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
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.
I don’t care about the word ‘art’ because it has been so discredited. So I want to get rid of it. There is an unnecessary adoration of ‘art’ today.
Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.
It is the spectators who make the pictures.
This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life.
It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.
My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.
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.
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.