Duchamp

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art, and he had a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (such as Henri Matisse) as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind.

Early life and education

Marcel Duchamp was born at Blainville-Crevon in Normandy, France, to Eugène Duchamp and Lucie Duchamp (formerly Lucie Nicolle) and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Émile Frédéric Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, paint, and make music together.

Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp's seven children, one died as an infant and four became 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.

As a child, with his two elder brothers already away from home at school in Rouen, Duchamp was closer to his sister Suzanne, who was a willing accomplice in games and activities conjured by his fertile imagination. At eight years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers' footsteps when he left home and began schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, in Rouen. Two other students in his class also became well-known artists and lasting friends: Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont. For the next eight years, he was locked into an educational regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not an outstanding student, his best subject was mathematics and he won two mathematics prizes at the school. He also won a prize for drawing in 1903, and at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize, validating his recent decision to become an artist.

He learned academic drawing from a teacher who unsuccessfully attempted to "protect" his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamp's true artistic mentor at the time was his brother Jacques Villon, whose fluid and incisive style he sought to imitate. At 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting his sister Suzanne in various poses and activities. That summer he also painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils.

Early work

Duchamp's early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles. He experimented with classical techniques and subjects. When he was later asked about what had influenced him at the time, Duchamp cited the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whose approach to art was not outwardly anti-academic, but quietly individual.

He studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, but preferred playing billiards to attending classes. During this time Duchamp drew and sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use verbal puns (sometimes spanning multiple languages), visual puns, or both. Such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life.

In 1905, he began his compulsory military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment,François Lespinasse, ''Robert Antoine Pinchon: 1886–1943'', 1990, repr. Rouen: Association les amis de l'École de Rouen, 2007, working for a printer in Rouen. There he learned typography and printing processes—skills he would use in his later work.

Owing to his eldest brother Jacques' membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamp's work was exhibited in the 1908 Salon d'Automne, and the following year in the Salon des Indépendants. Fauves and Paul Cézanne's proto-Cubism influenced his paintings, although the critic Guillaume Apollinaire—who was eventually to become a friend—criticized what he called "Duchamp's very ugly nudes" ("les nus très vilains de Duchamp"). Duchamp also became lifelong friends with exuberant artist Francis Picabia after meeting him at the 1911 Salon d'Automne, and Picabia proceeded to introduce him to a lifestyle of fast cars and "high" living.

In 1911, at Jacques' home in Puteaux, the brothers hosted a regular discussion group with Cubist artists including Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, and Alexander Archipenko. Poets and writers also participated. The group came to be known as the Puteaux Group, or the Section d'Or. Uninterested in the Cubists' seriousness, or in their focus on visual matters, Duchamp did not join in discussions of Cubist theory and gained a reputation of being shy. However, that same year he painted in a Cubist style and added an impression of motion by using repetitive imagery.

During this period Duchamp's fascination with transition, change, movement, and distance became manifest, and as many artists of the time, he was intrigued with the concept of depicting the fourth dimension in art. His painting ''Sad Young Man on a Train'' embodies this concern:

First, there's the idea of the movement of the train, and then that of the sad young man who is in a corridor and who is moving about; thus there are two parallel movements corresponding to each other. Then, there is the distortion of the young man—I had called this ''elementary parallelism''. It was a formal decomposition; that is, linear elements following each other like parallels and distorting the object. The object is completely stretched out, as if elastic. The lines follow each other in parallels, while changing subtly to form the movement, or the form of the young man in question. I also used this procedure in the ''Nude Descending a Staircase''.

In his 1911 ''Portrait of Chess Players'' (''Portrait de joueurs d'échecs'') there is the Cubist overlapping frames and multiple perspectives of his two brothers playing chess, but to that Duchamp added elements conveying the unseen mental activity of the players.

Works from this time also included his first "machine" painting, ''Coffee Mill (Moulin à café)'' (1911), which he gave to his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The later more figurative machine painting of 1914, ''Chocolate Grinder'' (''Broyeuse de chocolat''), prefigures the mechanism incorporated into the ''Large Glass'' on which he began work in New York the following year.

''Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2''

Duchamp's first work to provoke significant controversy was ''Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2'' ''(Nu descendant un escalier n° 2)'' (1912). The painting depicts the mechanistic motion of a nude, with superimposed facets, similar to motion pictures. It shows elements of both the fragmentation and synthesis of the Cubists, and the movement and dynamism of the Futurists.

He first submitted the piece to appear at the Cubist Salon des Indépendants, but Albert Gleizes (according to Duchamp in an interview with Pierre Cabanne, p. 31)Peter Brooke, The "rejection" of Nude Descending a Staircase
asked Duchamp's brothers to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting, or to paint over the title that he had painted on the work and rename it something else. Duchamp's brothers did approach him with Gleizes' request, but Duchamp quietly refused. However, there was no jury at the Salon des Indépendants and Gleizes was in no position to reject the painting. The controversy, according to art historian Peter Brooke, was not whether the work should be hung or not, but whether it should be hung with the Cubist group.

Of the incident Duchamp later recalled, "I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that." Yet Duchamp did appear in the illustrations to '' Du "Cubisme"'', he participated in the ''La Maison Cubiste (Cubist House)'', organized by the designer André Mare for the Salon d'Automne of 1912 (a few months after the Indépendants); he signed the Section d'Or invitation and participated in the Section d'Or exhibition during the fall of 1912. The impression is, Brooke writes, "it was precisely because he wished to remain part of the group that he withdrew the painting; and that, far from being ill treated by the group, he was given a rather privileged position, probably through the patronage of Picabia".

The painting was exhibited for the first time at Galeries Dalmau, ''Exposició d'Art Cubista'', Barcelona, 1912; the first exhibition of Cubism in SpainWilliam H. Robinson, Jordi Falgàs, Carmen Belen Lord, ''Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí''
Cleveland Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Yale University Press, 2006, Duchamp later submitted the painting to the 1913 " Armory Show" in New York City. In addition to displaying works of American artists, this show was the first major exhibition of modern trends coming out of Paris, encompassing experimental styles of the European avant-garde, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. American show-goers, accustomed to realistic art, were scandalized, and the ''Nude'' was at the center of much of the controversy.

Leaving "retinal art" behind

At about this time, Duchamp read Max Stirner's philosophical tract, '' The Ego and Its Own'', the study which he considered another turning point in his artistic and intellectual development. He called it "a remarkable book ... which advances no formal theories, but just keeps saying that the ego is always there in everything."

While in Munich in 1912, he painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings. He started '' The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even'' image, and began making plans for ''The Large Glass'' – scribbling short notes to himself, sometimes with hurried sketches. It would be more than ten years before this piece was completed. Not much else is known about the two-month stay in Munich except that the friend he visited was intent on showing him the sights and the nightlife, and that he was influenced by the works of the sixteenth century German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder in Munich's famed Alte Pinakothek, known for its Old Master paintings. Duchamp recalled that he took the short walk to visit this museum daily. Duchamp scholars have long recognized in Cranach the subdued ochre and brown color range Duchamp later employed.

The same year, Duchamp also attended a performance of a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel's 1910 novel, ''Impressions d'Afrique,'' which featured plots that turned in on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets and humanoid machines. He credited the drama with having radically changed his approach to art, and having inspired him to begin the creation of his ''The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even'', also known as ''The Large Glass''. Work on ''The Large Glass'' continued into 1913, with his invention of inventing a repertoire of forms. He made notes, sketches and painted studies, and even drew some of his ideas on the wall of his apartment.

Toward the end of 1912, he traveled with Picabia, Apollinaire and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia through the Jura mountains, an adventure that Buffet-Picabia described as one of their "forays of demoralization, which were also forays of witticism and clownery ... the disintegration of the concept of art".Mink, J. (2004). Duchamp. Taschen. Duchamp's notes from the trip avoid logic and sense, and have a surrealistic, mythical connotation.

Duchamp painted few canvases after 1912, and in those he did, he attempted to remove "painterly" effects, and to use a technical drawing approach instead.

His broad interests led him to an exhibition of aviation technology during this period, after which Duchamp said to his friend Constantin Brâncuși, "Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?". Brâncuși later sculpted bird forms. U.S. Customs officials mistook them for aviation parts and attempted to collect import duties on them.

In 1913, Duchamp withdrew from painting circles and began working as a librarian in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève to be able to earn a living wage while concentrating on scholarly realms and working on his ''Large Glass''. He studied math and physics – areas where exciting new discoveries were taking place. The theoretical writings of Henri Poincaré particularly intrigued and inspired Duchamp. Poincaré postulated that the laws believed to govern matter were created solely by the minds that "understood" them and that no theory could 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", Poincaré wrote in 1902. Reflecting the influence of Poincaré's writings, Duchamp tolerated any interpretation of his art by regarding it as the creation of the person who formulated it, not as truth.

Duchamp's own art-science experiments began during his tenure at the library. To make one of his favorite pieces, ''3 Standard Stoppages'' (''3 stoppages étalon''), he dropped three 1-meter lengths of thread onto prepared canvases, one at a time, from a height of 1 meter. The threads landed in three random undulating positions. He varnished them into place on the blue-black canvas strips and attached them to glass. He then cut three wood slats into the shapes of the curved strings, and put all the pieces into a croquet box. Three small leather signs with the title printed in gold were glued to the "stoppage" backgrounds. The piece appears to literally follow Poincaré's ''School of the Thread'', part of a book on classical mechanics.

In his studio he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. Although it is often assumed that the ''Bicycle Wheel'' represents the first of Duchamp's "Readymades", this particular installation was never submitted for any art exhibition, and it was eventually lost. However, initially, the wheel was simply placed in the studio to create atmosphere: "I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace."

After World War I started in August 1914, with his brothers and many friends in military service and himself exempted (due to a heart murmur),Cabanne, P., & Duchamp, M. (1971). ''Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp''
. New York: Viking Press. Hachette UK, 21 July 2009 Duchamp felt uncomfortable in Paris. Meanwhile, ''Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2'' had scandalized Americans at the Armory Show, and helped secure the sale of all four of his paintings in the exhibition. Thus, being able to finance the trip, Duchamp decided to emigrate to the United States in 1915. To his surprise, he found he was a celebrity when he arrived in New York in 1915, where he quickly befriended art patron Katherine Dreier and artist Man Ray. Duchamp's circle included art patrons Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, actress and artist Beatrice Wood and Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures. Though he spoke little English, in the course of supporting himself by giving French lessons, and through some library work, he quickly learned the language. Duchamp became part of an artist colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey

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