Duchamp

by Jose Maria Faerna (Editor), Cameo Books

One of the most controversial and enigmatic artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) fundamentally altered our way of looking at and understanding art. Associated in his early years with several avant-garde groups, notably the Cubists and Surrealists, Duchamp became most famous as the archetypal artist of the radical Dada movement. Duchamp's art illustrates his conviction that painting, as it had been previously understood, was mere representation; it was Duchamp's goal to turn painting into a purely intellectual tool, to make art that was, in his words, "aesthetically anaesthetized." Duchamp's attempts to transform people's ideas about art were not readily accepted, and often created huge scandals. At the exhibition of the New York Independents in 1917, he presented his now famous overturned urinal, which he signed and titled Fountain. Indifferent to ideas of "good" or "bad" taste, Duchamp continued to make his artworks (called "Readymades") from innocuous objects which he "assisted" and "adjusted" in order to activate hidden meanings. Living in Paris and New York, Marcel Duchamp had a profound influence on artists in both Europe and America - he counted as friends, among others, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Picabia, and Andre Breton, and worked on several films with Man Ray and Hans Richter. In 1955 Duchamp became a citizen of the United States, where he continued to influence all aspects of the contemporary art scene until his death in 1968. This survey of Duchamp's career documents the artist's unusual achievement with more than 60 reproductions of his work and an informative text discussing his preeminent role in the history of twentieth-century art.

Genres: Art

64 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1996

Reviews

[Eryk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an excellent primer on Duchamp. It's very short on actual text (~10 pages out of 61), but where it excels is in the full-page representations of some of his major paintings, drawings, and readymades. The pages are thick, and the size of the book is between a "stardard" book size and a coffee-table book. Even though I know much about Duchamp and his works, there were a few pieces I was not familiar with. And there was a fabulous diagram/explanation of his machine-like magnum opus: The Large Glass. It took a few hours to read, but only because I went very slowly and absorbed the photos and the captions below each. Though the point of the book was to showcase his works, I still think a bit more about his life, people he met, and his contributions to the art world could have been covered. Because of that, I gave it 3 stars (3.7, actually). (For me, the diagram of "The Large Glass" was worth the read and I was sure to make a copy of it.)