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Marcel Duchamp biography

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Quick Facts

  • NAME: Marcel Duchamp
  • BIRTH DATE: July 28, 1887
  • DEATH DATE: October 02, 1968
  • PLACE OF BIRTH: Blainville, France
  • PLACE OF DEATH: Neuilly, France

Best Known For

French artist Marcel Duchamp, associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, broke down boundaries between works of art and everyday objects.


Synopsis

Marcel Duchamp was born July 28, 1887, in France. After the sensation caused by Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), he painted few other pictures. He became famous for his "ready-mades" and heralded an artistic revolution. Largely ignored during his lifetime, he was in his 70s when he emerged as master whose entirely new attitude toward art and society changed the future of visual arts.

(born July 28, 1887, Blainville, Fr.—died Oct. 2, 1968, Neuilly) French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912), he painted few other pictures. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution. Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists, and in the 1930s he helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955.

Early years

Although Duchamp's father was a notary the family had an artistic tradition stemming from his grandfather, a shipping agent who practiced engraving seriously. Four of the six Duchamp children became artists. Gaston, born in 1875, was later known as Jacques Villon, and Raymond, born in 1876, called himself Duchamp-Villon. Marcel, the youngest of the boys, and his sister Suzanne, born in 1889, both kept the name Duchamp as artists.

When Marcel arrived in Paris in October 1904, his two elder brothers were already in a position to help him. He had done some painting at home, and his “Portrait of Marcel Lefranois” shows him already in possession of a style and of a technique. During the next few years, while drawing cartoons for comic magazines, Duchamp passed rapidly through the main contemporary trends in painting—Postimpressionism, the influence of Paul Cézanne, Fauvism, and finally Cubism. He was merely experimenting, seeing no virtue in making a habit of any one style. He was outside artistic tradition not only in shunning repetition but also in not attempting a prolific output or frequent exhibition of his work. In the Fauvist style Marcel painted some of his best early work three or four years after the Fauvist movement itself had died away. The “Portrait of the Artist's Father” is a notable example. Only in 1911 did he begin to paint in a manner that showed a trace of Cubism. He had then become a friend of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a strong supporter of Cubism and of everything avant-garde in the arts. Another of his close friends was Francis Picabia, himself a painter in the most orthodox style of Impressionism until 1909, when he felt the need of complete change. Duchamp shared with him the feeling that Cubism was too systematic, too static and “boring.” They both passed directly from “semirealism” to a “nonobjective” expression of movement. There they met “Futurism” and “Abstractionism,” which they had known before only by name.

The “Nude.” To an exhibition in 1911 Duchamp sent a “Portrait” that was composed of a series of five almost monochromatic, superimposed silhouettes. In this juxtaposition of successive phases of the movement of a single body appears the idea for the “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.” The main difference between the two works is that in the earlier one the kangaroo-like silhouettes can be distinguished. In the “Nude,” on the other hand, there is no nude at all but only a descending machine, a

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