Marcel Duchamp is critically hailed as one of the masters of Modern art for his expansion of art's definition. Thematically, Duchamp's works foreshadowed Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. His artwork investigated themes of eroticism and desire, which were further explored by the Surrealists. His visual studies of movement, and the ways humans and machines interacted, were adopted by Abstract Expressionists whose primary concerns were in capturing movement through paint on canvas. Though most viewers recognize his infamous Readymades, Duchamp's body of work has an extremely wide range in terms of material. He painted, sculptured, wrote and produced copious magazines and texts, and more. Duchamp is one of the 20th century's most influential artists not only because of his intuitive approach to art making, but because he tested the boundaries of art by uniting media to generate works that were as unrestricted by material as they were conceptually innovative.

• Duchamp pioneered the Dada movement, which rejected academic art and was inspired by Primitivism, which, in turn, inspired Surrealism in its focus on the subconscious. Duchamp relocated to New York before Surrealism gained prominence in France, and helped to inspire Abstract Expressionism through his belief in non-representational art. In moving between the two cities, Duchamp was one of the primary artists affiliated with both movements.
• Interpretations of Duchamp's works vary wildly. Since his conceptual assemblages often operated as riddles with no apparent answer, there are still numerous critical opinions and guesses as to Duchamp's intentions. Duchamp welcomed wide-ranging reactions to his artworks, even when critical. He believed the most outlandish interpretations of his art became works of art in themselves.
• Duchamp created two major works, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass, and Etant Donnes, which can be read and viewed as keys to his major thematic interests throughout his career. These two works innovatively utilize material. They incorporate sculpture, text, drawing, and painting.

Marcel Duchamp was raised in Normandy, in a family of artists who treasured cultural activity. His father was mayor of Blainville and his mother raised their seven children and painted landscapes depicting the French countryside. Family time was spent playing chess, reading, painting, and playing music. One of Marcel's earliest artworks, Landscape at Blainville (1902), was painted at age fifteen, and reflected his family's love of Claude Monet. Marcel was close to his two older brothers, and in 1904, after both had left to become artists, Marcel left for Paris to join them and to study painting at Academie Julian. In order to study, his brother, Jacques Villon, supported Marcel, and Marcel earned some income by working as a cartoonist. Duchamp's early drawings predict his ongoing interest in visual and verbal puns.

Paris in the early 1900s was the ideal place for Duchamp to study modern approaches to painting. Duchamp studied Fauvism, Cubism, and Impressionism, and was captivated by new approaches to color and structure. He especially related to the Cubist notion of reordering reality, rather than simply representing it. His early paintings, such as Nude Descending A Staircase (1912), illustrate Duchamp's interest in machinery and its connection to the body's movement through space, both technological issues implicit in early Modernism. However, Duchamp was most attracted to avant-garde notions of the artist as an anti-academic, and felt akin to one of his early heroes, the Symbolist painter and graphic artist, Odilon Redon. Early in his career, Duchamp developed an affinity for the mysterious allure of Symbolist subject matter, such as the woman as cryptic femme fatale. This deep-seated interest in the themes and exploration of sexual identity and desire would lead Duchamp toward his formation of Dadaism and Surrealism.

In 1911, the twenty-five year old Marcel Duchamp met Francis Picabia, and the following year attended a formative theater adaptation of Raymond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique with Picabia and Guillaume Apollinaire. This experience, and Roussel's image-rich writing in particular, influenced Duchamp's understanding of "expression." He noted that for the first time, he "felt that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter." This interest in cross-genre pollination would become one of the underlying ideas of Dada, as would his outright rejection of a conventional artistic path.

Duchamp devoted seven years - 1915 to 1923 - to planning and executing one of his two major works, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass. This installation of machinery wedged between glass panels was Duchamp's first "aesthetic manifesto," marking his rejection of outmoded painterly obsessions with pleasing the eye (in a theory he called the "Retinal Shudder"). His series of Readymades also sought to redefine art, or at least to question what art was. In one sense, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass thematically investigated eroticism and desire, which was typical in Duchamp's oeuvre. The work served as a gateway to his later found-object sculptures and facsimile publications.

In 1915, Duchamp immigrated to New York, and while finishing his Bride, conceived and manufactured several Readymades. These were found objects, such as a snow shovel, a urinal, or bicycle wheels, claimed by Duchamp through a simple signature. These objects, tied symbolically to themes of desire, eroticism and childhood memory, were an attempt to show the absurdity of canonizing avant-garde art practice. While Surrealism became popular in France, Duchamp traveled between New York and Paris, participating in printed textual projects, sculptural installations, and collaborations of all mediums amongst Dadaists and Surrealists. Beginning in 1920, Duchamp adopted an alternate female persona, Rrose Selavy, to fully explore ideas of sexual and cultural identity. All the while, he built Readymades and exhibited his infamous Bottle Rack series - an edition of eight bottle racks signed by Duchamp - in 1936. Wary of sensationalism following the Bottle Rack display, Duchamp secluded himself and befriended a tight-knit group of artists, including Man Ray, who photographed Duchamp many times throughout his life. For over twenty years, Duchamp labored in complete secrecy over his second masterwork, Etant Donnes, an elaborate, sexualized diorama (the work is currently permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). He famously hid from the public eye in favor of playing chess games with select guests up until his death in 1968.

Duchamp became increasingly interested in the ideas of chance and unpredictability, as his Readymades, as well as large masterworks, would suggest. His influence on contemporary art lies most strongly with his radical reconfiguration of the boundaries and possibilities of what constituted and artwork. Additionally, Duchamp questioned differences between original work and reproduction, between the artist and the spectator, and perhaps most importantly, questioned the differences between media. His interest in the repercussions and after-effects of art upon the viewer, and the narrative that formed around his works, has encouraged artists to consider more closely the viewer's role in the creation of a work of art. For this reason, Duchamp is considered a pioneer of Conceptualism and a founding figure of Assemblage art. He has also become a role model for artists who reject conventional gallery-based careers.


Below are Marcel Duchamp's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



On his attitude about art: "It is paradoxical. It is almost schizophrenic. On one side I worked from a very intellectual form of activity, and on the other de-deifying everything by more materialistic thoughts."

On chess: "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art, and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."