Artist

Marcel Duchamp

1887–1968 · French

Marcel Duchamp shifted the center of artistic value from manual skill toward selection, language, context and idea. Trained as a painter, he caused a sensation with Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 before largely abandoning conventional painting. Beginning with Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, his readymades proposed that an ordinary manufactured object could become art through an artist’s choice and its displacement into a new context. His long, deliberately discontinuous practice also included the Large Glass, optical experiments, chess and the secret construction Étant donnés.

Readymade; sculpture; painting; installation; film; print; conceptual practice