Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French American artist, chess player, and inventor who played a key role in the development of the avant-garde in the United States and in New York City, where he spent the last 25 years of his life.
Paintings by Marcel Duchamp
Étant donnés (1966)
Étant donnés (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, French: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage) is a 1966 assemblage by Marcel Duchamp. It was his last major artwork, surprising viewers and critics who had widely believed he had given up art; he was previously pursuing competitive chess which he had been playing for almost 25 years. The artwork is a tableau, visible only through a pair of peepholes—one for each eye—in a wooden door, of a nude woman lying on her back on a hill with her face hidden, legs spread, holding a gas lamp in the air in one hand against a landscape backdrop.
Duchamp worked in secrecy on the artwork from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio. It is composed of an old wooden door, nails, bricks, brass, aluminium sheet, steel binder clips, velvet, leaves, twigs, a female form made of parchment, hair, glass, plastic clothespins, oil paint, linoleum, an assortment of lights, a landscape composed of hand-painted and photographed elements and an electric motor housed in a cookie tin which rotates a perforated disc to create a waterfall effect. The Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, who had Duchamp as a lover from 1942 to 1949, served as the model for the female figure in the piece, and his second wife, Alexina (Teeny), served as the model for the figure's arm.
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2) is a 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp. The work is widely regarded as a Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time. Before its first presentation at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants in Paris it was rejected by the Cubists as being too Futurist. It was then exhibited with the Cubists at Galeries Dalmau's Exposició d'Art Cubista, in Barcelona, 20 April – 10 May 1912. The painting was subsequently shown, and ridiculed, at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was reproduced by Guillaume Apollinaire in his 1913 book, Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques. It is now in the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915)
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (in French : La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), also called The Large Glass (in French : Le Grand Verre), is an artwork by Marcel Duchamp over 9 feet (2.7 m) tall and almost 6 feet (1.76m) wide. Duchamp worked on the piece from 1915 to 1923 in New York City, creating two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. Duchamp's ideas for The Large Glass began in 1912, and he made numerous notes and studies, as well as preliminary works for the piece. The notes reflect the creation of unique rules of physics and myth which describe the work.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is also the title given to The Green Box notes (1934), as Duchamp intended The Large Glass to be accompanied by a book in order to prevent purely visual responses to it. The notes describe that his "hilarious picture" is intended to depict the erotic encounter between the "Bride", in the upper panel, and her nine "Bachelors" gathered timidly below in an abundance of mysterious mechanical apparatus in the lower panel. The Large Glass was exhibited in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum before it was broken during transport and intentionally left broken by Duchamp. He decided not to change the glass but to glue the pieces back together. It is now part of the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp sanctioned replicas of The Large Glass, the first in 1961 for an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and another in 1966 for the Tate Gallery in London. The third replica is in Komaba Museum, University of Tokyo.
Fountain (Duchamp) (1917)
Fountain was a readymade sculpture attributed to Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". The work is regarded by art historians and theorists of the avant-garde as a major landmark in 20th-century art.
In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing was submitted for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, to be staged at the Grand Central Palace in New York. When explaining the purpose of his readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice." In Duchamp's presentation, the urinal's orientation was altered from its usual positioning. Fountain was not rejected by the committee, since Society rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee, but the work was never placed in the show area. Following that removal, Fountain was photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in the Dada journal The Blind Man. The original has been lost. Sixteen replicas were commissioned from Duchamp in the 1950s and 1960s and made to his approval.
Apolinère Enameled (1917)
Apolinère Enameled was painted in 1916–17 by Marcel Duchamp, as a heavily altered version of an advertisement for paint ("Sapolin Enamel"). The picture depicts a girl painting a bed-frame with white enamelled paint. The depiction of the frame includes conflicting perspective lines that produce an impossible object already found in the original paint ad, where a part of the frame is missing. The piece is sometimes referred to as Duchamp's "impossible bed" painting.
Apolinère is a play-on-words referencing the poet, writer and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, a close associate of Duchamp during the Cubist adventure. Apollinaire wrote about Duchamp (and others) in his book The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations of 1913.
In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915)
In Advance of the Broken Arm, also called Prelude to a Broken Arm, is a 1915 sculpture by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp that consisted of a snow shovel with "from Marcel Duchamp 1915" painted on the handle. One explanation for the title is that without the shovel to remove snow, one might fall and break an arm. This type of humor is typical of dadaist work.
An antidote to what Duchamp called "retinal art", In Advance of the Broken Arm was the second of a series of sculptures that he named "ready-mades", the most famous of which is his 1917 Fountain. At the time, the term "ready-made" referred to manufactured goods as opposed to handmade goods, but Duchamp used the term to describe "an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist".
Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel (1910)
Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel is a 1910 painting by Marcel Duchamp. Raymond Dumouchel was a former schoolmate and a student in Radiology, an emerging field at the time (X-rays had been discovered in 1895). Duchamp painted the left hand of Dumouchel surrounded by an aura, suggestive of both the rays he worked with and his healing powers.
In a letter to the Arensbergs, Duchamp writes: "The portrait is very colourful (red and green) and has a note of humour which indicated my future direction to abandon mere retinal painting."
Troom troom (1914)
Replica of the 1914 Marcel Duchamp sculpture Bottle Rack, on display at the Art Institute of Chicago
The Bush (Duchamp) (1911)
The Bush is a painting by Marcel Duchamp from 1910–1911. It is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that acquired it through The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection in 1950. Its first owner was Dr. Raymond Dumouchel, himself the subject of another 1910 painting by Duchamp, Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel. One of the models may be Jeanne Serre, with whom Duchamp had a relationship and fathered a child, Yvonne, who later became known as Yo Savy. Duchamp noted that the painting marks the beginning of a practice of attaching non-descriptive titles to his work: "Introduce some anecdote without being 'anecdotal'"; the painting did not illustrate a definite theme, but the title created "the possibility to invent a theme for it, afterwards."
Chocolate Grinder (No. 1) (1913)
painting by Marcel Duchamp
Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette
Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (Beautiful Breath, Veil Water) is a work of art by Marcel Duchamp, with the assistance of Man Ray. First conceived in 1920, created spring of 1921, Belle Haleine is one of the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, or more specifically a rectified ready-made. This "readymade" consisted of a Rigaud brand perfume bottle with a modified label.
In 2009, Belle Haleine, Eau de voilette became the most expensive Duchamp piece ever sold at auction when it brought in €8,913,000 ($11,500,000) at Christie's in Paris, equivalent to €11,978,000 ($17,258,000) in 2023 values.
Network of Stoppages (1914)
Network of Stoppages, oil and pencil on canvas by Marcel Duchamp.