The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (147 page)

(1887–1968).
French-born artist and art theorist who became an American citizen in 1955, the brother of Raymond
Duchamp-Villon
and Jacques
Villon
. Although Duchamp produced few works (most of them are now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), he is regarded as one of the most potent figures in 20th-cent. art because of the originality and fertility of his ideas. He sprang to notoriety with
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
(Philadelphia), combining the principles of
Cubism
and
Futurism
, which was the most discussed (and vilified) work at the
Armory Show
in 1913. In the same year he invented the
ready-made
with a bicycle wheel mounted on a kitchen stool, and from this time he virtually abandoned painting and other conventional media. From 1915 to 1923 he lived mainly in New York, where he was a leader of the
Dada
movement. His works of this period include other ready-mades, notably
Bottle Rack
(1914) and
Fountain
(a urinal signed R. Mutt , 1917). Another of his celebrated provocative gestures was adding a moustache and beard and an obscene inscription to a reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
(1919). So far as it is possible to derive a theoretical basis from the incoherences of Dadaism, the concept of the ready-made seems to derive from Duchamp's conviction that life is meaningless absurdity and from his repudiation of all the values of art. Duchamp's major work of this period was a construction on glass entitled
The Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors
, even, also known as
The Large Glass
(Philadelphia, 1915–23; a facsimile by Richard
Hamilton
is in the Tate, London, 1965–6). This is his most esoteric work and to many people is an incomprehensible joke. After leaving
The Large Glass
‘definitively unfinished’ Duchamp virtually abandoned art for chess. He was a good enough player to represent France in four chess Olympiads and his obsession for the game intensified as he grew older. Of his marriage in 1927 his friend
Man Ray
wrote: ‘Duchamp spent most of the one week they lived together studying chess problems, and his bride, in desperate retaliation, got up one night when he was asleep and glued the chess pieces to the board. They were divorced three months later.’ He lived mainly in Paris from 1923 to 1942 and then for the rest of his life mainly in New York. After his death it was discovered that he had worked in secret for twenty years on
Etant Donnés
(Given that …), a large mixed-media construction; it is now in Philadelphia. Duchamp became a legend in his own lifetime. He was a man of enormous charm, with a keen sense of irony, and by his character as much as his works he did more than anyone else to change the concept of art in the 20th cent. He tried, unsuccessfully as he himself recognized, to destroy the mystique of taste, and in 1962 said: ‘When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics … I threw the bottle rack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.’ Nevertheless, he revolutionized thinking about art.

 
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(1876–1918).
French sculptor, the brother of Jacques
Villon
and Marcel
Duchamp
. After studying medicine he took up sculpture in 1898. From 1905 to 1913 he exhibited at the
Salon d'Automne
with works of expressive naturalism which at first differed little from those of others who were seeking a way to escape from the influence of
Rodin
. From about 1910, however, he came under the influence of the
Cubist
group and by 1914 he was recognized as pre-eminent among the small number of Cubist sculptors. His most celebrated work is
The Horse
(casts in Tate, London, MOMA, New York, and elsewhere, 1914), which completed his move towards abstraction. This has been called by G. H. Hamilton (
Painting and Sculpture in Europe
1880–1940, 1967) ‘the most powerful piece of sculpture produced by any strictly Cubist artist’, and has been compared with the work of the
Futurists
, particularly that of
Boccioni
, who had met Duchamp-Villon in 1913. In the success with which it expresses the taut energy of muscular movement in static forms it certainly achieves at least one of the things at which the Futurists were aiming in their attempts to represent ‘the dynamics of movement’. Duchamp-Villon served with the French army in the First World War and died from blood-poisoning after contracting typhoid fever.

 
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(1877–1953).
French painter, graphic artist, and textile designer. His early work was in an
Impressionist
manner, but he became a convert to
Fauvism
in 1905 under the influence of
Matisse
. In 1908 he worked with
Braque
at L'Estaque and abandoned Fauvism for a more sober style influenced by
Cézanne
, but thereafter he soon developed the highly personal manner for which he became famous. It is characterized by rapid calligraphic drawing on backgrounds of bright colours thinly washed on a white ground, and was well suited to the glittering scenes of luxury and pleasure he favoured. He was a well-established figure by the mid 1920s and the accessibility and
joie de vivre
of his work helped to popularize modern art. In 1910 he made friends with the fashion designer Paul Poiret, who interested him in textile design, and he worked as a designer for both Poiret and Bianchini Férier, a silk manufacturer of Lyons, exerting a considerable influence on the world of fashion. He also made numerous book illustrations, notably for
Apollinaire's
Bestiaire
in 1910. His popularily continues undiminished, not least in Japan, where he is a favourite with collectors.

 
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dugento
.

See
QUATTROCENTO
.

 
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