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
The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.
Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.
All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.
I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.
Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
Society takes what it wants. The artist himself does not count, because there is no actual existence for the work of art. The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something - like electricity. But the onlooker has the last word, and it is always posterity that makes the masterpiece. The artist should not concern himself with this, because it has nothing to do with him.
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.