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
No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.
The life of a chess master is much more difficult than that of an artist - much more depressing. An artist knows that someday there'll be recognition and monetary reward, but for the chess master there is little public recognition and absolutely no hope of supporting himself by his endeavors. If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him - as if anyone could - but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted.
The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.
All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.
Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.
In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.
I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.
I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do...
The only thing that is not art is inattention
I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.
I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.
Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.