Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, says Wikipedia. Duchamp's output had considerable influence on the development of post-World War I Western art, and whose advice to modern art collectors helped shape the tastes of the Western art world.
A playful man, Duchamp prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much with words, but with actions such as dubbing a urinal "art" and naming it Fountain. He produced relatively few artworks as he quickly moved through the avant-garde rhythms of his time.
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.[1]
Duchamp's first controversial work, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un escalier n° 2) (1912), depicts the motion of the mechanistic nude with superimposed facets, similar to motion pictures. The painting shows elements of both the fragmentation and synthesis of the Cubists, and the movement and dynamism of the Futurists.
He first submitted the piece to appear at the Cubist Salon des Indépendants, but jurist Albert Gleizes asked Duchamp's brothers to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting, or paint over the title that he had painted on the work and rename it something else. His brothers did approach him with Gleizes' request, and Duchamp quietly refused. Of the incident Duchamp later recalled, "I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that."
Later he submitted the painting to the 1913 Armory Show in New York City -- officially the International Exhibition of Modern Art -- which displayed works of American artists and was the first major exhibition of the modern trends coming out of Paris. American show-goers, accustomed to realistic art, were scandalized, and the Nude was at the center of much of the controversy.
Work on The Large Glass continued into 1913 with his invention of inventing a repertoire of forms with notes, sketches and painted studies, and even drawing some of his ideas on the wall of his apartment.
In his studio he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. Later he denied that its creation was purposeful, though it has come to be known as the first of his readymades. "I enjoyed looking at it", he said. "Just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace."
Meanwhile, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 was scandalizing Americans at the Armory Show, and the sale of all four of his paintings in the show financed his trip to America in 1915.
After World War I was declared in 1914, with his brothers and many friends in military service and himself exempted, Paris felt uncomfortable to Duchamp. He decided to emigrate to the then neutral United States. To his surprise he found he was a celebrity when he arrived in New York in 1915 where he quickly befriended art patron Katherine Dreier and artist Man Ray.
New York Dada had a less serious tone than that of Europe, and was not a particularly organized venture. Duchamp's friend Picabia connected with the Dada group in Zürich, bringing to New York the Dada ideas of absurdity and anti-art. Together with Man Ray and many from the group that met almost nightly at the Arensberg home or caroused in Greenwich Village, Duchamp contributed his ideas about art and his humor to the New York activities, much of which ran concurrent with the development of readymades and The Large Glass. (See also found art.)
Duchamp and Dada are most often connected by his submission of Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. The Independent Artists shows were unjuried and all pieces that were submitted were displayed. However, the show committee said that Fountain was not art and rejected it from the show causing an uproar amongst the Dadaists and led Duchamp to resign from the board of the Independent Artists.[2]
Along with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp published New York's Dada's magazine, The Blind Man which included art, literature, humor and commentary.
In 1915 Duchamp began doing his "readymades" — found objects he chose and presented as art. He assembled the first readymade, a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, in 1913 about the same time as his Nude Descending A Staircase was attracting the attention of critics at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, though it wasn't until two years later he called it a readymade.
Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, is considered to be the first "pure" readymade. Prelude to a Broken Arm (November 1915), a snow shovel, followed soon after. In 1919, Duchamp made a Mona Lisa parody by adorning a cheap reproduction with a moustache and a goatee, as well as adding the rude inscription L.H.O.O.Q., when read out loud in French sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul" (translating to "she has a hot ass" as a manner of implying the woman in the painting is in a state of sexual excitement and availability). This was intended as a Freudian joke, referring to Leonardo da Vinci's alleged homosexuality. According to Rhonda Roland Shearer, the apparent reproduction is in fact a copy partly modelled on Duchamp's own face.[3]
His Fountain, the urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt that shocked the art world in 1917, was selected in 2004 as "the most influential artwork of the 20th century" by 500 renowned artists and historians.[4]
Rrose Sélavy, also spelled Rose Sélavy, was one of Duchamp's pseudonyms. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie", which translates to English as "Eros, such is life". It has also been read as "arroser la vie" ("to make a toast to life").
Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray of Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it. Duchamp used the name in the title of at least one sculpture, Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy?. The sculpture, a type of readymade called an assemblage, consists of an oral thermometer, a couple dozen small cubes of marble resembling sugar cubes inside a birdcage.
Duchamp became a United States citizen in 1955 but his influence on the art world remained behind the scenes until the late 1950s when he was "discovered" by young artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns who were eager to escape the dominance of Abstract Expressionism.
Interest in Duchamp reignited in the 1960s, and he gained international public recognition. 1963 saw his first retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, and in 1966 the Tate Gallery hosted a large exhibit of his work. Other major institutions, including the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed with large showings of Duchamp's work. He was invited to lecture on art and participate in formal discussions, as well as sitting for interviews with major publications.
1938 - The International Surrealist Exhibition was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris with more than 60 artists from different countries, showing around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations.
The surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called on Duchamp to do so. At the exhibition's entrance he placed Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi (an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the patrons who were in full evening dress. Surrealist Street filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various surrealists. He designed the main hall to seem like subterranean cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single light bulb which provided the only lighting,[1] so patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art. Wolfgang Paalens installation underneath was composed of limp oak leaves and a water-filled pond with actual water lilies and reed, and the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Around midnight in the crazy gleam of the pale light cones the visitors witness the dancing shimmer of a sparsely dressed girl who suddenly arises from the reed, jumps on the bed, abruptly lapses into a hysterical shriek - an idea of Dali -, and disappears just as quickly.
Much to the surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.
1942 - For the First Papers of Surrealism show in New York, surrealists again called on Duchamp to design the exhibition. This time he wove a 3-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works.[2] He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his friends to the opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed patrons arrived they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls, and skipping rope. His design for the show's catalog included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.
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