edward Lucie-Smith writes that he has ‘probably exercised an influence over Modernism second only to that of Cézanne' and he describes him as ‘perhaps the most important art-theorist and avant-garde provocateur of the twentieth century. He directed attention away from the work of art as a material object, and instead presented it as something which was essentially an idea: he shifted the emphasis from making to thinking.’ To many people, however, this achievement is something to lament rather than to applaud.

Duchamp was born at Blainville, Normandy, one of six children (three sons and three daughters) of a successful notary. Their grandfather was an amateur engraver, and Marcel's two brothers and one of his sisters also became artists— Suzanne Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon. In 1904 Duchamp followed his brothers to Paris, where he studied for a year at the Académie Julian. His early paintings were influenced by Post-Impressionism and then Fauvism, and he also did humorous drawings for various journals to help earn his living. From the outset he was interested in art primarily as a vehicle for ideas and had little concern for skilled craftsmanship or beauty of technique. In 1909 he began exhibiting his work in public, at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne, but he had no interest in achieving conventional career success.

By 1911 Duchamp was part of the Cubist circle, and in that year he produced his first work to show real originality—Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (Philadelphia); it depicts a stylized, semi-abstract figure walking down a spiral staircase, movement being suggested by the use of overlapping images, in the manner of rapid-fire multiple-exposure photography. The following year, 1912, he painted a more sophisticated version, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Philadelphia), in which the figure is more machine-like and the movement more dynamic. This was shown in Barcelona and Paris in 1912, but it was in New York the following year that it first made a great impact, becoming the most discussed work in the Armory Show. The attention it received was mainly negative (probably the most quoted comment about it was that it looked like ‘an explosion in a shingles factory'), but there were also more appreciative remarks, and the publicity made Duchamp suddenly much better known in the USA than he had ever been in France. This first conspicuous success as a painter was also Duchamp's last, for in 1913 he made his first ready-made and from this point virtually abandoned conventional media.

In 1915, after spending two leisurely years as a library assistant at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, Duchamp moved to New York and spent the rest of the First World War there (he was excused military service on account of a minor heart complaint). His fame (or notoriety) from the Armory Show had not been forgotten, and he was greeted by reporters as he disembarked and made welcome in intellectual circles. The art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg provided him with a studio, but he refused all offers from dealers to handle his work (he had a disdain for making money as an end in itself) and instead supported himself by giving French lessons. With Man Ray and Francis Picabia he formed the nucleus of New York's Dada movement. Duchamp's main contribution to this was the ready-made, the best-known of which was Fountain (1917), consisting of a urinal bowl signed ‘R. Mutt', which was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists. In 1918–19 Duchamp spent nine months in Buenos Aires playing chess, then returned briefly to Paris, where in 1919 he produced one of his most famous creations debunking the art world—a reproduction of the Mona Lisa to which he added a moustache, beard, and rude inscription (Picabia used a version of it on the cover of 391 in March 1920).

From 1920 to 1923 Duchamp again lived in New York, and during this period he was engaged mainly on his most complex and ambitious work—an enigmatic construction entitled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass (Philadelphia; replica by Richard Hamilton, 1965–6, in the Tate Gallery, London). (The French title is ‘La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même', which contains a characteristic Duchampian pun, for ‘même’ sounds the same as ‘m'aime', which would give the translation ‘The bride stripped bare by her bachelors loves me'.) Duchamp's plans for this work go back as far as 1912 and he began constructing it in 1915. He abandoned it as ‘definitively unfinished’ in 1923, but it was damaged whilst being transported in 1926 (following its first public showing at the ‘International Exhibition of Modern Art’ at the Brooklyn Museum) and ten years later he made repairs, incorporating cracks in the shattered glass as part of the image and declaring it completed ‘by chance'. This unruffled pace was typical of Duchamp, for he once said ‘I've never been able to work more than two hours a day'.

The Large Glass is a window-like structure about nine feet high, featuring an upper and lower glass panel in an aluminium framework; each panel is embellished by oil paint, lead wire and foil, dust, and varnish. The upper panel features ‘the bride's domain’ and the lower panel ‘the bachelor apparatus'. Duchamp wrote detailed commentaries explaining his elaborate machine imagery, which expresses his vision of the frustrations and futility of sex; essentially the work ‘constitutes a diagram of an ironic love-making machine of extraordinary complexity in which the male and female machines communicate only by means of two circulatory systems, and without any point of contact’ ( Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art, 1981). Scholars have produced voluminous interpretations of the work, which John Golding considers has ‘a substantial claim to be the most complex and elaborately pondered art object that the twentieth century has yet produced'. To many people, however, it is an incomprehensible joke.

In 1923 Duchamp returned to Paris and lived there until 1942 (although he made several visits to New York). Both his parents died in 1925, leaving him a legacy that made him less inclined than ever to work. Instead he devoted much of his time to his passion for chess. He was one of the best players in France (he represented the country at four Olympiads and was champion of Paris in 1932), and the International Master Edward Lasker described him as ‘a marvelous opponent. He would always take risks in order to play a beautiful game, rather than be cautious and brutal to win.’ His obsessive devotion to the game ruined his first—rather frivolous—marriage in 1927, of which Man Ray wrote: ‘Duchamp spent the one week they lived together studying chess problems, and his bride, in desperate retaliation, got up one night when he was asleep and glued the chess pieces to the board. They were divorced three months later.’ (With his aristocratic looks and enormous charm, Duchamp was highly attractive to women, and a friend wrote that he ‘could have had his choice of heiresses'; in 1954 he made a happy second marriage to Alexina Sattler, who had previously been the wife of the art dealer Pierre Matisse, son of Henri Matisse.)

In 1942 Duchamp settled permanently in New York, although he regularly visited France. By this time he seemed to have long abandoned art, but he had in fact continued to experiment quietly, for example with rotating coloured discs that anticipate Kinetic art. He also did a good deal to promote avant-garde art, particularly Surrealism, in France and the USA, notably through the activities of the Société Anonyme, but in the exciting post-war New York art world he was for many years a marginal figure. From the late 1950s, however, avant-garde artists began to rediscover his work and ideas (it was not until 1954, when the Arensberg collection went on show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that his work was easily accessible), and in his final years he was revered as a kind of patron saint of modern art, giving numerous interviews in which he showed his characteristic graciousness and wit. In 1959, exhibitions of his work were held in London, New York, and Paris, and many others followed, including ‘The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp’ at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1966.

Near the end of his life Duchamp revealed that he had been working in secret for 20 years (1946–66) on a large mixed-media construction called Etant donnés: 1° La Chute d'eau, 2° Le Gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). It features a naturalistic painted sculpture of a reclining nude woman holding a lantern, with behind her a simulated landscape, including a trickle of water representing a waterfall; this elaborate tableau is viewed through peepholes in a heavy wooden door. He presented it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it joined the majority of his other works. Duchamp died on a visit to France and was buried with other members of his family in Rouen. He composed the inscription for his gravestone, jesting to the last: ‘D'ailleurs c'est toujours les autres qui meurent’ (All the same, it's always other people who die).

Duchamp's iconoclasm and experimental attitude have been enormously influential, most obviously on Conceptual art, but also for example on Minimal art and on Pop art, in which the ready-made has played such a big part. His wit and irony have been sadly lacking in most of his followers, however ( Max Ernst said ‘Marcel was fooling—but people took him seriously’), and it could be argued that his influence has been disastrous, encouraging people of no discernible talent to believe that anything they do, say, or think is worthy of attention as art.