Marcel Duchamp Essay

Marcel Duchamp

Henri-Robert Marcel Duchamp was born in the Normandy village of Blainville-Crevon, near Rouen, on the 28^th of July 1887. He helped activate the American move from realism to concept, also changed their concept in making art out of everything or anything . Duchmap later acknowledged his grandfathers artistics influences on him. 

Suzanne Duchamp (French, 1889-1963 ), “Fille en Jardin”, c. 1940; oil/canvas, 21.5” x 25.5”

When Marcel was fifteen he began to paint, his first was his sister Suzanne; he painted her playing tennis or patience. He also painted her when looking at a picture, his admiration for Monet also led him to excute a series of landscapes in the Impressionist manner, using small rapid brush strokes. His legacy includes the insight that art can be about ideas. 

Marcel Duchamp "Landscape at Blainville", Blainville-crevon 1902, lanscape oil on canvas 61x50 cm 

 Duchamp said a little about his youth, except to remark that he had a perfectly happy and ordinary childhood. During his early months in Paris, Duchamp worked to improve his drawing skills while absorbing the life of the city people, with the idea perhaps of becoming the painter of modern life. Duchamp pursued commercial drawings and in the summer of 1907 and exhibited in the first salon des Artistes Humorists organized by the editor of Le Rire, at the Palais de Glace. 

Duchamp came to select mass-produces everyday that are called readymade, an inspiring act as much as a stylistic category. At the end the readymade had far-reaching suggestions for what more is considered as art. By years he rejected purely visual, or in another way called "retinal pleasures", and he kept committed to the study of optics and outlooks. He also used to qualify this by saying that the dada spirit was the " non-conformist spirit of every century that has existed since man is man"; how far Duchamp's "policy of absolute negation" reached into the dada movement as a whole is not simple to determine.

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., (1919), Assisted Readymade: pencil on a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa 19.7x12.4 cm.

His first piece was Nude Descending Down the staircase, which was in the cubist style (1912). After that it was the readymade "which I mentioned in the previous paragraph". He also entered the exhibition in 1917 with his first Fountain. There was also the " L.H.O.O.Q" (1919), also known as a print of monalisa with a moustache drawn on it, for that painting some artists interpreted that he did so and the rest of the artists don’t take everything serious. 

Marcel Duchamp "Bride striped Naked by her Bachelor" , United States 1915-1923, oil on glass 

His final work was his Large Glass or Bride striped Naked by her Bachelor, and only for this painting that Duchamp had added instruction or the Green box. Duchamp's first concrete demonstration of this occurred in 1916 in New York, when he made, from memory, a full scale hand tinted black and white photographic replica of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase for Louise and Walter Arensberg.

Marcel Duchamp and his sister Suzanne were quite similar in character and forged a special bond during their Normandy childhood that never flattered, despite the geographical distance that frequently separated them. After replying on her help to pull off his first "remote" readymade battle rack,  he involved her in another long-distance collaboration. He offered her a ready-made as a gift in celebration of her second wedding and he described it as " it was a geometry book … to be hung by strings on the balcony of "their"  apartment". 

Marcel Duchamp "Bicycle Wheel" , 1913, sculpture, The Israel Museum Jerusalem, ready-made  

Duchamp's readymade from 1916-1917. Duchamp, whilst being one of the main faces of the Dada art movement, was inspired by a few artists when he started off. In his earlier works on canvas, he was inspired by the work of Cezanne, Matisse and movements such as cubism, symbolism, abstractionism and some post-impressionism.

Rosalind Krauss and David Joselit have identified in Duchamp's work as a corporeal eroticized model of visual mechanical forms and devices. They  symbolize the mechanical female body, which is perceived as a dangerous machine, "desire into the mechanism and production into desire." Duchamp's creation of the desiring mechanized(yet dysfunctional) bride and bachelors in Large Glass appeared like his female persona, "Rrosa Selvay" in 1912. The year he began his first experiments with precious optics demonstrates his transformation of the fractured self into a conceptual strategy was 1912. This device both masks and confirms. 

Also in Duchamp's work, sexuality is always a construct ," a site of composition and decomposition", in which erotic energy becomes a means by which fixity, including fixity of the gaze itself is undermined. Francis Naumann considers Duchamp's most important contribution to art to have been the conceptual implications of distance through the replication of unique works of art in multiple forms. 

Marcel Duchamp " Fountain" , 1917, sculpture, Tate Gallery London, ready-made  23.5x18 cm

Dada is one of the movement that Duchamp was involved in and he was the leader. Dada is French for "hobby-horse". This word was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their aesthetic creations and protest activities. Dada was a literary and artistic movement born in Europe. Duchamp preformed the most notable outrages by painting a mustache on Monalisa and the fountain was originally a urinal. When he submitted his piece on the fountain to the society of independent artist, it wasn’t presented. It was already shown in the exhibition, however when the piece got rejected Duchamp backed down and resigned from the board of the independent Artists. 

" My art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral." Duchamp, this art has undergone a qualitative leap. He successfully contrived to live art, thus realizing Breton's goal to 'put poetry into practice'. Breton defined the saga it recounts as 'at the frontiers of eroticism, of philosophical speculation, a kind of great modern legend'. 

Marcel Duchamp, " Chess Game ", France 1910, oil on canvas 114x146.5 cm 

Another point of his creative process was prompted by the desire to heal the rift between art and life. This aspiration is grounded theoretically in the philosopher. " Suspension of judgment' led him, quite naturally, to reject absolutes on every front and his favorite tool for subverting them was with: 'humor and laughter-not necessarily derogatory derision-are my pet tools". Thus for Duchamp humor was an additional means of reaffirming freedom, of defending individualism, and of "turning tragedy into comedy and comedy into art". By means of humor, he abolished the difference between what has an aesthetic quality and what has none at all. The irony of affirmation led him to the beauty of indifference and being as non-aesthetic as possible, he might finally be poetic-after all.

This long uninterrupted process of re-interpretation eventually lead us to the paradox of the "eternal-up-to-datedness' of the ready-made principle, leaving behind the objects selected by Duchamp almost a century ago. Nothing else but a severe critique of this idea of absolute progress is at the core of the concept of modernity. The paradoxical 'eternal up-to-datedness' of the readymade cannot be explained inside the art world. The explanation must be sought, rather than that the conditions resulting from economic and industrial progress still prevail in the modern world indeed. It is in this sense that the readymade constituent the opposite of the technically reproduced work of art, since a mass-produced produce, being replaceable at anytime by a new one, has no need of reproduction.

 Many Americans know of Marcel Duchamp, if they recognize his name at all, as a French-born artist that scandalized New York worth his Nude Descending a Staircase. Duchamp was especially ingenious in employing portraiture as a device of self invention. Museums display objects deliberately arranged to convey messages about identity meaning and value. Marcel Duchamp died in the midst of the tumultuous and memorable events of 1968. Forty years on, his contributions to modern art-notably though not exclusively in his innovations of self portrayal seem even more remarkable than during his lifetime.

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