Marcel Duchamp

July 28 1887 (Blainville-Crevon) - October 2 1968 (Neuilly-sur-Seine). French-American artist, associated with the Dadaist, Futurist and Surrealist movements as well as Pop Art and Minimalism; he was one of the most influential artists of the modern era.

Born in 1887 in Normandy, France, he began painting at age 15. He was the grandson of a painter, and his three siblings were also visual artists; unlike his relatives, he turned his ironic skepticism about art into an extraordinary career built on the smallest amount of work. At sixteen he went to Paris to study art. From 1905-1910 he contributed cartoons to French papers.

His early paintings reflect an interest in movement, forecasting the themes of Italian Futurist work; his paintings received wide acclaim in the US. After a while he abandoned painting for three-dimensional art and offered everyday objects as "ready-mades". In 1915, during World War I, he moved to New York and spent several years working on Large Glass, a monumental piece, which was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. Meanwhile he became the modern master of the provocative. With self-confidence, he submitted a urinal titled Fountain to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, whose vice president he was. The exhibition organizers refused to accept it, so Duchamp resigned. Similarly, in a DADA exhibition in Paris in 1920 he submitted a reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa to which he added a moustache and a goatee; its official title was L.H.O.O.Q. (Elle a chaud au cul), which is loosely translated as "she has a hot arse".

By the mid 1920s, Duchamp had publicly abandoned painting in favor of chess and certain experiments in kineticism. In 1942 Duchamp fled to the US again during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Here he worked sporadically over the next 20 years. Duchamp died in 1968.

Sources

• Bossy, Michel-André. Artists, Writers, and Musicians: An Encyclopedia of People Who Changed the World. Westport, Connecticut: The Oryx Press, 2001.
• Kostelanetz, Richard. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. Second Edition. New York: Routledge, 2001.