Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp (AFI maʀsɛl dyˈʃɑ̃) (Blainville-Crevon, 28 July 1887-Neuilly-sur-Seine, October 2, 1968) was a French artist and chess player.
Especially known for his artistic activity, his work exerted a strong influence on the evolution of Dadaism. Like the aforementioned movement, he abhorred the symbolic sedimentation in artistic works as a consequence of the passage of time and exalted the value of the temporary, the fleeting and the contemporary. Duchamp is one of the main supporters of artistic creation as a result of a pure exercise of the will, without the strict need for training, preparation or talent.
Since the 1960s, he has been considered by numerous historians and art critics as the most important artist of the 20th century. André Breton described him as "the most intelligent man of the century". Through inventions such as ready-mades , his work and artistic attitude continue to considerably influence the different currents of contemporary art.
Duchamp, who does not belong to any precise artistic current, has a unique style. Breaking the artistic and aesthetic codes then in force, he is considered the precursor of some of the most radical aspects of the evolution of art since 1945.
Biography
He was born on July 28, 1887 in Blainville-Crevon, a small French town where his father, Eugène Duchamp, was a notary and mayor. He was the third of six siblings. His two older brothers, who later took the names Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, decided to pursue art, perhaps due to the influence of their maternal grandfather, who, after earning a considerable fortune as a shipping agent, had retired to pursue art. his main hobbies, engraving and painting, even exhibiting some works at the Universal Exhibition in Paris (1878).
Like his older brothers, to whom he was very close, Marcel attended drawing classes at high school. His brother Gaston (Jacques Villon) had achieved some fame as a poster painter in Paris at a time when Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alfons Mucha were prominent, and Marcel, who admired his brother, tried to imitate his style in his first drawings.. In the summer of 1902, aged fourteen, he painted his first impressionist-influenced oil paintings depicting landscapes of Blainville. He would also make several drawings with different media (watercolor, gouache, monotype, pencil) with a single subject: his sister Suzanne, two years his junior, who would also devote himself to painting. In 1904 he left his parental home to go to the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre, where he lived with his brother Gaston de él. Marcel, like his brothers, had a monthly allowance that his father gave him as an advance on the inheritance.
Artistic beginnings in Paris
In 1904, Montmartre had been home to the artistic community of Paris for more than fifty years. Marcel took the exam at the École des Beaux-Arts , which he failed. He enrolled in a private school, the Académie Julian, which he left shortly after for life in the neighborhood cafes, where, as was customary at the time, he kept a notebook in which he drew scenes from everyday life. After his military service in Eu, near Rouen, he returned to Paris in 1906. At that time he made humorous drawings, an activity that enjoyed prestige at the time. In 1907 five of his drawings were selected at the first Salon des Artistes Humoristes. In 1908 they were chosen, now defunct, for the Salon d'Automne, a major annual exhibition. Marcel painted for the next few years in a Fauvist style, of which Matisse was the standard bearer. Although Duchamp, often contradictory in his statements, sometimes rejected the influence of Cézanne, in others he acknowledged having remained under his influence for a long time, under which he would probably paint Portrait of the artist's father, a portrait psychological of his father. He painted more portraits around this time, including one of his friend Dr. Dumochel in which he exaggerated some physical features. In this regard, Duchamp commented that it was a first attempt to endow his work with humor. In 1910 he painted The Chess Game, in which his two brothers appeared playing chess in a garden with their women absorbed in their musings. By exhibiting this painting along with four others at the Salon d'Automne, he became societaire, which meant the right to exhibit without being previously examined by a jury.
Although his early paintings showed talent, he produced few works compared to other artists. This was a time of wavering and experimentation with various trends.
Cubist period
It was a time of artistic revolutions: the collage of Picasso and Braque, Futurism, the works of Alfred Jarry, the poetry of Apollinaire and the abstract art of Vasily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay and Piet Mondrian opened up modern art. From 1911 Duchamp began to innovate more seriously. According to Tomkins, the painting that marks the beginning of this stage is Sonata. In the painting, inspired by the cubism of his brother Jacques Villon, his three sisters appear performing a piece of music and his mother, oblivious. After experimenting with "a faovism that was not based solely on distortion" in The Thicket, he painted Yvonne and Magdaleine in pieces and Portrait (Dulcinea), in which he plays with the themes of movement and transition, major themes in Duchamp's work. At this time he had a relationship with Jeanne Serre, according to Gough-Cooper and Caumont the model of The Thicket , with whom he had a daughter, although Duchamp would not know it until much later. At that time he was hunted by cubism during his visits to the Galerie Kahnweiler , where there were paintings by Picasso and Braque. As both Picasso and Braque refused to justify Cubism with theories or manifestos, the group of New Cubists including the Duchamp brothers—with whom Picasso and Braque were not associated—understood its intellectual foundation through the explanations of Jean Metzinger. This group met at the de Villon house in Puteaux on Sunday afternoons, hence the name of the Puteaux group. Among other topics, in the group discussions, two issues of importance to Duchamp were discussed: The fourth dimension and art interpreted by the mind instead of by the retina (retinal art). As a result of these new ideas, in 1911 he undertook the task of representing the mental activity of a game of chess, an effort that led to Portrait of chess players . Although his technique does not stand out from other cubist works, his attempt to emphasize mental activity to the detriment of the "retinal" image does.
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Starting with Portrait of Chess Players, the first innovative painting, each of Duchamp's works was different from the previous ones. He never stopped to explore the possibilities as he opened up a new work, he just switched to something else. Around this time, he stopped seeing his brothers so much and began to be in contact only with a group of friends, especially Picabia. Then he began to be interested in the pictorial embodiment of the idea movement. The first attempt at this line is Sad Young Man on a Train, which Duchamp considered a sketch. In addition to the new line that it opens, this work is notable for being the first time in which Duchamp plays with words in his works, since according to him he chose sad because of its alliteration with train . Duchamp's next work continued this path. It is about Nude descending a staircase , of which he painted two versions.
Nude, which he began in December 1911, surprised in the first place by its title, which he painted on the same canvas. The nude was an artistic subject with already established fixed rules, which since therefore they did not include figures going down stairs. Duchamp showed the idea of movement through successive superimposed images, similar to those of stroboscopic photography. Both the sensation of movement and the nude are not found in the viewer's retina, but in his brain. It combines elements of cubism and futurism, a movement that attacked the cubism of the Puteaux group. The painting was to be exhibited in the cubist exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants, but Albert Gleizes asked his brothers to tell him to voluntarily withdraw the painting, or to change the title, which they thought was caricatural, to what they agreed to. Regarding this incident, Duchamp would later recall:
I didn't apply. I said very well, very well, I took a taxi for the show, I recovered my picture and I took it. It was a real twist in my life. I realized that, after that, I would never be too interested in groups again.Tomkins (1996, p. 95)
However, if Naked Descending a Staircase encouraged Duchamp to follow his own path without ascribing to theories or groups, it was another painting painted that same year that would mark the path that would end years later in the making of The Large Glass (La marièe mise à nu pair ses célibataires): Coffee grinder, a small painting for the kitchen of his brother. According to Duchamp himself, he painted a description of the mechanism, structured in two parts, ideas also present in the glass, although at that time he was not aware of what he meant.
Travel to Munich and back to Paris
In those years he received, according to Tomkins, the influence of Jules Laforgue and Raymond Roussel. He was attracted to the first by his cynical humor, his detachment from his characters and his verbal games. From the second, his work based on puns, transliterations and puns. As Roussel himself later revealed, he was attracted by the "madness of the unexpected" and the discovery of a work that stems solely from the author's imagination, since for Roussel the works should not contain "nothing except combinations of totally imaginary objects." Duchamp went with Francis Picabia to the performance of Impressions of Africa , which made a strong impression on him. A week later he set out alone for Munich. There he made no attempt to meet Kandinsky, and in fact the question of pure abstraction was quite indifferent to him, but he went to work. From this period are the first sketches of the large glass and the theme of virgins and their transition to a bride appears, a theme that he would work on for a long time. He began with the drawings of the Virgin , then continued with the painting The Transition from the Virgin to the Bride and culminated with Bride . According to some critics, such as Jerrold Seigel, the paintings are not about sexual initiation, but about the transition to the state just before, of expectant innocence. In the last two, a device appears that will also appear in the Large Glass and in fact, according to Duchamp himself, Bride was nothing more than a rehearsal for a more important work. At this time he was in love with Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Picabia's wife. After two months of work he visited Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin and his museums before returning to Paris. On the return trip he wrote two pages of puns, fantasies and puns describing a picture he would not get to paint. This text is considered a precedent for the notes that he would later include in his Green Box and the language of the Large Glass . As he would later declare, at this time he had abandoned cubism and the pictorial representation of the movement, and had had enough of painting. He embarked on the creation of a different, large-scale work, for which he sought a job as a librarian that took him a few hours.
However, the Section d'Or exhibition, the most important cubist exhibition held before the war, upset his plans completely. Six works by Duchamp were exhibited, including Naked Descending a Staircase. No. 2. The Munich paintings were not exhibited, as he considered them mere studies. His work had little general impact, but it received praise from Guillaume Apollinaire, who probably paid attention to it because of their mutual friendship with Picabia, and, more important, it attracted the keen interest of Arthur B. Davies, Walter Pach and Walt Kuhn, who planned to organize the International Exhibition of Modern Art that would go down in history as the Armory Show. He then went to travel through countries
The Armory Show brought American art into contact with the European avant-garde. Among the paintings, sculptures and decorative works on display, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a great reaction. There were thirty and forty minute lines to view the painting, and the American Art News offered ten dollars to whoever could best explain the painting. not very numerous collectors. The three Duchamp brothers did very well: Raymond sold three of the four sculptures on display, Jacques Villon sold nine of his paintings, and Marcel sold all four of his canvases for a total of $972.
Duchamp spent two years conducting studies for the Large Glass. The change in his work was total. Although before his trip to Munich he had shown his contempt for retinal art, his art was still circumscribed in the tradition of Western art, both in materials, since he always painted in oil on canvas, as in concepts. After the trip, he appreciates how he abandons the principle of creative sensitivity and replaces it with mechanical drawing, writing, irony and the use of chance. According to Tomkins, it is no coincidence that this change coincided with Duchamp's move to Neuilly, where he would live away from the artistic circle of Montmartre. There he devoted himself to working on the preliminaries of his new work. He made preparatory drawings and wrote notes. At some point it occurred to him that he would carry out the work on glass. In this way he could avoid oxidation of the colors and could also leave unpainted areas, which eliminates the need to fill the entire support. He had decided that in his work he would show a psychological movement, a transition, as he had already done in The transition from the virgin to the bride . At this time he studied the Renaissance perspective in detail. He made a perspective study of the lower panel (la machine célibataire or the single machine). He also painted a coffee grinder in perspective ( Chocolate grinder (No. 1) ). This oil on canvas work is a study of the central element of the lower panel. It is painted in a very different style from his previous works, as he painted it with all the precision of which he was capable. By resorting to technical drawing, Duchamp tried to eliminate the personal sensitivity of the artist by mechanizing the line. He later considered that work to be the true beginning of the Large Glass . In his preparatory notes he plays with irony and alters the laws of physics and chemistry. Thus, we talk about the oscillation of density, the inversion of friction and sexuality as a two-stroke engine in a flirtation with pataphysics. Duchamp said that he sought to get closer to science, but not out of love for it, but to "discredit it slightly, in a slight, unimportant way". Duchamp's great interest in the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry is also appreciated.. Of Puteaux's group, Duchamp was the only one who worked conscientiously to understand these issues. In fact, Gertrude Stein says of Duchamp after meeting him that he "looks like a young Englishman and talks vehemently about the fourth dimension."
After eliminating talent in manufacturing by resorting to technical drawing, Duchamp attacked conscious intention by resorting to chance. It occurred to him to cut three threads one meter long and drop them on three canvases. He traced the resulting lines and reproduced each three times on a canvas. He titled the result Darning Network . Although other artists had used chance to escape their constraints, Duchamp used it in a new way, considering that, since everyone's luck is different, the result of their chance was an expression from his subconscious. four-legged stool (Bicycle wheel on a stool). Duchamp said it arose as a diversion, as he found it pleasant to watch the spokes disappear as the wheel turned. Later he bought a bottle holder, a common item in French homes at the time, with no intention of using it to fill it with bottles, but as a ready-made sculpture. In a note from 1913, Duchamp notes the question "Can you make works that are not art?"
He was also looking for the material with which he would make the glass. After a few months in which he was trying to corrode the glass with hydrofluoric acid, he abandoned the idea because it was too cumbersome and dangerous, since the chemical reaction released toxic gases. Then it occurred to him to use wire thread that he would glue to the glass with drops of varnish. The material was easy to find, malleable, and very comfortable. With wire on glass he created Sled. Although France entered World War I on August 3, 1914, and his two brothers were called up shortly thereafter, the general opinion in France is that the war would last less than half a year. Under these circumstances, Duchamp continued working on his studies for the Great Glass. The next thing he tackled was another wire-on-glass work, the Nine Male Molds , three-dimensional vessels representing singles. Although in principle there were eight, he finally added a ninth, the station manager. For Duchamp the number three represented the crowd. The three and multiples of three appear frequently in his work. For the Draft Pistons at the top of the glass, Duchamp again resorted to luck: he left a square piece of cheesecloth in front of a window and photographed it three times while the wind gently shook it. The resulting silhouettes would form the Pistons.
Transfer to New York
Walter Pach returned to Paris in search of works to organize more exhibitions in New York on the European avant-garde. As a result of this visit, Duchamp and Pach became friends. Many of the artists based in the French capital had been called up. Duchamp was discharged from the army when a rheumatic heart murmur was detected. Although he did not exhibit his skeptical attitude toward war and impervious to patriotism, he had to put up with the reproaches of his sister-in-law and strangers who rebuked him on the street for not being at the front. Thus, he wrote to Pach on April 2, 1915 that he was "totally determined" to leave France, and in a later letter he clarified "I am not going to New York, I am leaving Paris, which is very different.". On June 15 he sailed on the Rochambeau in the direction of New York.
In New York, he initially stayed at the home of the Arensberg couple. Walter Arensberg, the son of a steel magnate, had been greatly impressed by the Armory Show. By the time Duchamp arrived at his apartment, Arensberg was hoarding works by Brancusi, Picasso, Braque, Matisse and the Puteaux Cubists. He earned a living and learned English by teaching French to friends of Pach and Arensberg, including John Quinn, with whom he became friends. After two months in New York, the media found out that he was there and he became a target of interviewers. He reciprocated with original ideas and opinions, however, he neither spoke of his work nor dedicated himself to painting. In September he moved out of the Arensberg apartment. Three months later he moved again. Renting his new apartment forced him to look for work in addition to classes, so through Pach he got a job at the French Institute.
Shortly after moving into his new apartment, he bought two panes of glass that would support the Large Glass, on which he worked two hours a day, although not every day. In winter he shared a flat with Jean Crotti, who made a piece of metal on glass portraying Duchamp: Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, which Arensberg acquired and later disappeared. It was at this time that Duchamp bought a snow shovel, hung it from the ceiling by a cable, titled it In Advance of the Broken Arm and signed it. It was an object chosen through "visual indifference and, at the same time, the total absence of good or bad taste". It is the first true ready-made: a work created by the choice of the artist, not by skill. Shortly thereafter he wrote to his sister Suzanne to make the bottle holder ready-made in the distance. To do this, she just had to write an inscription on it. However, Suzanne had already thrown away the bottle holder and the bicycle wheel. In any case, the idea of ready-made was born. Duchamp would say much later "I am not at all sure that the concept of ready-made is not the most important idea that my work has produced".
At that time he became the center of attraction of the Arensberg group for his ingenuity. He drank a lot, in the words of Albert Gleizes, and according to Gabrielle Picabia, "all his students fell into his arms", because "he had acquired enough experience and knew how to behave in any situation". In his inner circle were Picabia, the photographer Man Ray and Henri-Pierre Roché, with whom he would share a long friendship. On the other hand, at this time Duchamp played chess every night at the house of Arensberg, who had been part of the Harvard team.
In addition to Arensberg's circle, Duchamp also worked in that of Alfred Stieglitz, who edited the magazine 291, where Duchamp collaborated writing abstract poetry in French. He also treated Beatrice Wood. The 22-year-old girl said in her meeting that she thought modern art could be done by anyone, to which Duchamp replied why didn't she try. When Wood showed him the drawing of her, Duchamp told him that she would try to get her friend Allen Norton to publish it in Rogue and offered to paint it in her studio. Wood wrote of this time, "Except for the physical act, we were lovers." love triangle. However, according to her own testimony, she did not sleep with him until 1917.
The Society of Independent Artists and the R. Mutt Fountain
From the beginning of 1917 the artists of the Arensberg circle founded the Society of Independent Artists, in imitation of the Salon des Indépendants with the intention of organizing exhibitions without a prize or a jury. In two weeks they reached six hundred members. Duchamp was appointed head of the selection committee and decided that the works would be exhibited in alphabetical order according to the author's last name. A total of 2,125 works by 1,200 artists were exhibited, making the exhibition the largest in the history of the United States. Duchamp did not present any work under his name, but he did do so under the pseudonym R. MUTT.
The work in question was a urinal that Duchamp had bought with Arensberg and Stella. She laid it down and painted the name R. MUTT on it. R. Mutt alluded on the one hand to Mott and the comic strip Mutt and Jeff and on the other hand R. referred to Richard, French slang for "purse". sent to the organization with the two dollars of registration and the title: Source. As Beatrice Wood wrote, the object caused quite a stir among some organizers, who considered it to be a joke or indecency. A vote was held to determine whether the urinal should be admitted to the exhibition, which its supporters lost. Duchamp and Arensberg resigned from the board. The urinal was exhibited in gallery 291 where Stieglitz photographed it. The fate of the work is unknown. It is also unknown why Duchamp submitted it to the exhibition. According to Tomkins, it could be a provocation directed at the faction that took the matter more seriously.
At that time Duchamp, Roché and Wood published The Blind Man where he reproduced the photograph taken by Stieglitz together with the editorial The Richard Mutt Case in which emphasis is placed on that the author chose the work, which makes it art. Fifty years later, Duchamp would say "I threw the urinal in their faces and now they admire it for its aesthetic beauty".
War
In 1916 Dada originated in Zurich by a group of artists fleeing the First World War. According to one of its founders, Tristan Tzara, Dadaism was not modern at all, and Duchamp associated it with Jarry and Aristophanes. They declared that all human work is art and considered that life was more important than art. Duchamp, who also had no interest in going to war, shared many points with the Swiss Dadaists, but assured that what he and his circle were doing in New York "was not Dada." The difference was, according to him, that the Dadaists “were waging a battle against the public. And when there's a battle going on, it's hard to laugh at the same time." The atmosphere in New York was more jovial, however Duchamp and his group are known as the New York Dadaists.
At that time he began teaching French to Katherine Dreier, who would be around for the next thirty years of his life. Dreier, the daughter of wealthy German immigrants, was a founding director of the Society of Independent Artists in 1916, and had voted against the Source, but after Duchamp's resignation she said she did not find originality in it, but that if those who did make it had helped him see it, he would have been able to appreciate it. Later he commissioned a painting for his library. It took Duchamp six months to make his first painting since 1914. The result, which he titled Your m' (which Tomkins says is usually read as Your m'emmerdes, or "you bore me"), is a retinal picture that Duchamp himself did not like. It was the last canvas that he painted in his life.
A little later, however, he would go to Buenos Aires accompanied by Yvonne Chapel. The reasons, according to a letter to Jean Crotti, appear to be the tension in the Arensberg marriage and the restrictions caused by the war.It is not known why he chose Argentina. During his travel preparations, Duchamp gave his friends his works, including a study of the Large Glass which he gave to Roché and a 7 × 5 cm miniature of Nude Lowering a ladder which he gave to the Stettheimer sisters.
Buenos Aires and Paris
Duchamp embarked with Chastel on board the Crofton Hall bound for Buenos Aires, where they would arrive twenty-six days later with the intention of staying for a few years. Three weeks after his arrival he received the news of the death of his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon, who had volunteered and contracted typhoid fever with complications in a military hospital.
According to what he wrote to Crotti, Duchamp found Buenos Aires very macho, since Buenos Aires society did not accept single women. In addition, she wrote to Ettie Stettheimer «Buenos Aires does not exist. It is nothing more than a large provincial population with very rich people without a hint of taste who buy everything in Europe ». But at the same time she liked him, as he continued "I am very happy to have discovered this very different life...in which I find pleasure in work." He bought a piece of glass and began working on effects that he wanted to transfer to the Large Glass. He also tried to organize a cubist exhibition to introduce porteños to modern art, for which he asked his friend Henri for help. -Martin Barzun from Paris, who was to bring him thirty cubist paintings, poems by Mallarmé and avant-garde magazines. Barzun did not collaborate and the exhibition did not prosper.
But he soon gave up work for chess. He bought chess magazines and studied games by José Raúl Capablanca. In 1919 he joined a chess club and began to play by correspondence with Arensberg. For Duchamp, chess was "a masterpiece of Cartesianism" and "so imaginative that, at first glance, it doesn't even seem Cartesian" and he was drawn to confronting the two attitudes, the chess and the artistic. Yvonne Chastel eventually tired of chess and returned to Paris.
Katherine Dreier paid him a visit and returned to New York with two works by Duchamp. The first was Stereoscopy by hand (Stéréoscopie à la main), which played with the stereoscopic effect: it was about two photographs in which he had drawn a polyhedron that when seen with a stereoscope seemed to float above the landscape. The second was À regarder (de l'autre côte du verre), d'un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure or To look at (from the other side of the glass), with a waxen eye for almost an hour, a title that Dreier would change to Equilibrio alterado (Disturbed balance). It was a glass on which she had applied the silver scraping technique, which consists of scraping a mercury base to obtain the shapes that are sought. In the glass there are elements that would end up in the Great Glass, such as the oculist's blades or the scissors and others, such as the pyramid or the magnifying glass.
The only ready-made he devised in Buenos Aires was a gift he sent by post to his sister Suzanne on the occasion of her wedding to Jean Crotti. She sent them the instructions to hang a geometry book on a string from a window so that the wind would blow its pages and learn "finally three or four things about life." She called it Le ready-made malheureux (Ready made miserable ).
In 1919 he embarked on the Highland Pride bound for Southampton. She spent a month in London, after which she visited her parents' house in Rouen, and from there she went to Paris. She found Paris little changed, despite the war. Young artistic circles gravitated to Apollinaire, who had been discharged from the army with a serious head injury that had killed him before the armistice. Duchamp did not exhibit anything at the Salon d'Automme in 1919, but he made sure that nineteen works by Raymond, his dead brother, were exhibited. It was around this time that he learned of his daughter, who was being raised by his mother, Jeanne Serre, and Henry Mayer, a financier. He would not see her again for more than forty years.
But Duchamp had in mind to return to New York, which he did at the end of December. However, it gave him time to create three new ready-mades: the Tzanck Check (Chèque Tzanck), L.H.O.O.Q. and Air de Paris (Air de Paris).
Back in New York
Upon his return to New York, he found that the Arensbergs had ceased to be what they were, as they found themselves in financial difficulties. Together with Dreier and Man Ray he founded Société Anonyme, Inc. . Duchamp insisted that modern art should be fun, as he considered it essential to rekindle America's interest in new trends. Over the next twenty years, the Société Anonyme organized eighty-five exhibitions and introduced the work of Archipenko, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Villon, Eilshemius, Mondrian and Schwitters despite lack of funding.
Duchamp had the Large Glass moved to his new apartment, and dust accumulated on it. Man Ray took a photograph of the result which he titled Powder Culture (Élevage de puissière). He then fixed the powder on the cones, cleaned the rest, had the area silver plated bottom and dedicated himself to scraping it to obtain the three oculist blades. He also built his first optical machine Rotative plaque verre (Optique de précision) , which he did not consider art. This exploration led him to become interested in cinematography. He made a film of Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven shaving her pubis with stereoscopic effect. The film was spoiled and only two strips that fit were saved. In this sample the stereoscopic effect was appreciated. For the rest, he played a lot of chess at the Marshall Chess Club, where he managed to beat Frank Marshall on two occasions in the simultaneous games that the master played against twelve opponents.
In 1920 Duchamp's alter ego Rose Sélavy saw the light for the first time. The choice of the name is due to the fact that Rose seemed to him the silliest name of the time, and Sélavy a calambur de c'est la vie. Duchamp bought a french window (French window), covered the panes with black leather and pasted the title: Fresh widow copyright Rose Sélavy 1920 (Fresh widow, copyright Rose Sélavy 1920). Man Ray photographed Duchamp dressed in a fur coat and cloche hat, a shot that would accompany a perfume bottle labeled Belle Haleine-Eau de Violette (Precious Breath-Eau de Veil). Duchamp also used the name of his female alter ego in a much "rectified" ready-made: Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy. He later added an additional R to the name, which became Rrose Sélavy.
In June 1920, he visited Paris. There he found the Dadaist group, headed by Tzara, Picabia and Breton and which also included Jacques Rigaut, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Gala, Theodore Fraenkel and Philippe Soupault. Duchamp attended several events, but wrote to Ettie Stettheimer that "from afar all these movements are enhanced by an appeal they lack at close range". On this visit he made a short film with Man Ray who played with optical effects and created a ready-made: The brawl at Austerlitz (La bagarre d'Austerlitz). The visit was brief, since at the beginning of 1921 sailed back to New York. When asked why he preferred to live in New York when many American artists were leaving for Paris, Duchamp replied that New Yorkers were more willing to leave him alone.
It was a time of detachment from friendships, love relationships, and work. He neither finished the Large Glass nor began new works and refused to repeat himself. She edited a Henry McBride anthology; Together with his acquaintance Leon Hartl, he bought a dye shop, a business that failed after six months, and managed to participate in simultaneous games against Capablanca.
In early 1923 he returned to Paris. This time she gave no reason. Tomkins assumes that Duchamp was at this time associating New York with his creative drought. Before leaving he made one last ready-made : Wanted / $2,000 Reward , a wanted poster that he had commissioned from a printer and on which he put Front and profile photographs of you. By then he had decided to leave the Great Glass unfinished.
Twenty years (almost uninterrupted) in Paris
Instead of going directly to Paris, Duchamp disembarked in Brussels, where he spent four months playing chess and participated in the Brussels Tournament, his first major, and in which he finished in third place.
In Paris, Breton cemented the French legend of Duchamp in his essay in the October issue of Littérature. Breton otherwise had little luck drawing Duchamp into the Surrealist movement. In fact, although he was part of the jury of the Salon d'Automne , he hardly related to the artistic bustle of Paris. He barely received a commission from Jacques Doucet to make an optical machine, which he worked on during 1924 and which he called Rotating Semisphere (Rotative demi-sphère). Duchamp made it to change the cost of materials and the engineer who made it, and made it clear that he did not want it exposed. He also stressed that he did not want anything other than the optics to be seen on the machine. Breton continued to publish writings—often single phrases, such as My niece is cold because my knees are cold ( My niece is cold because my knees are cold)— by Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy in Litterature.
In 1924 he participated in the twenty-minute film by René Clair and Picabia Entr'acte, which was screened in a performance of the ballet Relâche. Duchamp appears in a scene playing chess with Man Ray until a stream of water interrupts the game. He later participated in Cinésketch, in which he played the role of Adam, practically naked except for one fig leaf and a false beard alongside Bronja Perlmutter, who played the role of Eva. In late 1925 he invested part of his inheritance—his parents died earlier that year—in a film, Anemic Cinéma, with calamburos by Rrose Sélavy that rotated on some records.
His main occupation, however, was still chess. He would leave Paris for weeks to participate in tournaments. He played on the Riviera with the Nice team, and returned to participate in the Brussels Tournament the year after his return to Europe. He was fourth. He was invited to the team that would represent France at the first unofficial chess Olympiad in 1924, where France came seventh. A little later he was named champion of Upper Normandy by winning a tournament in Rouen. At this time he made his Bono para la roulette de Monte Carlo (Obligations pour la roulette d Monte-Carlo), which featured a photograph of him taken by Man Ray with his face covered in foam and forming two horns. These bonds, valued at 500 francs, promised a return of twenty percent. The money was invested in a system that Duchamp had developed to win at roulette. The gains were slim, however, but the bonds would appreciate over time.
In 1925 he participated in the French chess championship. Duchamp designed the poster for the event.He finished sixth, but came close to beating the champion, Robert Crepeaux.
In 1926 he began his career as an art dealer, a trade he would carry out for two decades. In Tomkins' opinion, this is "unusual" as he had long despised the craft. His goal was him, he said, "neither winning nor losing, plus ten percent." He did not make great profits. His first major intervention was the auction of eighty works by Picabia. Later he became interested in Brancusi's sculptures of the recently deceased John Quinn. After acquiring 29 pieces, he traveled to the United States to try to sell them. There he attended the first exhibition in which the Large Glass was exhibited, organized by Dreier. Shortly after the sale, he returned to Paris. There he worked selling artwork by like-minded artists, such as Brancusi, to a few clients, including the Arensbergs.
Duchamp married, to the surprise of his acquaintances, in 1927 Lydie Sarrazin-Levassor, whom he had met through Picabia. Duchamp wrote about his wedding to Katherine Dreier «I am getting married in June. I don't know how to explain it, because it's been so sudden that it's hard for me to explain. [Lydie] she's not particularly pretty or attractive, but she seems to have a mentality capable of understanding how I can cope with marriage ». Tomkins believes that Duchamp married looking for the financial stability offered by Lydie's father, a car manufacturer. However, the pension he granted his daughter was a meager 2,500 francs. Although the first weeks were, according to Lydie, who writes "we were very close, very intimate" and Duchamp, who writes in a letter to Walter Pach " It's been a lovely experience so far and I hope it stays that way. My life has not changed at all; I have to earn money, but not for two”, in the summer the problems surfaced. Lydie was a stranger to modern art, and she did not fit in with Duchamp's friends, for example when Crotti asked her to pose nude. Nor did he cope well with Duchamp's fondness for chess, which kept him studying game situations until dawn. On one occasion he glued the rigs to the board. Shortly after, Duchamp told her that she was going to play with Man Ray and that he would not return. They continued to see each other until Duchamp asked for a divorce from her in October, which was granted on January 25, 1928.
After the divorce, Duchamp continued his relationship with Mary Reynolds and continued to participate in chess tournaments. In 1929 he traveled with Dreier through Spain and Germany. At the Hyéres Tournament he was awarded the prize for brilliance and at the Turnoi International de Paris in 1930 he played with the best chess players on the planet. He finished last but drew with Savielly Tartakower and drew George Koltanowsky. He participated in several competitions with the French national team, captained by Alexander Alekhine, world champion, losing more games than he won. Edward Lasker considered him “a very solid player.” In 1933 he took part in his last major tournament at Folkestone.
As an artist, he set to work publishing the notes he had made in relation to the Large Glass, given that the glass, without them, was incomprehensible to anyone. naked eye, because it was an accumulation of ideas not only visual, but also verbal. She collected these notes, along with reproductions of seventeen earlier works and photographs of Man Ray in a Green Box, which contained ninety-four items.
Duchamp maintained a long friendship with numerous European and American avant-garde artists. Among them, Joan Miró stands out, whom he met in Barcelona in 1917 and their relationship deepened in the 1920s and 1930s. A new impetus came through Teeny, one of the people for whom the Catalan and his wife Pilar had the most esteem. Teeny was the colloquial name of Duchamp's second wife, born Alexina Sattler (Cincinnati, January 20, 1906-Villiers-sur-Grez, December 20, 1995). She had separated from Pierre Matisse, Miró's well-known New York dealer, in 1948 and divorced the following year. She had met Duchamp much earlier, in 1923, and when they met again in the fall of 1951 they began a relationship that ended in a wedding on January 19, 1954. She brought to the marriage her three children, Paul, Jacqueline and Peter, the same to whose room Miró had made a mural in 1939. Teeny contributed his own Miró collection, as evidenced by a letter from Duchamp, in a letter dated June 5, 1956 to Roché, he refers to Teeny being willing to give him a Miró and a Rouault to exchange of a Duchamp that he wishes to recover. One of the pieces was the drawing Untitled (1946) (DDL 1074). In 1955 Duchamp became a US citizen.
He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1968.
Work
After 1915 he painted very few works, although he continued to work until 1923 on his masterpiece, The Bride Laid Naked by Her Bachelors, Including (1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art), a work also known as The Big Glass (Le grand verre). Made in paint and wire on glass, it was enthusiastically received by the Surrealists.
The original work is in the Philadelphia museum and is cracked, due to poor packaging when it was transferred to the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, the only time it could be seen in its original state. Ten years later, Duchamp himself restored the piece at the home of Katherine Dreier, its owner at the time.
In the field of sculpture, he pioneered two of the main ruptures of the 20th century: kinetic art and ready-made art. The latter consisted simply of the arbitrary combination or arrangement of everyday objects, such as a urinal (Fuente, 1917) or a bottle holder, which could become art at the artist's desire.
The ready-made introduced a strong critique of the institutional framework and the fetishism of works of art, causing enormous tensions even within the surrealist circle itself.
His Bicycle Wheel (original 1913 lost; third version 1951, Museum of Modern Art, New York), an early example of kinetic art, was mounted on a bench kitchen.
In addition to his plastic work, it is very important to highlight his fondness for puns that were often present in the titles of his works, producing a multiplicity of hilarious readings.
His creative period was short and afterwards he let others develop the themes he had devised; Although he was not very prolific, his influence was crucial for the development of Surrealism, Dada and Pop Art, and even to this day, he remains the crucial artist for the understanding of Postmodernism.
It is frequent to detach from Duchamp's works readings with explicit sexual contents, in general, the analyzes of his work move between psychoanalysis and academic and institutional questioning of the plastic arts.
The last years of his life, Duchamp secretly prepared what would be his last work and which would be put together only after his death, this is a diorama that can be seen through a hole in a door of the Philadelphia museum, what is seen in there is a part of the body of a woman, holding a lamp in a rural landscape. The title adds even more uncertainty to the readings that can be made of the work "Dice: 1. The waterfall 2. The public lighting gas". (Etant donnés: 1-la chute d'eau, 2- le gaz d'éclairage).
There is another "reading" of Duchamp's work, and, by inclusion, of all so-called "modern art": All of his work is a mockery of the viewer, completely devoid of meaning of any kind. Dalí openly mocked the "search for readings" of modern art critics. He used to say: "I don't know what I've done, but it's full of meaning."
The readymade
The ready-made is a difficult concept to define even for Duchamp himself, who declared that he had not found a satisfactory definition. It is a reaction against retinal art, that is, visual art, as opposed to an art that is learned from the mind. By creating works of art out of objects simply by choosing them, Duchamp tackles the problem of determining what the nature of art is and tries to show that such a task is a chimera. In choosing him, Duchamp tried to leave his personal taste aside; the chosen objects must have been indifferent to him visually, or retinally. For this reason he limited the number of ready-mades to be created. However, he knew that the choice is a manifestation of his own taste. In this regard he stated that it was a "little game between me and me ".
In retrospect, a Bicycle wheel on a stool can be considered the first ready-made, although at the time Duchamp did not interpret it as such, nor did he interpret it as such. Bottle holder. These two works, selected in Paris, were lost after they were moved. The first fully authentic ready-made is a snow shovel that he hung from the ceiling by a thread and titled In Advance of the Broken Arm. A week later he bought a fireplace fan and named it Pulled at 4 Pins, which in English has no meaning, but whose translation into French, tiré a quatre èpingles, is can be translated as "to the nines". With the exception of bicycle wheel and bottle holders, which, as has been indicated, are not ready-mades per se, these works usually have names that apparently bear no relation to the object.
In the spring of 1916 he chose three new ready-mades. Peigne was a dog comb signed with the initials M.D. Although the title is descriptive, the inscription that accompanied it is not: «3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n'ont rien a faire avec la sauvagerie» (3 or 4 drops of height do not have nothing to do with savagery). As he wrote the same day of its creation, with the inscription he intended to transform the act into an event for the future. Pliant... de voyage is a typewriter cover, making it the first soft sculpture. À bruit secret (A secret noise) is a ball of string between two square sheets of brass fastened by four screws. Duchamp told Arensberg to put a small object inside the ball, without telling him what it was, so that when it was shaken it would generate a sound. On the brass plates there is an unintelligible inscription with overlapping and incomplete words in English and French. In 1917 he converted an advertisement for Sapolin paint in which he modified some letters into Apolinère Enameled , creating a rectified ready-made , as it is modified.
He later signed a painting of a battle scene from the Café des Artistes, thus making it a ready-made. He also said you could sign off on the Woolworth Building to make it ready-made or use a Rembrandt as an ironing board.
In 1917, he chose a wooden plank with several brackets that he had bought to hang clothes but that he left on the ground for a while and with which he used to trip and nailed it permanently to the ground, calling it Trébuchet (Coat rack), making a pun on trébucher (stumble) Porte-chapeau was a circular coat rack that he attached to the ceiling.
His most famous ready-made is probably Source (1917), featured in the Society of Independent Artists exhibition. The Blind Man editorial emphasized that it did not matter whether the author had made it himself or not, but that it was the act of choice that transforms a plumbing fixture into a work of art. artistic, and creates a new thought for the object.
However, the authorship of its Source is questioned, since it is believed that it was not him but a lover, the Dadaist artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who conceived it. Before the exhibition of this work, in April 1917, Duchamp wrote his sister a letter that said "[...] a friend, using the pseudonym Richard Mutt, sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture". No one knew who Mutt was, but Duchamp claimed that he was the author. The tracks of such Mutt were followed, which led to Philadelphia, where the aforementioned Elsa had gone to live. In addition, the ready-made works of this sculptor show pieces of urinals, so closely related to Fuente.
Travel Sculpture (Sculpture de voyage) is a work made with bathing caps cut into strips, glued and nailed to his wall that he made shortly before leaving for Buenos Aires.
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