Marcel Duchamp

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<I>Bilboquet</I>, 1910 wooden toy – Readymade ball: 4 in. (10.2 cm) in diameter stick: 8 ¾ in. (22.23 cm) inscribed on ball: <I>Bilboquet / Souvenir de Paris /A mon ami M. Bergmann / Duchamp printemps</I> Please contact gallery for further details
Bilboquet, 1910
wooden toy – Readymade
ball: 4 in. (10.2 cm) in diameter
stick: 8 ¾ in. (22.23 cm)
inscribed on ball: Bilboquet / Souvenir de Paris /A mon ami M. Bergmann / Duchamp printemps
Please contact gallery for further details
<i>Cover for Le Surréalisme en 1947, (Prière de Toucher) </i>, 1947 Modified Readymade: collage of foam-rubber breast and velvet mounted on board 9 ¼ x 8 1/6 in. (23.5 x 20.5 cm) Please contact gallery for further details
Cover for Le Surréalisme en 1947, (Prière de Toucher) , 1947
Modified Readymade: collage of foam-rubber breast
and velvet mounted on board
9 ¼ x 8 1/6 in. (23.5 x 20.5 cm)
Please contact gallery for further details

Artist Bio

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)


1887
Born July 28 in Blainville, France, the forth of six children.

1902
Makes his first paintings at age fifteen.

1904
Upon the completion of his high school education joins his two older brothers, Jasques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, in Paris. He studies painting at the Académie Julian for one year and rapidly passes through the main contemporary trends in painting – Postimpressionism, the influence of Paul Cézanne, Fauvism, and Cubism. He sees no virtue in making a habit of any one style.

1905
Finishes at the Académie Julian and spends a year in the army working in a print shop in order to avoid the general conscription laws then pending. When he returns to Paris, he finds work as an illustrator and cartoonist for popular satirical journals.

1909
Begins exhibiting paintings in the Salon d'Autumne and the Salon des Indépendants. His works show the influence of Paul Cézanne and the fauves. At the Sunday gatherings he attends in Puteaux, a Parisian suburb where his brothers have their house and studio, he participates in discussions about philosophy, music, literature, photography, and non-Euclidean geometry. In art, members of what is to become known as the Puteaux group, embrace cubism, which finds its most doctrinaire proponents in Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.

1911
Duchamp's paintings show a trace of Cubism. He meets Francis Picabia, who probably introduces Duchamp to writings of Max Stirner. After a trip from Paris to Rouen he completes the self-portrait "Sad Young Man on a Tain".

1912
Creates "Nude Descending a Staircase" which shows no nude but only a descending machine, a nonobjective and virtually cinematic effect that is entirely new in painting. Submits it to Society of Independent Artists in Paris, where Gleizes and Metzinger request it to be removed, claiming that its kinetism is not cubist.

1913
"Nude Descending a Staircase" is being selected for the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, known as the Armory Show, where it becomes a sensation. The success is so tremendous that Duchamp stops painting at the age of 25. Within the next two years, he adopts a consciously scientific attitude to art-making, compiling notes for a project that will become "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even", also known as "The Large Glass". For it, he repudiates entirely what he calls retinal art and adopts the geometrical methods of industrial design, experimenting with methods of measurement and mechanical drawing. "The Large Glass" becomes like the blueprint of a machine, albeit a symbolic one, that embodies his ideas of man, woman, and love. The topic of sexual relationships as mechanical processes that he had begun to investigate in 1912 in paintings like "La Mairée", here reaches a new and radical synthesis. Like the "Nude", "The Large Glass" is to become unique among works of modern painting. Until 1923, Duchamp works almost exclusively on the preliminary studies and the actual painting of the picture itself. During this period, he develops the idea of the so-called readymade by proposing a "Bicycle Wheel" as art, which is simply an ordinary bicycle wheel: An industrially produced object becomes a work of art through the choice or assistance of the artist.

1914
When World War I breaks out, Duchamp, who is exempt from military service due to a minor heart defect, is living and working in almost complete isolation as a librarian.

1915
He leaves Paris for the New York, where he is welcomed by reporters and intellectuals as a famous man and soon meets future patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg, as well as a large circle of artists and poets who would give shape to New York Dada. The Arensbergs establish a studio for him in the Lincoln Arcade building. He soon becomes the center of a circle that gathered at the Arensberg's apartment in the evenings, where he is often to be found playing chess with Arensberg or Francis Picabia. He gets many offers from art galleries eager to handle his works but refuses them all, not wanting to start a full-time career as a painter. To support himself, he gives French lessons. He helps Arensberg buying back as many of his works, including the "Nude". Makes New York his home until 1923, where his activities influence the conception of artistic practice elaborated as New York Dada. In particular, he provides key theorizations of strategies like the use of mechanical drawing, the deployment of found objects, and the assumption of alternate identities. Construction of "The Large Glass" begins. Painted on glass and including industrially produced wires, it represents a mechanical diagram of sexual intercourse, the functioning of which is elaborately, though enigmatically, explained by Duchamp in his notes related to the project. Makes his first New York readymade: a snow shovel bought at a hardware store to which he adds the inscription: "In Advance of the Broken Arm [after] Marcel Duchamp".

1916
He moves to 33 West 67th Street, in the same building as the Arensbergs. They will pay his rent in exchange for "The Large Glass". He meets Katherine S. Dreier, a director and benefactor of Society of Independent Artists. He demonstrates that the action designating a readymade can also take place at a distance by Duchamp's letter to his sister Suzanne asking her to complete "Bottlerack" which he had purchased as a "sculpture already made" and left in his apartment in Paris. "Fountain", the most notorious example of his readymades, is submitted to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, and organization that Duchamp found, under the pseudonym R. Mutt. Despite the stated program of the group to exhibit anything submitted by artists who had paid the fee, "Fountain" was rejected, resulting in a scandal that was only heightened when it was revealed who had authored the work. Duchamp discusses idea of the readymade publicly for the first time in an interview for the "Evening World".

1917
Duchamp's ready-mades anticipate a few years the Dada movement, which Picabia introduces to New York City in the magazine "291" in the same year.

1918
Leaves "The Large Glass", still unfinished, to Walter Arensberg. Leaves New York with Yvonne Chastel for nine-month stay in Buenos Aires.

1919
Moves from Buenos Aires to Paris where he establishes contact with the Dada group there and creates "L.H.O.O.Q.", a photograph of the "Mona Lisa" with a moustache and a goatee added. The act expresses the Dadaists' scorn for the art of the past, which in their eyes is part of the infamy of a civilization that has produced the horrors of the war just ended.

1920
Returns to New York, founds the Société Anonyme, Inc., in New York with Man Ray and Katherine Dreier. He creates his female alter ego Rose (later Rrose) Sélavy, first as conceptual, one year later as visual entity. For the next twenty years, he signs his work with this pseudonym. As a persona, Rrose Sélavy is to be consistently identified with commercial methods of signifying authorship such as the copyright and the trademark. "Fresh Widow", the first work copyrighted by Rrose Sélavy, is built by a carpenter for Duchamp and is a reproduction of a set of French doors. By replacing the window panes with black patent leather and titling the work "fresh widow" (a pun on "French window"), Duchamp alludes to the casualties of World War I.

1921
Creates works that are to become emblematic of Dada's sensibilities, including "L.H.O.O.Q" and "50 cc Air de Paris". He also contributes to the formation of Dada identity when he and Man Ray collaborate on the only issue of "New York Dada". Including a mock statement of authorization sent by Tristan Tzara from Paris, the issue was the only official Dada publication to appear in the United States.

1923
Stops working on "The Large Glass". Moves back to Paris where he remains until 1942, except three brief visits to the US. He begins a romantic relationship with Mary Reynolds. As the years pass, art activity interests him less and less, but cinema becomes more relevant to him. His works to this point are only potential machines, and it is time for him to create machines that are real. The first ones are devoted to optics and lead to a short film, "Anemic Cinema" (1926). Another work is "Rotary Demisphere" (1925) which experiments with the visual tricks produced by forms in motion. With these and other products, he acts as a kind of amateur engineer. The modesty of his results is a way by which he can ridicule the ambitions of industry. The rest of the time he is absorbed in chess playing, even taking part in international tournaments.

1926
Sails to New York to organize a Constantin Brancusi exhibition at Brummer Gallery. "The Large Glass" shown publicly for the first time in the International Exhibition of Modern Art, sponsored by the Société Anonyme, Brooklyn Museum, New York.

1927
Marries Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of an automotive manufacturer. The couple divorces by January 1928.

1932
He keeps on participating in chess tournaments in the United States and Europe and publishes a guide to endgame situations cowritten with the German chess master Vitaly Halberstadt.

1934
Duchamp publishes the "Green Box", containing a series of documents related to "The Large Glass". André Breton's important essay on Duchamp, "Lighthouse of the Bride", is being published in the Parisian journal Minotaure. From that time on there is a closer association between the Surrealists and Duchamp, who helps Breton to organize all the Surrealist exhibitions from 1938 to 1959.

1935
Designs the "Rotoreliefs" to be played on an ordinary record player and attempted to sell them at the annual inventors' fair in Paris, a largely unsuccessful venture.

1936
"Cubism and Abstract Art", organized by Alfred H. Barr, opens at Museum of Modern Art, New York, including five works by Duchamp. Travels to the US to gather images for his "Boîte-en-valise". "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism", organized again by Barr, opens at Museum of Modern Art, with eleven works by Duchamp.

1937
First solo exhibition presented by Arts Club of Chicago.

1938
"Exposition international du surrealism" opens in Paris. Duchamp contributes female mannequin representing Rrose Sélavy.

1939
Just before World War II he assembles his "Boîte-en-valise", a suitcase containing 68 small-scale reproductions of his works. When the Nazis occupy France, he smuggles his material across the border in the course of several trips. Eventually he carries it to New York, where he joins a number of the Surrealists in exile, including Breton, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy.

1941
Peggy Guggenheim transports materials for fifty of Duchamp's "Boîtes-en-valise" from Marseilles to New York.

1942
When the Germans occupy Paris, Duchamp leaves again for New York, where he renews contact with the avant-garde and its patrons. He begins making notes for the last major project of his life, "Étant donnés": a three-dimensional tableau in which his lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between viewing and sexuality gains a direct and unambigous representation.

1947
Settles permanently in New York. "Exposition International du Surrealisme", organized by Duchamp and Breton, opens in Paris.

1949
"Twentieth-Century Art from the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection", which includes thirty works by Duchamp, opens at Art Institute of Chicago.

1950
"Fountain" (represented by a substitute) shown in public for the first time at the Sidney Janis Gallery's "Challenge and Defy" exhibition.

1951
Renews acquaintance with Alexina (Teeny) Matisse, the former wife of Pierre Matisse. They move into a New York apartment, where they reside until 1959.

1953
"Dada: 1916-1923", organized by Duchamp, opens at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

1954
Marries Teeny Matisse; becomes stepfather to Jacqueline, Paul, and Peter Matisse. More than ever he lives in semiretirement, he is content with chess.

1955
Becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen.

1960
The contemplative life is interrupted when rising generation of American artists realize that Duchamp has found answers for many of their problems. Suddenly tributes come to him from all over the world. Retrospective shows of his works are organized in America and Europe.

1961
Museum of Modern Art's "Art of Assemblage" exhibition opens.

1963
First retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum

1964
In collaboration with Duchamp, Arturo Schwarz opens "Homage to Marcel Duchamp" at Galleria Schwarz in Milan. The exhibition features the newly editioned readymades. Takes part at documenta III in Kassel.

1965
Exhibits at the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover

1966
First major European retrospective, "The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp", organized by Richard Hamilton, opens at the Tate Gallery, London.

1968
Duchamp dies on October 2nd after a laughing fit in Neuilly-sur-Seine. His friends find out that he has worked secretly for his last 20 years on "Étant donnés: 1. The waterfall, 2. The illuminating gas" – a heavy wooden door which offers through two small holes a glimpse of a mixed media installation, showing the lower part of a naked female body in a landscape.



SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2008-09
"Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture", National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (solo)
"Duchamp Manray Picabia", Tate Modern, London, UK
"Duchamp: una obra que no es una obra "de arte", Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina (solo)

2008
"Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia - The Moment Art Changed Forever", Tate Modern, London, UK

2006
"Marcel Duchamp", Galerie Michel Vidal, Paris, France (solo)

1966
"The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp", Tate Gallery, London, UK (solo)

1963
"By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy", Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA (solo)

1954
"Arensberg collection", Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA

1938
"Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme", Paris, France

1937
Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL (solo)

1927
"International Exhibition of Modern Art", Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

1917
Society for Independent Artists, New York, NY

1913
Armory Show, New York, NY

1912
Salon des Indépendants, Paris, France

1909
Salon des Indépendants, Paris, France
Salon d'Automne, Paris, France

Past Gallery Exhibitions

BERLIN
The Bilboquet Room
Marcel Duchamp
December 13, 2011 - January 27, 2012
Detail Image