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Marcel Duchamp (July 28, 1887 – October 2,
1968) was an influential French/American artist.
He was arguably the most important influence on
the development of post-war art in Europe and
North America, in particular Pop Art and
Conceptual Art.


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== Biography ==

Born Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp in
Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the
Haute-Normandie Region of France, he came from an
artistic family. Of the six children of Eugene and
Lucie Duchamp, four would become successful
artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of:
*Jacques Villon (1875-1963), painter, printmaker
*Raymond Duchamp-Villon  (1876-1918), sculptor
*Suzanne Duchamp|Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti
(1889-1963), painter


Living and working in a studio in Montparnasse,
Marcel Duchamp's early works were
Post-Impressionism|Post-Impressionist in style but
he would become perhaps the most influential of
the Dada artists. A student at the Académie
Julian, his influence is still strongly felt to
this day by contemporary artists.

At his eldest brother Jacques' home, in 1911
Marcel and brother Raymond organized a regular
discussion group with artists and critics such as
Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger
and others that soon was dubbed the Puteaux Group.
Duchamp enjoyed the companioniship of many women.
In 1927, he and Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor married,
and divorced a few months later. In 1954, he and
Alexina Duchamp|Alexina "Teeny" Sattler married,
and they remained together until his death.In
1955, he became a naturalized citizen of the
United States. The last surviving member of the
Duchamp family of artists, in 1967, in Rouen,
France, Marcel helped organize an exhibition
called "Les Duchamp: Jacques Villon, Raymond
Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp."
Some of this family exhibition was later shown at
the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Marcel
Duchamp died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and is
buried in the Rouen Cemetery, in Rouen, Normandy,
France.

== Political Views ==
In early years, Duchamp had some contact with the
Salon d'Automne|Salon Cubists of Paris, but
aesthetic as well as political differences
precluded closer affiliation. In 1912, he painted
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, in which
motion was expressed by successive superimposed
images, as in film|motion pictures.  The work was
originally slated to appear in Paris, but the
Salon Cubists demanded that Duchamp retitle it to
avoid possible scandal. Duchamp removed the work
from the exhibition entirely, and, in 1913, it
went on to create a scandal at the Armory Show in
New York City instead; it also spawned dozens of
parodies in the years that followed.

Politically, Duchamp opposed World War I and
identified with Individualist Anarchism, in
particular with Max Stirner's philosophical tract
The Ego and Its Own, the study of which Duchamp
considered the turning point in his artistic and
intellectual development.

== Found Objects ==
Duchamp was one of the first artists to use found
objects, readymades, as the basis for his
artworks. His work Fountain (Duchamp)|Fountain
consisted mostly of a ceramic urinal. His work In
advance of a broken arm consisted of an old snow
shovel. Another displayed a bicycle wheel. 

Research published in 1997 by art historian Rhonda
Roland Shearer indicates that Duchamp's supposedly
'found' objects may actually have been created by
Duchamp. Exhaustive research of items like snow
shovels and bottle racks in use at the time has
failed to turn up any identical matches. The
urinal, upon close inspection, is non-functional.
(However, there are accounts of Walter Arensberg
and Joseph Stella being with Duchamp when he
purchased the original Fountain at J. L. Mott Iron
Works.) The artwork "L.H.O.O.Q." which is
supposedly a poster-copy of the Mona Lisa with a
mustache drawn on it, turns out to be not the true
Mona Lisa, but Duchamp's own slightly-different
version that he modelled partly after himself. If
Shearer's findings are correct then Duchamp was
creating an even larger joke than he admitted.
http://www.duchamp.org/ImpossibleBed/PartI/

== Société Anonyme ==
Escaping service in the World War I|First World
War on the pretext of a dubious heart condition,
he travelled to the United States, where he
befriended Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, with whom
he founded the Société Anonyme (art)|Société
Anonyme in 1920. Duchamp's circle also included
Walter Arensberg|Louise and Walter Arensberg,
Beatrice Wood and fellow Frenchman, Francis
Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures.

== Abandons Art for Chess ==
During 1923, Duchamp virtually abandoned his
career as an artist to play chess, a habit-forming
stategy game which he played for the rest of his
life to the near exclusion of all other activity.
Duchamp's obsessive fascination with chess can be
traced back much earlier to the themes of his
major art pieces. The most immediately obvious of
these is the chess position known as "trébuchet"
(the trap), which gave its title to the Readymade
of 1917: a coat rack with four hooks, which is
nailed to the floor, hooks uppermost.

Not only did he design 1925 Poster for the Third
French Chess Championship, but he finished the
event at fifty percent (3-3, with 2 draws), and
thus earned the title of chess master. During this
period his fascination with chess so distressed
his first wife that she glued his pieces to their
board, which possibly contributed to their divorce
four months later. He went on to play in the
French Championships and also in the Olympiads
from 1928-1933, favoring hypermodern openings like
the Nimzo-Indian. In spite of his efforts he was
unable to move from the rank of a strong French
master to the rank of a strong international grand
master. Sometime in the early 1930s, Duchamp
realized that he had reached the height of his
ability and had no real chance of winning
recognition in top-level chess. Over the following
years, the intensity of his participation in chess
tournaments declined but he discovered
correspondence chess and became a chess journalist
writing weekly newspaper columns.

In 1932 Duchamp teamed up with fellow chess
theorist Halberstadt to publish "L'Opposition et
Cases Conjugees sont Reconciliées" (Opposition
and Sister Squares are Reconciled). This
pataphysical 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 loosing 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 observed  "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."

During his later years, many people attempted to
lure Duchamp back into the art world.
His theme of the endgame was picked up by British
playwrite Samuel Beckett who used it as the
narrative device for his commercially successful
1957 play of the same name, Endgame (play) |
"Endgame".  One of Duchamp's most notable chess
games occured in 1968, at a concert called
"Reunion" at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto. His
opponent was the avant-garde composer and event
organizer John Cage. The music was produced by a
series of photoelectric cells underneath each
square of the chessboard which were sporadically
triggered during normal game play.  

On choosing a career in chess Duchamp had this to
say:
"If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I
certainly would not discourage him - as if anyone
could - but I would try to make it positively
clear that he will never have any money from
chess, live a monk-like existence and know more
rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to
be known and accepted."

Marcel Duchamp took aim at conventional notions of
"high art," "culture" and commodities by
presenting mass-produced objects such as a bottle
rack or a snow shovel as sculpture. He coupled his
visual assaults on "art" with verbal puns: he
signed his Fountain, "R. Mutt," or "armut," German
for poverty, and named a Mona Lisa defaced by a
drawn-on goatee beard and moustache L.H.O.O.Q., a
coarse French pun (When pronounced in French,
"elle a chaud au cul", it means "She's got a hot
ass"). When his Fountain was rejected as not being
art, for the unjuried 1917 Independents exhibition
in New York, Beatrice Wood defended him: "The only
works of art America has given are her plumbing
and her bridges."

== The Large Glass ==
In 1923 he concluded work on his The Large
Glass|The Bride Stipped Bare by her Bachelors,
Even (The Large Glass), a piece he began in 1913.
The work is documented with his 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 descibe The Large
Glass.

A stage play by Merce Cunningham's A Walk Around
the Park was presented in 1968 in Buffalo, New
York. The set design was based on Duchamp's The
Large Glass|The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), supervised by
Jasper Johns. Ref: "Marcel Duchamp; ed. by Anne
d'Harnoncourt & Kynaston McShine, ISBN
3.7913.1018.6 (Munich, 1989), P. 30

== Collaboration with Surrealists ==
After 1923 he devoted much of his time to chess
but from the mid-1930s onwards he collaborated
with the surrealism|Surrealists and participated
in their exhibitions. Duchamp settled permanently
in New York in 1942. From then until 1944,
together with Max Ernst and André Breton, he
edited the Surrealist periodical VVV, in New York.

== His Mark ==
In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the
most influential artwork of the 20th century by
500 of the most powerful people in the British art
world. This is testimony to the influence of
Duchamp's work, and the mark he has left on the
art world.

==Selected works and genres==
* Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs
d'echecs) 1911. Oil on canvas 108 x 101 cm. The
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
* Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu
descendant un Escalier. No. 2)
* Found art|Readymades
* Fountain (Duchamp)|Fountain
* The Large Glass|The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even. Often called The Large Glass.
* The Green Box (La Mariée mis à nu par ses
célibataires même). Notes and studies for 'The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
* Rrose Sélavy
* Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy?
* Rotoreliefs
* Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas.
(Etant donnés: 1. la chute d'eau/2. le gaz
d'éclairage)http://www.freshwidow.com/etant-donne
s2.html
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==Reference==
Book reference | Author=Tompkins, Calvin |
Title=Duchamp: A Biography | Publisher=U.S.: Henry
Holt and Company, Inc | Year=1996 | ID=ISBN
0-8050-5789-7

==External links==
Duchamp works
*http://www.understandingduchamp.com Andrew
Stafford: Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp
*http://www.marcel-duchamp.com/ Marcel-Duchamp.com
*http://www.marcelduchamp.org/ MarcelDuchamp.org
*http://www.marcelduchamp.net/ MarcelDuchamp.net
*http://www.abcgallery.com/D/duchamp/duchamp.html
Marcel Duchamp at Olga's Gallery
*http://www.aqualoop.com/aqua_sound/delia/Duchamp.
html AquaLoop.com: Marcel Duchamp Rotoreliefs

Essays by Duchamp
* http://members.aol.com/mindwebart3/marcel.htm
The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp. (1957)

Essays about Duchamp
*http://www.marcelduchamp.org/ImpossibleBed/PartI/
Marcel Duchamp's Impossible Bed and Other "Not"
Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of Influence
From Art To Science by Rhonda Roland Shearer

Duchamp in the news
*http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.
stm BBC news story about the lasting influence of
Fountain.

Audio and video
*http://www.ubu.com/sound/duchamp.html UbuWeb:
Music, Lectures, etc
*http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/ducha
mp_legacy.htm Clore Auditorium, Tate Britain:
Agendas: Duchamp's Legacy - Richard Hamilton and
Sarat Maharaj (RealPlayer required.)

Resources
*http://www.marcel-duchamp.com/ Étant donné
Marcel Duchamp (annual publication in French and
English)
*http://www.toutfait.com/ Toutfait: The Marcel
Duchamp Studies Online Journal