Duchampian News & Views

  • “ALL ARTISTS ARE NOT CHESS PLAYERS” : Allan Savage on Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia

    “For Marcel Duchamp, chess was almost everything. As his friend, the author Henri-Pierre Roché, noted: “He needed a good chess game like a baby needs his bottle.” It featured throughout his art career, from his early painting Portrait of Chess Players (1911) to Reunion, the performance/chess game he staged with John Cage in 1968 on an electronically prepared board.”

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  • Jeu d’échecs avec Marcel Duchamp

    “This film records an in-depth interview with Duchamp which took place five years before his death, at the time of his first ever one-man show (at the Pasadena Art Museum). It records for posterity Duchamp talking about his life, his ideas on art, why he chose to continue living in America after fleeing France in 1915, and why he virtually abandoned his work as an artist in 1923.”

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  • Machinima and Up and Coming

    “Most of my reading and writing right now is concerned with how Surrealists theorized found objects. The principal figures I’m looking at, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp were not officially inaugurated by Andre Breton into the Surrealist group but made some of the most interesting contributions to found object art with their assemblages and readymades.”

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  • Davy between painting, photography

    “In his letter to Alfred Steiglitz — the father of American photography — Marcel Duchamp wrote: “You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.” The letter is dated May 22, 1922.”

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  • Duchamp: “Sixteen Miles of String” (1942)

    “Duchamp bought 16 miles of string, of which only one mile was used, to prepare an entanglement in which the visitor experienced difficulties in finding his way to the paintings, a metaphor for the difficulties which the layman often encounters in the attempt to understand modern painting”

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  • Ducham en Barcelona

    "See video of new "Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia" exhibition in Spain .. read more...
  • Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia Exhibit at Museo Nacional D’Art de Catalunya

    "BARCELONA - This exhibition aims to chart the artistic and personal relationships of three of the great figures in early twentieth-century art, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. Together they created the Dada movement in New York during the First World War, and, unusually within the history of modern art, they remained friends, with periods of varying intensity, throughout their lives. On view 26 June through 21 September, 2008." Visit Museo .. read more...
  • Wee exhibit, big scandal

    "Which is perhaps why Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the curator of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, has placed Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel right at the centre of her huge line-up of contemporary art in this year's Biennale program, to which she has attached the slogan "Revolution - Forms that Turn" as her overriding theme. 'A revolution is a turn and a return,' she says. ' It is also a sudden shift in perspective, a turning of perspectives, which is what Duchamp has done. So with this .. read more...
  • Marsden Hartley exhibit at Amon Carter shows darker vision of the West

    “[Marsden] Hartley returned to New York City in 1919, where he became an unlikely member of the Société Anonyme, the avant-garde group headed by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Katherine Dreier. Hartley was attracted to the freedom of the group, but he was at heart a much more traditional artist and he lasted only seven months.”

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