In 1917 he took a porcelain urinal, signed it with the pseudonym “R. Mutt,” and submitted it to an exhibition in New York under the title “Fountain.” The jury refused it. The object vanished. But the photograph survived.
It is the most influential gesture in the history of twentieth-century art.
Marcel Duchamp was born in Normandy in 1887, into a family of painters — his brothers were artists too. He studied painting himself and joined the Cubists. “Nude Descending a Staircase” — 1912 — caused a sensation at the New York Armory Show: a figure in motion broken down on Cubist principles. The American papers went wild.
But Duchamp’s mind was already elsewhere. He was asking: what makes a thing a work of art? The artist’s brush? Or the artist’s gaze, and the context?
He took a bicycle wheel and mounted it on a stool. He took a bottle rack. He took a urinal. He called these things “readymades” and declared them works of art. If the artist says it is art — it is art.
Then he all but abandoned painting and spent twenty years playing chess — seriously: he competed in tournaments and became a master.
It turned out he had been working in secret on his last major piece, “Étant donnés,” an elaborate three-dimensional installation unveiled only after his death in 1969.
Everyone who practices conceptual art, performance, or installation today is Duchamp’s heir.