Marcel Duchamp - Biography

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp, was born on July 28th, 1887, near Blainville, France. In 1904, he traveled to Paris to join his artist brothers, Raymond Duschamp-Villon and Jacques Villon. In Paris, Marcel studied painting at the Academie Julian, until 1905. His early work was Post-Impressionist. In 1908, Duchamp’s work was exhibited at the Salon di Automne, and in 1909 at the Salon des Independants, both in Paris.

In 1911, at their Puteaux home, the brothers hosted a regular discussion group with other writers and artists, including: Picabia, Fernand Leger, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye and Alexander Archipenko. The group became known as the Puteaux Group, and their work, Orphic Cubism, or Orphism. The movement received its name and its theory from Apolinaire’s Orpheus.

Orphism, led by the Delaunays, sought to produce pure color harmonies as independent of nature as music. In 1912, Robert Delaunay painted Orphisms manifesto, his series Simultaneous Contrasts; in which the swirling movements of color are meant to evoke the rhythms pulsating through the universe. The movement, with its nonobjective style, was difficult to maintain and lasted only a few years, with many of its members turning to Futurism.

In 1912, Duchamp produced two of his iconic works: Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, and The Bride. The first was shown at the Armory Show, which set off radical modernism. Perhaps no work at the show was as controversial as Duchamp’s Nude. Proclaimed scandalous, since ‘nudes do not look like that’, the painting was the herald of Duschamp’s Analytic Cubism - which was very close to Futurism. In fact, Futurism, with its glorification of modernization, and its aim of conveying the surge of industrial society, appropriated the technique of Analytic Cubism in order to capture movement, that is, to give “a static representation of movement”. Analytic Cubism was a criticism of traditional art, which limited the subject to a single place and time. Futurism, empowered with Duchamp’s method, became capable of expressing the new notions of space and time, or matter and motion, revealed by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Futurism, like other idealizations and glorifications of progress, modernity, industry, technology and etc. found its doom in WWI. Some old, and forgotten, ancient Greek maxims revealed themselves in history’s sense of irony, as many futurists themselves marched forward, as if on tracks, towards their end pushed and pulled by the same vehicles of destruction they had glorified a few very long years ago.

Duchamp’s Bride, was an even more disturbing development then his Nude. Any resemblance to the human form is sought in vain, regardless of how tangent, or abstract. Instead of veins, souls and flesh, in the Bride we find a mechanism, engineered beautifully to fulfill no function whatsoever. There seems to be a criticism, if not a satire, of the scientification of the human form. She appears to have been analyzed into uselessness, stripped of any and all human form and reduced to a psychologically and physiologically dysfunctional piece of plumbing. Without a doubt, the work presents an almost complete reversal of Futurism, and its glorification of the machine and progress, and reveals a certain prophetic pessimism over the future – a preemptive response to the forces about to be unleashed on Europe.

In the same year, Duchamp attended a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel’s 1910 novel, Impressions d’Afrique. The novel, and play, featured narratives that turned on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets, and humanoid machines. Duchamp credits the play for inspiring him to begin his The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, also known as, The Large Glass – a work which would be completed a full decade later. Towards the end of 1912, Duchamp would travel with Picabia, Apollinaire and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, through the Jura Mountains. During this trip, all of them would begin contemplating a certain ‘disintegration of the concept of art’.

In 1913 Duchamp withdrew from painting circles. He did paint a few canvases following 1912, but in each of them he attempted to remove all ‘painterly’ effects. Having, in some sense, left the art world he began working as a librarian. In a letter to a friend – Constantin Brancusi – he would write: “Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than the propeller? Tell me, can you do that?” In accord with this abandonment of painting, Duchamp began to study mathematics and physics, and most importantly, the theoretical works of Henri Poincare; who’s work brought about a rather Hegelian turn in Duchamp’s thinking. Pontclaire taught that the laws believed to govern matter were in fact the creations of the minds that understood them, and as such none of them can be considered ‘true’; “the things themselves are not what science can reach…, but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality”. Poincare’s influence on Duchamp led directly to his 3 Standard Stoppages, and, to a large extent, also to his ‘Readymades’.

After the declaration of war, in 1914, Duchamp, having been exempted from military service, left for America. Arriving in New York, in 1915, he found himself a celebrity. He quickly befriended Man Ray, Katherine Dreier and a number of well-known Avant-Garde figures. Duchamp largely established the Dadaist movement in New York, and eventually, with Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roche, published a Dada magazine, entitled The Blind Man.

Out of despair over the mechanized mass killing in WWI, a series of largely ex-Futurist artists launched a protest movement called Dada, or Dadaism. Its overarching purpose was to declare to the public that the catastrophe of WWI rendered all established values, including political, moral and aesthetic ones, meaningless. In fact, Dadaism was intimately linked with Communism, in their common aim of overthrowing bourgeois society, and its logical and economic structures. The link with Communism, however is not particular to Dadaism, as most artists of the 20th century, up until the last couple decades, tended to associate themselves, if not directly involve themselves, with Communism and Socialism.

Dadaism, however, was short lived, its prominence limited to about ten years between 1915 and the mid 1920’s. In this rather short life, Dadaism preached - with a vengeance - ‘non-sense’ and anti-art. Hans Arp wrote that, “Dadaism carried assent and dissent ad absurdum. In order to achieve indifference, it was destructive.” The infamous example, of course, was Duchamp’s ‘improved’ Mona Lisa; a reproduction of Da Vinci’s masterpiece which was inscribed with a mustache and the abbreviation LHOOQ, which translates into a vulgar pun when pronounced in French. Some historians claim that it was a meant as a reply to Freud’s famous essay on Da Vinci, where he discusses Da Vinci’s homosexuality. Another infamous work of Dadaism is Portrait of Cezanne, which exhibited a toy monkey inside a frame. In contemplating Dadaism, it must not be overlooked that the movement was not wholly negative. Within its calculated irrationality, there was also a path of liberation, which, of course, depended on what they termed imagination. H. W. Janson writes, “the only law respected by the Dadaists was that of chance, and the only reality, that of imagination”. Dada falls under the aesthetic episteme of Fantasy, which followed Abstraction; Fantasy, however, does not denote the lighthearted, day-dreaming, and, in general, rather superficial view of ‘fantasy’ today, but refers to a notion much closer to that introduced by Sigmund Freud, as something structural and collective, and not simply imaginary and vacuously individual. Dadaism’s emphasis on ‘imagination’ refers to a sophisticated concept, intimate with the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy.

During his stay in New York, or what can be called his Dadaist period, Duchamp developed his Readymades, the concept of ‘found art’. The major work of this period, of course, is the infamous Fountain. Duchamp submitted this urinal to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. The jury, however, rejected the work. The rejection was all the more spectacular since the jury’s principle was to display everything submitted. By the end of the century, however, Dechamp’s urinal would be voted the ‘most influential artwork of the 20th century’.

During this period, Deschamp produced a number works, including, Bottle Rack, Prelude to a Broken Arm, and his Mona Lisa parody.

Following the end of the Great War, Duchamp would return to Paris. His stay, however, would be brief, as he soon left for Buenos Aires – where he would become a ‘victim of chess’ – and then back to New York - where he would settle and grow old. From the end of WWI until the early 1920’s – with the exception of his time in Argentina – Duchamp would take part in a series of collaborations with Andre Breton, Man Ray, Marc Allegret, and others. These collaborations involved what he termed ‘kinetic works’, as well as photography, music and even some experimental cinema.

By 1923, Duchamp was hardly a practicing artist, having devoted, or, in his own words, ‘become victim’ of chess. In some sense, it would be chess, and not art, that would remain with him until his death. This distinction, however, is complicated by his own words: “The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists”; on another occasion, he would say: “I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position”. At the height of his ability, Duchamp would earn the title Chess Master. He became especially infatuated with endgame situations, and exposed an enigmatic endgame problem, which has since been deemed insoluble by grandmasters and endgame specialists.

During the 1940’s Duchamp would edit the Surrealist periodical VVV, while in the 1960 he would co-found an international literary group to oppose the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, named Oulipo. For decades Duchamp had an intimate relationship with the Surrealists, and yet, he never ‘joined’ them. Twice he was asked to curate their exhibition: in 1938, the International Surrealist Exhibition, and in 1942, the First Papers of Surrealism show. To say that his design of those exhibitions was a piece of surrealist meta-work would be appropriate. For the 1938 exhibition, Duchamp not only placed Dali’s Rainy Taxi at the entrance, but decked the halls with surrealist dressed oversized mannequins, and forced the patrons to view the art with flashlights, only after having passed through a subterranean cave with 1200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling. For the 1942 show, he spun a web of string throughout the exhibition space, to the point of limiting movement and even, in some cases, making it next to impossible to see the works.

In 1966, some quarter of a century since his last discernible work of art, Duchamp revealed his final piece, Etant Donne: 1. la chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’eclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). He had been working on this piece secretly since 1946; not even his spouse and closest friends knew of the work, they were all convinced he had given up art over two decades before.

Given Duchamp’s work, his stance on the art of the late 20th century is pivotal. An erroneously attributed quote, suggests a rather negative attitude:

This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

This quote, however, was not uttered by Duchamp himself, but by fellow Dadaist, Hans Richter. Nonetheless, the letter in which the quote is contained suggests that Duchamp fully approved of the sentiment. His stance regarding late 20th century art is seemingly further complicated by a statement from 1964:

Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since [Gustave] Courbet, in favor of retinal painting.... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas. The resolution of this seeming contradiction regarding Duchamp’s stance on late 20th century art is, however, resolvable, by a parallax difference in the artists who make them – my painting of my living room is not Yves Klein.