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Marcel Duchamp Quotes
1887–1968 France
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (July 28, 1887 – October 2, 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
France Non-fiction authors Painters Sculptors Also known as: Duchamp
Random Marcel Duchamp quote
16 quotes
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.
To be looked at [from the other side of his art-work 'The Glass'] with one eye, close to, for almost an hour.
..paint was always [in history of painting] a means to an end, whether the end was religious, social, decorative or romantic. Now it's become an end in itself..
You think you're doing something entirely your own, and a year later, you look at it and you see actually the roots of where your art comes from without your knowing it at all.
Art Is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists by Phaidon (2016)
The only man in the past whom I really respect was Seurat.. .He didn't let his hand interfere with his mind.
I wanted to kill art for myself.. ..a new thought for that object.
If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases [it] creates a new image of the unit of length.
I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.
I was interested in ideas - not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.
In French there is an old expression, 'la patte', meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and all that retinal painting.
Painting is over and done with. Who could do anything better than this propeller? Look, could you do that?
..the thing was to choose one [a ready-made object] that you were not attracted by.. ..and that was difficult because anything becomes beautiful if you look at it long enough.. .[My intention was to] completely eliminate the existence of taste, bad or good or indifferent.
People talk of Pablo Picasso as the leader of the Cubists but, strictly speaking, he is no longer a Cubist. Today he is a Cubist, tomorrow he will be something else. The only true Cubists are Gleizes and Metzinger.
He [= Duchamp himself, writing in the third person] CHOSE IT. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.
The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.. .I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.
Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
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