Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchampwas a French, naturalized American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, conceptual art and Dada, although he was careful about his use of the term Dada and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant...
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth28 July 1887
CityBlainville-Crevon, France
Marcel Duchamp quotes about
I thought to discourage aesthetics... I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.
Not all artists are Chess players, but all Chess players are artists
I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.
Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general.
The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem
Chess is a sport. A violent sport.
The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.
Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.
It is the spectators who make the pictures.
It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.
The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.
The most interesting thing about artists is how they live
My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see
Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.