Marcel Duchamp: The Complete Story
Marcel Duchamp was the artist who decided that choosing an object could be art, and changed everything. He took a factory made urinal, signed it with a fake name, called it Fountain, and submitted it to an exhibition. With that one gesture he put the idea ahead of the craft and opened the door to conceptual art, the most influential move in modern art.
He then walked away from art at the height of his fame to play chess.
Born: Blainville Crevon, France, 1887
Known for: the readymades, Fountain, Nude Descending a Staircase
Died: Neuilly sur Seine, France, 1968
The urinal that broke the rules
In 1917 Duchamp bought a urinal, turned it on its back, signed it R. Mutt and submitted it to a New York show that had promised to accept anything. The committee hid it instead.
He called such objects readymades: ordinary things the artist simply selects and declares to be art. Decades later a poll of experts voted Fountain the most influential artwork of the twentieth century.
The scandal on the staircase
Before the readymades he was a painter. His Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 breaks a figure into overlapping slices of motion, part Cubism, part time lapse photograph. See what is cubism.
Shown at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, it caused an uproar, mocked as an explosion in a shingle factory. Overnight Duchamp was famous in America.
Jokes aimed at art itself
Duchamp loved to puncture seriousness. He took a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa, drew a moustache and goatee on her, and added a crude pun for a title.
His huge glass work, nicknamed The Large Glass, mixes machinery and desire into a diagram no one can fully explain. He treated art as a game of ideas and wordplay, not beauty.
Quitting for chess
In the 1920s Duchamp seemed to give up art almost entirely to play competitive chess, even representing France. Many thought he had retired.
In secret he spent twenty years building a final work, Etant donnes, a peephole scene revealed only after his death. The man who said he had stopped was working the whole time.
What people ask about Marcel Duchamp
What is Marcel Duchamp famous for?
Inventing the readymade and submitting a urinal, Fountain, as art, which launched conceptual art.
What is a readymade?
An ordinary manufactured object that the artist selects and presents as art.
Did he really quit art for chess?
He stepped back to play chess seriously, while secretly building a last work for twenty years.
When did he die?
In 1968, in France.
Why the idea still wins
Almost every conceptual, Pop and installation artist since walks through the door Duchamp opened. See Pop art. A century on, the urinal still forces the oldest question in modern art: who gets to decide what counts.
One last detail. Original Fountains barely survive, so the versions in museums today are mostly later replicas Duchamp authorised. The most famous object in modern art is, fittingly, a copy of a thing anyone could buy.