Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was born on July 28, 1887, in Blainville-Crevon, a village in Normandy near Rouen, into a family unusually crowded with artists ^[1]. His father, Eugène Duchamp, was a notary, and his maternal grandfather, Émile Nicolle, was a shipping agent who made engravings. Of the six Duchamp children who survived infancy, four became artists: Gaston (who worked as Jacques Villon), Raymond (who took the name Raymond Duchamp-Villon and became a sculptor), Marcel, and their younger sister Suzanne Duchamp, a painter ^[1].

The household tolerated artistic ambition. When Gaston and Raymond left for Paris to pursue art, their father supported them financially, deducting the sums from their eventual inheritances, an arrangement he later extended to Marcel ^[2]. The young Marcel studied at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen, where he did well in mathematics and won a prize for drawing. He began painting around 1902, producing landscapes of Blainville in a manner touched by Impressionism ^[1].

In 1904 he joined his older brothers in Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, though by his own later account he spent much of his time playing billiards rather than attending class ^[2]. To earn money he drew cartoons for illustrated papers, and the punning, joke-driven habits of that trade never left his work. Over the following years he moved rapidly through the styles then available to a young painter: Post-Impressionism, Fauvist color, and by 1911 a personal reading of Cubism ^[3].

The picture that made Duchamp notorious was Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, painted in 1912. It rendered a figure in motion as a cascade of overlapping planes, closer to chronophotography than to any conventional nude ^[3]. When he submitted it to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, the hanging committee, which included Cubist painters and his own brothers, asked him to withdraw it or change the title. Duchamp took the painting home instead. He later said the episode helped free him from groups and movements altogether ^[2].

The rejection turned into an unlikely triumph. In 1913 the painting appeared at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, the show remembered as the Armory Show, where it became the most talked-about work on display. Critics mocked it, one famously comparing it to an explosion in a shingle factory, crowds lined up to see it, and it sold ^[4]. Duchamp, still in Paris, found himself famous in America before he had ever crossed the Atlantic.

He was already moving away from painting. In 1913 he mounted a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool in his studio, at first simply because he liked watching it spin. In 1914 he bought a bottle-drying rack from a Paris department store and signed it. He would soon coin the term readymade for such works: manufactured objects promoted to art by the artist's choice rather than his hand ^[3]. The idea, developed casually, became the most consequential of his career.

Duchamp sailed to New York in 1915, exempted from French military service on medical grounds, and found the city welcoming: collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg became his patrons and their apartment his social base ^[2]. Among Marcel Duchamp achievements the readymades stand first, and the decisive one came in 1917. The Society of Independent Artists had promised to exhibit any work whose maker paid the fee. Duchamp, a board member, tested the promise by submitting a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt" and titled Fountain. The board refused to show it, Duchamp resigned, and a defense of the piece appeared in the small magazine The Blind Man, arguing that Mr. Mutt's choice, not his handiwork, created the artwork ^[5]. The original object was lost, probably discarded, and survives only in a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz; in 2004 a poll of five hundred British art professionals named Fountain the most influential artwork of the twentieth century ^[6].

His other sustained project was The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, usually called the Large Glass, which occupied him from 1915 to 1923. Built from oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust fixed between two large panes of glass, it stages an obscure mechanical courtship between a "bride" in the upper panel and nine "bachelors" below ^[3]. Duchamp declared it definitively unfinished in 1923. When the panes cracked in transit after a 1926 exhibition, he repaired the work and said he liked the cracks, which completed it by chance ^[2]. The Glass now belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which holds the largest collection of his work anywhere, most of it from the Arensberg collection ^[7].

Alongside these he kept up a stream of smaller provocations. In 1919 he penciled a mustache and goatee on a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa and titled it L.H.O.O.Q., letters that read as a vulgar pun in French ^[3]. In 1920 he invented a female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, photographed in costume by Man Ray, whose name puns on the phrase "Eros, c'est la vie" ^[2]. From 1935 to 1941 he assembled the Boîte-en-valise, a leather case holding miniature reproductions of his own works, a portable museum of himself issued in series ^[7]. Each gesture questioned originality, authorship, and the market, questions that later generations of artists treated as central.

By the mid 1920s Duchamp let it be known that he had abandoned art for chess, and for once the legend was close to the truth. He had learned the game as a boy and played seriously in New York and Buenos Aires, where he spent nine months in 1918 and 1919 studying it obsessively ^[2]. Back in France he earned the title of chess master from the French federation and competed in the French championship. He represented France at four Chess Olympiads between 1928 and 1933 and played first board for the country in correspondence chess ^[8].

His strength was real if not world class. He drew a tournament game against Frank Marshall, the longtime American champion, and in 1932 he and the theorist Vitaly Halberstadt published Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled, a technical study of rare king-and-pawn endgames, printed in French, German, and English ^[8]. Duchamp designed the book himself. He also reported on chess for the Paris daily Ce Soir in the late 1930s.

Chess was not a renunciation of art so much as a continuation of it by other means. He told an interviewer that while not all artists are chess players, all chess players are artists, a remark he repeated in a 1952 address to the New York State Chess Association ^[8]. The game's closed system of rules, freed from money and objects, matched his distaste for what he called retinal painting, art aimed only at the eye ^[2].

Duchamp cultivated detachment in life as in art. In 1927 he married Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, the daughter of a wealthy automobile family; the marriage lasted about six months and ended in divorce in January 1928, with Duchamp reportedly unwilling to let domestic life interrupt his chess ^[2]. For roughly two decades afterward his closest companion was the American sculptor Mary Reynolds, with whom he lived intermittently in Paris; she later joined the French Resistance during the German occupation ^[2].

He had one child, a daughter born in 1911 from a brief relationship with Jeanne Serre. He learned of her existence only decades later; she became the artist Yo Sermayer, and father and daughter met in the 1960s ^[2]. In 1954 he married Alexina "Teeny" Sattler, the former wife of the art dealer Pierre Matisse, and the marriage was by all accounts happy and lasted until his death ^[1].

Duchamp left occupied France in 1942, reaching New York by way of Marseille and Casablanca, and spent the war years among the émigré Surrealists, helping André Breton mount exhibitions, including the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism show, which he webbed with a mile of string ^[2]. He became a United States citizen in 1955 ^[1]. Friends described a courteous, unhurried man who lived cheaply, sold little, and financed himself partly by dealing works by Brancusi and others. Among Marcel Duchamp facts often repeated is his indifference to studios and possessions: for years his New York apartment appeared to contain almost no art at all.

Through the 1940s and 1950s Duchamp played the retired grandmaster of modern art, giving interviews, sitting on juries, and advising collectors, while insisting he had stopped making things. The pose concealed a secret. From 1946 to 1966, in a rented room on East 11th Street in Manhattan, he built one last major work: Étant donnés, a walk-in tableau of a nude figure lying in a landscape, visible only through two peepholes in an old Spanish wooden door ^[7]. He left an instruction manual for its assembly. The Philadelphia Museum of Art installed it in 1969, the year after his death, and its unveiling astonished even his close friends ^[7].

Recognition arrived steadily in these decades. The Arensberg collection went to Philadelphia in 1950, giving his work a permanent home. In 1963 the Pasadena Art Museum staged his first retrospective, where the photographer Julian Wasser caught the 76-year-old playing chess against a nude Eve Babitz beneath the Large Glass, an image that became famous in its own right ^[2]. The Tate Gallery in London mounted a large exhibition in 1966. Younger artists, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns among them, sought him out and acknowledged his example ^[3].

Duchamp kept a routine of summers in Cadaqués on the Spanish coast and winters in New York. On the evening of October 1, 1968, he dined at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine outside Paris with Man Ray and the critic Robert Lebel, reportedly in high spirits. He died of heart failure in the early hours of October 2, 1968, at the age of 81 ^[1]. He is buried in the Rouen Cemetery with his family, under an epitaph he wrote himself: "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent" (Besides, it's always other people who die) ^[2].

Any Marcel Duchamp biography ends with a paradox: a man who made relatively few objects and sold fewer became one of the most influential artists of his century. The readymade dissolved the assumption that art must be made by hand, and from that dissolution flowed Pop art's embrace of commercial imagery, Fluxus, conceptual art, installation, appropriation, and much of what museums have collected since 1960 ^[3]. Critics coined the phrase "Duchampian" for art that operates through choice, context, and wit rather than craft.

His market and institutional standing caught up with his reputation late. Because the original readymades were mostly lost, he authorized signed replicas in 1964 with the Milan dealer Arturo Schwarz, an edition that itself raised the questions about copies and authenticity his work had always posed ^[6]. The Philadelphia Museum of Art remains the essential site for seeing his work in depth, holding the Large Glass, Étant donnés, and versions of the readymades ^[7]. The Centre Pompidou in Paris and other major museums have devoted retrospectives to him, and the Association Marcel Duchamp, run by his heirs, awards an annual Prix Marcel Duchamp to a French contemporary artist ^[3].

He also left a legacy in words. His interviews with Pierre Cabanne, published in 1967, and Calvin Tomkins's conversations and full-scale biography preserve a voice that was skeptical, funny, and free of grievance ^[2]. Duchamp liked to say that the viewer completes the work of art. Half a century after his death, viewers, artists, and arguing critics are still completing his.