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Essay on Marcel Duchamp
Most art historians have either ignored or underestimated the visual, epistemological, and psychosexual implications of Duchamp's oeuvre; instead, they have tended to concentrate on either a Marxian reading of the artist's elevation of "readymade," everyday commodities to the level of art, or on allegorical or esoteric interpretations based on such issues as n-dimensional geometry, courtly love, alchemy, and Neoplatonism. The former has yielded a critique of the modernist ethos of originality; the latter explores the artist's iconographic concerns, an investigation that tends to contradict Duchamp's principles of nominalism and "aesthetic indifference." Neither commentary, however, addresses the increasing relevance of Duchamp's project of self-inquiry a discourse driven by his interrogation of meaning and identity in general, and sexuality in particular. (David Hopkins, 1998).
French-born avant-garde artist and art theorist who became an American citizen in 1955. His output was small (most of his key works are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and for long periods he was more or less inactive, but he is regarded as one of the most potent figures in modern art because of the originality and fertility of his ideas; in Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists (1986), Edward Lucie-Smith writes that he has 'probably exercised an influence over Modernism second only to that of Cézanne' and he describes him as 'perhaps the most important art-theorist and avant-garde provocateur of the twentieth century. He directed attention away from the work of art as a material object, and instead presented it as something which was essentially an idea: he shifted the emphasis from making to thinking.' To many people, however, this achievement is something to lament rather than to applaud. (Ian Chilvers, 1999).
Duchamp was born at Blainville, Normandy, one of six children of a successful notary. Their grandfather was an amateur engraver, and Marcel's two brothers and one of his sisters also became artists--Suzanne Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon....
