Cubism

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born on 28 July 1887, near Blainville, France. In 1904 he joined his artist brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp Villon, in Paris, where he studied painting at the Académie Julian until 1905. Duchamp's early works were Post-Impressionist in style. He exhibited for the first time in 1909 at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne in Paris. His paintings of 1911 were directly related to Cubism but emphasized successive images of a single body in motion. In 1912 he painted the definitive version of Nude Descending a Staircase; this was shown at the Salon de la Section d'Or of that same year and subsequently created great controversy at the Armory Show in New York in 1913.

Duchamp's radical and iconoclastic ideas predated the founding of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1916. By 1913 he had abandoned traditional painting and drawing for various experimental forms including mechanical drawings, studies, and notations that would be incorporated in a major work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even of 1915-23. In 1914 Duchamp introduced his readymades — common objects, sometimes altered, presented as works of art — which had a revolutionary impact upon many painters and sculptors. In 1915 Duchamp came to New York, where his circle included Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, with whom he founded the Société Anonyme, as well as Louise and Walter Arensberg, Francis Picabia, and other avant-garde figures.

After playing chess avidly for nine months in Buenos Aires, Duchamp returned to France in the summer of 1919 and associated with the Dada group in Paris. In New York in 1920 he made his first motor-driven constructions and invented Rrose Sélavy, his feminine alter ego. Duchamp moved back to Paris in 1923 and seemed to have abandoned art for chess but in fact continued his artistic experiments. From the mid-1930s he collaborated with the Surrealists and participated in their exhibitions. Duchamp settled permanently in New York in 1942 and became a United States citizen in 1955. During the 1940s he associated and exhibited with the Surrealist emigrés in New York, and in 1946 began Etant donnés, a major assemblage on which he worked secretly for the next twenty years. He died in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on 2 October 1968.

Written by Lucy Flint Gohlke ...

(PLease Login to see the complete biography.)