“Can one make works that are not ‘of art’?”
Marcel Duchamp
When Marcel Duchamp created his most famous work—the industrially produced urinal Fountain—it was largely ignored. “Of course, it had to be scandalous,” Duchamp later recalled of his readymade, but its provocation went deeper than a cheap bit of toilet humor. Fountain was the high point of Duchamp’s campaign to dismantle and expand the boundaries of what constitutes a work of art; it had begun four years earlier, when he asked, “Can one make works that are not ‘of art’?”
Readymades were ordinary, pre-existing objects like urinals, bicycle wheels, and snow shovels elevated to the status of high art simply by the artist’s act of presentation. “In other words, I reduce the idea of aesthetic consideration to the choice of the mind, not the ability or cleverness of the hand,” Duchamp explained. The choice of a readymade was to be guided by a kind of “aesthetic indifference” with the intention to “avoid emotion, to have the driest possible feeling toward it.” On occasion the works were given a title like In Advance of the Broken Arm. Often humorous or even nonsensical, the titles poked fun at the seriousness of high art.
This attitude, which later became known as “anti-art,” was not Duchamp’s starting point. He had been born into a family of artists in Blainville, Normandy, in 1887 and, like his older brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and his younger sister, Suzanne Duchamp, he began his artistic career as a painter. In his early years, he painted pictures of his family like Portrait of Yvonne Duchamp and bright, impressionistic scenes of the landscapes around Rouen. Later, he began to paint portraits and imaginary scenes in a style closer to the Fauvism of Henri Matisse. In 1966, reflecting back on this early period, Duchamp described this series of stylistic changes as his “swimming lessons,” in which he internalized and worked through the philosophies and limitations of the past three decades of modernist painting.
In the early 1910s, Duchamp moved to Paris and settled on a Cubist style, characterized by a machine-like depiction of the human body and a muted color palette of browns, ochres, and grays. Working alongside his brothers, he produced several of his most inventive paintings, including Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2). Its abstraction and erotic subject matter caused a scandal when it was shown in New York at the Armory Show in 1913.
Sexual iconography remained a staple of Duchamp’s work for the rest of his career. His most adventurous painting, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass) (1915–23), takes up the subject of sex directly. Made on two panes of glass, the painting depicts the erotic encounter between a bride, whose nebulous body occupies the painting’s upper panel, and a cluster of nine bachelors on the left of the lower section. The two parties communicate through a series of enigmatic mechanical devices—pistons, sieves, toboggans, etc.—whose inner workings were explained (partially) in the artist’s scrawled, haphazard notes, which he later compiled into The Green Box (1932). Duchamp originally did not consider the work finished; only after it broke in transit did he declare it complete.
Avant-garde transgression and the playful overturning of customs (artistic, societal, or otherwise) became central to Duchamp’s practice. Challenging expectations about gender identity, he created a glamorous female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. “I thought it was much more basic to change from a man into a woman than to change from a religion to another,” Duchamp reported. Rrose’s name was a pun—when said out loud, it sounds like “Eros, c’est la vie” (“Eros, that’s life.”) Rrose was the creator of many of Duchamp’s works in the 1920s and ’30s, including his kinetic sculpture Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) and his experimental Dadaist film Anemic Cinema, which she signed with her thumbprint.
Duchamp was always caught between France and New York, and he moved back and forth across the Atlantic several times. He finally settled in the US after World War II and worked in New York for the rest of his life. From 1952, he began working in secret on his final and most scandalous work, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau, 2. Le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). Now located at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the installation is reminiscent of a diorama. Looking through a peephole, the viewer sees the body of a nude female mannequin holding a gas lamp and stretched out in a landscape. Inspired by Gustave Courbet’s infamous erotic painting Origin of the World (1866), Duchamp positioned the viewer at the feet of the nude figure, forcing them into an uncomfortable voyeuristic encounter.
Despite his place as a central figure in numerous artistic groups in both countries—including Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism—Duchamp resisted categorization, prioritizing creative individuality. Though he’s primarily remembered as an artist, he was also a curator, conservator, art advisor, professional chess player, writer, inventor, and celebrity. While Duchamp was fond of referring to himself as simply a respirateur or “breather,” his lifelong friend, the photographer Henri-Pierre Roché, summed up these so-called “marginal” activities when he said the best thing about Duchamp was the “use of his time.”
Benjamin Price, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2023–24
