Marcel Duchamp

Painter. Born July 28, 1887 in Blainville, France, the son of a notary of Rouen. One of Marcel's brothers, Gaston, known as Jacques Villon, was a painter; another brother, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, was a sculptor. Duchamp moved to Paris at the age of 17 and began to paint. By 1911 he was responding in his painting to cubism, but his subjects were unusually personal and psychologically complex compared to the typical cubist ones.

In his famous Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) Duchamp used a limited cubist palette and faceting of forms but completely contradicted the cubist esthetic in his choice of an ironic title and stress on actual movement. When this painting was exhibited at the Armory Show in New York City in 1913, it created an uproar and was the focal point for derogatory criticism of the show (one critic described the work as "an explosion in a shingle factory").

In 1912-1913 a radical change took place in both Duchamp's life and art. Together with the writer Guillaume Apollinaire and the painter Francis Picabia, he began working out a highly original and mocking concept of art. Duchamp sought out methods of making art in which the artist's hand would not be stressed (using chance an

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To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal expression of art a` l'e`tat brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. d mechanical methods of drawing and painting). Duchamp used many original and complex processes in its physical creation. the most famous was his Fountain, which shocked the American public in 1917 when they saw an ordinary urinal displayed in an art exhibition. I want to put painting once again to the service of the mind

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. By 1923 Marcel was preoccupied with chess. Duchamp lived an apparently contented private life, with a happy second marriage in 1954, and he maintained amicable if slightly ironic contacts with many contemporary artists. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. He mixed briefly with the Dadaists in Paris but increasingly withdrew from actual artistic production. divided his time between New York and Europe

. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane. He created a few famous paintings in cubism until he changed his method a painting once again when he decided to find a method that would put less stress on the painter’s hands with the quote “I want to put painting once again to the service of the mind. After producing several canvases in the current mode of Fauvism, he turned toward experimentation and the avant-garde, producing his most famous work, Nude Descending a Staircase, No.

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