Saturday, January 6, 2018

Artist of the day, January 6-7: Marcel Duchamp, French Artist

Marcel Duchamp, in full Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp, (1887-1968), French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), he painted few other pictures. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution. Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists, and in the 1930s he helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955.

He was more than 70 years old when he emerged in the United States as the secret master whose entirely new attitude toward art and society, far from being negative or nihilistic, had led the way to Pop art, Op art, and many of the other movements embraced by younger artists everywhere. Not only did he change the visual arts, but he also changed the mind of the artist.

His friendship with Man Ray led to their publication of New York Dada in 1921. From 1915 to 1923 he worked on The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) , which he considered his most important single work. It was shown at the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1927, but was badly damaged on its return journey. Duchamp repaired and partially remade it in 1936, and the piece is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1965-6. Duchamp continued to be a figure of huge importance in the art world. He kept up an interest in experimental film and continued to organise exhibitions, notably the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938. He also devoted much time to playing tournament chess. In the last twenty years of his life, he worked in secret on a three-dimensional realisation of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, entitled Etant donnés (Philadelphia Museum of Art). His first one-man exhibition was held at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1937.


 Mr Marcel Duchamp





























































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