Marcel Duchamp is one of the most interesting and innovative figures in the history of 20th-century art. Born in France, in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1887, Duchamp was one of the key players in the Dada movement. Despite his connection to Dadaism, Marcel Duchamp is a figure that is difficult to categorize within any framework.
Duchamp went through countless artistic phases, from historical avant-gardes to Dadaism, culminating in the invention that definitively changed the concept of artwork and revolutionized art history. In this article, we will explore Marcel Duchamp’s transition from painting to ready-made.
The Ready-Made
Many associate his name with ready–made artworks. He was the very first to transform a common object into a work of art without making any aesthetic intervention on it.
However, not everyone knows that his artistic production was extremely varied and that the young Marcel’s early painting experiences were characterized by an assimilation of the main stylistic novelties of the time: Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, Symbolism, Futurism.
Duchamp and the Fourth Dimension
Among all styles, it is within cubism that he moves with the greatest ease, as demonstrated by the works shown below, created in 1911 and 1912.
Duchamp introduces the notion of fourth dimension in his theoretical and plastic research simultaneously with many other cubist, futurist, or abstract artists.
For Duchamp, the fourth dimension corresponds to the invisible that painting must reveal: ideas, the soul and movements of the body, erotic impulses, time and space that are distorted.
In the painting Nude (Study), Sad Young Man in Train, preserved in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Duchamp’s interest in cubism and the study of the fourth dimension is clearly manifested.
Among the elements he takes from the movement that owes its origins to Picasso and Braque, we find a sober palette. Unlike the Impressionists, the Cubists preferred to use a palette with few colors, generally ranging between brown and gray.
From Cubism, Duchamp also adopts the tendency to subordinate representational fidelity to the needs of abstract composition.
But more than anything, he focuses on the description of movement which, like in a kaleidoscope, is fragmented into all its phases. Duchamp’s interest centers on the description of two distinct movements: that of the train and the swaying movement of the young man’s body.
The forward motion of the train is suggested by the multiplication of lines and volumes of the figure, which appears almost transparent, allowing glimpses through it of the windows. The swaying motion of the figure is instead rendered by a series of repetitions in the opposite direction.
This sequence of replicated images evokes the effects of chrono-photography, and the related ideas of the Italian futurists, from whom Duchamp acknowledges the influence.
Duchamp uses this formal device not only to illustrate movement but also to integrate the figure into the surrounding environment and to convey the melancholy suggested in the title of the work.
The Transition of Marcel Duchamp from Painting to Ready-Made
The rejection at the Salon des Indépendants in 1912, where Duchamp participated presenting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, marks the breaking point that will lead Duchamp to progressively distance himself from painting and take a step back from the art world, shifting towards a more irreverent artistic production that he deemed less anachronistic.
In 1913, Duchamp created his first ready-made: Bicycle Wheel.
For Duchamp, the ready-made represents the concrete opportunity to challenge an art system that is too academic and still too tied to the theorization of what constitutes a work of art. By simply selecting prefabricated elements and calling them art, Duchamp managed to subvert the established notions of the artist’s craft and the aesthetic experience of the viewer.
Speaking of ready-mades, did you know that the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome holds one of the most famous among its collections?
This is one of the versions of the famous Fountain by Richard Mutt (the pseudonym Duchamp used).
It is nothing more than a common urinal that Duchamp signed with the name “R. Mutt.”
The work, created in 1917, was never exhibited to the public and subsequently went missing.
Since 1964, there have been sixteen replicas of the object in the world, and one of these can be found on Artsupp! You can find it in the permanent collection section of the National Gallery!
If you are interested in discovering more about Duchamp’s Fountain, here is an in-depth article: Duchamp: Fountain and the ready-made
