Marcel Duchamp Monograph
Marcel Duchamp is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Originally from Blainville, France in the years of 1880, and under the influence of the older brothers of him, who left their careers of law and medicine to become artists, Marcel pursued art as a profession. However, what differentiates Marcel from his brothers and the other artists of that time was his thirst for breaking with pre -established paradigms in the world of visual art from the beginning of the 20th century. It is known that he challenged these paradigms and that is why one of the most controversial artists is considered at the time, but what is not known is why he did it, or specifically what inspired him to challenge the art of his time.
The research question of this monograph is as follows: what makes Marcel Duchamp a breakup within the visual arts of the twentieth century? This question will specifically explore what Duchamp did to break the schemes, as well as the different sources of inspiration he had throughout his life, which led him to become the influential artist he was. This will be achieved with the support of different books on the subject, as well as certain Internet pages that talk about Marcel Duchamp and the impact it had at the time. Works like that of not sneezing will be analyzed? (1921), naked down a staircase (1912), The Great Glass (1915-1923) and La Fuente (1917).
The choice to focus this research in Marcel Duchamp and the paradigms of his time, is because he has been a key figure for the artistic movements of the last century. These movements have left their mark on the past, and continue to do so in the present. Without Duchamp we would not understand where the contemporary art of our time came from or how new works are created with this trend. Nowadays, Duchamp Ready-Mades are still issues to discuss what art is and what does not. The previously mentioned works deserve an analysis to understand their meaning and the impact they had when created.
Marcel Duchamp was born on July 28, 1887 in Blainville, Normandía, France. He was the third of six brothers and like his older brothers, at the end of his school studies he decided to go to Paris to study art. He started in the world of painting by his family and painting landscapes of France. At the beginning of him the influence of the Impressionist Monet is seen. Impressionism predominated at that time but Duchamp noticed that this was not for him and decided to become a cartoonist for the newspaper Le Courrier Français and Le Rire. He made fun drawings but mocking of the daily life of Paris. These were focused on word games, whether visual or verbal, and always without color. From here we can see Marcel’s personality of rebellion. He did not want to continue with the impressionist trend and paint what they taught him at school, which led him to give up and focus on making comments that did not necessarily do a work of art "little", as he was accustomed.
From 1906 to 1913 they were crucial years for the future of painting in Paris. Fauvism was originating in France, which was characterized by its provocative use of colors and because each painter created their works as a personal experience full of spontaneity and freshness. Fauvismo lacked and developed only between 1904 and 1908. It was an artistic tendency that ended impressionism.
The protagonist of Fauvism was Henri Matisse, who was one of Duchamp’s first inspirations. What caught attention was Matisse’s way to use painting. He used it as a tool and usually had priority over the subject that was being painted. He simply took the painting from his containers and applied it without more to his canvas. The subject he painted was completely independent to the colors he used and this liked Duchamp, because he enjoyed the idea of using the paint as something already done, without the need to mix to find the perfect tone that coincided with the drawing.
From here it can be said that Duchamp was inspired for its Ready-Made term, since that refers to taking an ordinary object without artistic purposes and using it to create a work of art. Although the paint used by Matisse did have artistic purposes, Duchamp was inspired by this because of the fact that it was not necessary to manipulate before being used, but was taken and applied directly from the tube to the canvas. No other artist had done this to this point in art history.
Cubism, developed between 1907 and 1914, reacted against the bright colors of Fauvism and concentrated on the structure of objects. Treats the forms of nature through geometric figures and straight lines, mainly. As well as in Fauvism, the Cubists emphasized the intervention of the artist of reality: artists began to recreate their subjects instead of simply copying them. This also inspired Duchamp, and led him to make one of his most important creations: naked down a ladder in 1912. This was the first work that changed the artist’s life.
The nude figure did not seem naked, it didn’t even seem human. When Duchamp sent him to the Salon Des independants, an association of independent artists, he was rejected by Cubist Albert Gleizes, who was part of the association’s committee. He contacted Marcel’s older brothers and asked them to convince him to voluntarily withdraw it, because it was not what the Cubist circle wanted in his exhibition, since he was considered very "futurist" for containing movement. The brothers carried out their mission and Marcel accessed without putting a scandal, but he was not happy. That was the moment when he realized that he could not belong to a group, but that the only person he could trust was himself.
Some years later, this same painting was making Duchamp the most famous modern artist in Europe. The work was selected for Armory Show in New York, which contained more than 1500 works by American and European artists. When the exhibition was inaugurated, the busiest section was that of foreign artists. The spectators were surprised and fascinated by the modern works that violated art rules. Nude down a ladder was the one that caused the most shock, since many spectators could not distinguish naked; They did not find the human form. It was something completely different from what had been previously seen in art. They even compared it with a stack of old golf sticks and an explosion. The critics made fun of the exhibition and encouraged the public to attend and see it as if it were a circus. The part of foreign artists was so controversial that the voice ran to other cities, such as Boston and Chicago. The general public did not understand the work, however, the American artists were very interested and hungry for this new breakdown of traditional and academic art.
In 1912, when Duchamp was just twenty -five years old, his career as a painter was about to finish. It was around that year that he was interested in different issues to those he said before, such as mathematics and physics. His interest aroused in part because new discoveries were just made that had changed and questioned the foundations of scientific thinking until that moment. This was precisely what Duchamp needed after his rejection by his Cubists and his brothers: he had to start from scratch and with a different approach.
In October 1911, Duchamp had met Francis Picabia, who introduced him to a type of life outside the parameters of conventional artists. They formed a good friendship and in 1912, Picabia invited him to a play, which was an experience that was going to completely change the course of his career as an artist. The work was an adaptation of a novel written by Raymond Roussel in 1910. Roussel was a great inspiration for Duchamp because his work presented something that he was not common for him to witness in his life: a completely independent job. A job that had nothing to do with great names or important influences. Roussel’s work was like Duchamp poetry. From him he took the inspiration to make his great glass. This was the moment when Duchamp realized that it was better for an artist to be influenced by a writer than by another artist.
Roussel introduced to the life of Duchamp Machine figures that had at least some similarities with human figures, which could paint and do other activities. These were Roussel’s ideas that caused the most impact on Duchamp’s works. His inventive machinery, his artificial scientific experiments and the alteration of the senses to create new meanings was what invaded Duchamp’s imagination and led him to his new creations.
Another great inspiration for Marcel Duchamp was Henri Poincaré, mathematician and physical, who published several theoretical books. These books discovered conceptual changes that occurred after the invention of X -rays and the phenomenon of radioactivity, especially in the atom and its laws. With the help of Poincaré, Duchamp inserted physics into his art to devalue rational science. Towards the end of 1912, physics had entered a stage of development to which I will characterize as a "unrealistic of principles", a "doubt" and "a serious crisis" in the sciences in the sciences. Everything that was believed was questioned. The axioms of physics disintegrated and the existence of objective scientific knowledge was questioned. Poincaré explained that no theorem can be considered true. "There is not a single reality that we can take for granted", which inspired Duchamp, because no work of art that made from that moment up alone, but that each of them belonged to a whole: they were reflected and They projected each other.
Since Duchamp tended to seek inspiration in literary works, he found her in the poem of "Liming Belly" of Gertrude Stein, written in 1915-17. Ironically, the poem had cubist parameters, since it was not a continuous line but a series of images and feelings. From this poem came the inspiration to do why not sneeze?, which is a work composed of many marble cubes that look like sugar cubes, a thermometer and a jibia. All this was contained in a bird -made bird cage. This work was for Dorothea Dreier, but seeing how it ended, she rejected her. He returned to his sister, who kept her in her collection of Duchamp works, but later gave her another collector without receiving anything in return. The work was not a success. Almost nobody has seen it, but those who did see her did not understand her message, but at the same time they knew that she was very peculiar to or have any meaning. Duchamp himself did not help find meaning since the only thing he said about her was a general description and explained how marble buckets cheated the viewer because they look fragile and light but are actually strong and heavy. The same explained that the thermometer was there to measure the temperature. In other words, Duchamp was very ambiguous with his explanation and did not say much about the message of the work.
We see this throughout his life and in all the works he creates. Duchamp was a person of few words and he did not like to tell the public what they had to understand of his art. He simply tolerated every interpretation that gave his art.
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