When did marcel duchamp die

Embodying the intellect of his literary contemporaries Marcel Proust and James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) has been aptly described by the painter Willem de Kooning as a one-man movement. Jasper Johns has written of his work as the “field where language, thought and vision act on one another.” Duchamp has had a huge impact on twentieth-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted, he said, “to put art back in the service of the mind.”

Born in Normandy in northern France, Duchamp traveled back and forth between Europe and the United States for much of his life. His initial foray into modern art followed the trends of his contemporaries, with his first paintings in the mode of Cézanne and the Impressionists, while after 1910 his work reflects a shift toward Cubism. One of his most important works, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912; Philadelphia Museum of Art) (a second version of a work on cardboard from 1911), however, reflects Duchamp’s ambivalent re

Marcel Duchamp

Born in Blainville, Normandy, Duchamp was the son of a notary and the younger brother of the painter Jacques Villon and the Cubistsculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon. He studied at the Académie Julian in 1904-5. His early figure paintings were influenced by Matisse and Fauvism, but in 1911 he created a personal brand of Cubism combining earthy colours, mechanical and visceral forms, and a depiction of movement which owes as much to Futurism as to Cubism. His Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2, 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), created a sensation at the 1913 New York Armory Show. Duchamp did very little painting after 1912, creating the first of his 'readymades' in 1913. These were ordinary objects of everyday use, sometimes slightly altered, and designated works of art by the artist. His earliest readymades included Bicycle Wheel (1913), a wheel mounted on a wooden stool, and a snow shovel entitled In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915). One of his best-known pieces is a urinal, titled Fountain and signed 'R. Mutt', which he submitted to an exhibition of the Soci

Marcel Duchamp: The Forefather of Conceptual Art

Articles and Features

By Shira Wolfe

“Painting has always bored me, except at the very beginning, when there was that feeling of opening the eyes to something new.”

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp is regarded as one of the crucial figures in the development of modern and contemporary art and his body of work spanning from painting to the plastic arts has had a huge impact persisting to this day. The artist-provocateur par excellence, not only did he provide a personal interpretation of Cubism, but also greatly influenced Dadaism and Surrealism, paving the way for Conceptual Art with the aim of putting “art back in the service of the mind.”

Biography of Marcel Duchamp – From Art to Anti-Art

Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 in Blainville-Crevon in Normandy, France, and grew up in a creative family. His childhood home was filled with art by his grandfather – Duchamp later said of this time: “When you see so many paintings, you’ve got to paint.” At the age of 17, he decided to become an artist.

Copyright ©bandfull.pages.dev 2025