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
Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.
In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society
Since I found that one could make a case shadow from a three-dimensional thing, any object whatsoever - just as the projecting of the sun on the earth makes two dimensions - I thought that by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we are not familiar with.
Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.
Humor is the only reason to live.
You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)
There is no solution, for there is no problem.
In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.
Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.
I was poking fun at myself most of all.
I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.
I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work.
Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.
I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don't do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years.