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
In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.
Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?
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.
To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.
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