Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp worked from the beginning of the 20th century through the 1960s influencing the art world in ways that no other artists can claim. He had a part, even if it was small in nearly every art movement from the cubists to the futurists to the dada to surrealism and through to pop art, creating his own genre intermitted called ready made art.

Duchamp was a French Artist born in 1887 and moved to Paris in 1904 to pursue his career as a painter. Over the next twenty years he did his most famous works including Nude Descending a Staircase no. 2 and Fountain. Nude Descending a Staircase no. 2 was painted in 1912 and is a cubist depiction of a woman walking down a flight of stairs. This was one of Duchamp’s first and only attempts in cubist paintings (other paintings include Portrait of Chess Players, The King and the Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, and The Passage from the Virgin to Bride). Even though he had little experience with cubist painting he achieved a sense of vitality that no one

else in that movement quite captured. Cubist theory says that a cubist painting is the depiction of a subject from multiple views at one time, but Duchamp changed their rules and depicted his subject from multiple views over time as to give a sense of movement and space. This piece was rejected by the Salon des IndÐ"©pendents because they felt he was mocking the cubists. They also did not like the titled painted on the bottom left looking like a caption with reinforced their impression of his comic relief.

There was no question that as a painter Duchamp was along side even the most gifted painters of the time. What he lacked was faith in art itself, and he looked to replace aesthetic values in his work with something that was juxtaposed to the so-called common-sense world. As early as 1913 he began studies for an entirely awkward piece: The Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. At this time he rejected what he called retinal art and adopted the geometrical methods of industrial design. It became like the blueprint of a machine, although a symbolic one, that embodied his ideas of man, woman, and love.

Like the Nude Descending a Staircase no. 2, The Large Glass was to be unique among works of modern painting. Between 1913 and 1923, Duchamp worked almost exclusively on the preliminary studies and the actual painting of the picture itself.

During this period a stroke of genius led him to a discovery of great importance in contemporary art, the so-called ready-made. In 1913 he produced the Bicycle Wheel, which was simply an ordinary bicycle wheel. In 1914, Pharmacy consisted of a commercial print of a winter landscape, to which he added two small figures reminiscent of pharmacists' bottles. It was nearly 40 years before the ready-mades were seen as more than a derisive gesture against the excessive importance attached to works of art, before their positive values were understood.

In February 1923 Duchamp stopped working on "The Large Glass," considering it definitely and permanently unfinished. As the years passed, art activity of any kind interested him less and less, but the cinema came to fulfill his pleasure in movement. His works to this point had been only potential machines, and it was time for him to create machines that were real, that worked and moved. The first ones were devoted to optics and led to a short film, Anemic Cinema (1926). With these and other products, including "optical phonograph records," he acted as a kind of amateur engineer. The modesty of his results, however, was a way by which he could ridicule the ambitions of industry.

In 1932 Duchamp teamed up with fellow chess theorist Halberstadt to publish L'opposition et cases conjuguÐ"©es sont rÐ"©conciliÐ"©es (Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled). This pataphysical (term coined by the French writer Alfred Jarry, is a philosophy dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics) treatise describes the Lasker-Reichelm position, a unique and extremely rare position that can arise in the endgame (or third and final phase) of a game of chess. In conclusion, the authors observe that the most Black can hope for is a draw. Given accurate play by White, Black can only succeed in delaying the progress of events, ultimately losing to White. They demonstrate this fact by plotting the game play on enneagram-like charts that fold in upon themselves. Grasping the central theme of this work, the endgame, is an important key to understanding Duchamp's complex attitude towards his artistic career. While his contemporaries were achieving spectacular success in the art world by selling their visions to high society collectors and trend setters, Duchamp said "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."

Although Duchamp carefully avoided art circles, he remained in contact with the Surrealist group in Paris, composed of many of his former Dadaist friends. When in 1934 he published the Green Box, containing a series of documents related to The Large Glass, the Surrealist poet AndrÐ"© Breton realized the importance of the painting and wrote the first comprehensive study of Duchamp, which appeared in the Paris magazine Minotaure in 1935. From that time on there was a closer association between the Surrealists and Duchamp. Just before World War II he assembled his BoÐ Ñ*te-en-valise, a suitcase containing 68 small-scale reproductions of his works. When the Nazis occupied France,