Marcel Duchamp: Art up to the break with art

Good conditions for artistically gifted logicians

Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 into a family for whom the term “art-loving lawyers” really fits:

His father Justin-Isidore Eugène Duchamp (1848–1925) was a notary, his mother Marie Caroline Lucie Duchamp (1856 – 1925, as the mother of six children probably not employed) was the daughter of Émile Frédéric Nicolle, who after a career as a shipbroker became a renowned painter and engraver.

Marcel was the third of six children and grew up near the French Channel coast in Blainville-Crevon, near Rouen.

The family's children were born at large intervals; Lucie Duchamp had her first son at 19, the next at 20, Marcel at 31, Suzanne at 33, Yvonne at 39 and Magdelaine at 42.

Since the age gaps to his two older and two younger siblings were each around a decade, Marcel effectively grew up in the company of a sister, Suzanne, who was two years younger.

The upbringing in the Duchamp family was clearly conducive to inspiring a passion for art . However, it is equally likely that the usual tendency prevailed in this family as well, requiring (male) offspring to at least complete an apprenticeship in a "respectable academic profession" beforehand; both of these aspects are demonstrated by the careers of the Duchamp brothers.

Marcel's eldest brother Emile Méry Frédéric Gaston Duchamp initially studied law and worked as a notary before enrolling at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris in 1894, subsequently becoming a famous painter and graphic artist under the pseudonym Jacques Villon

Jacques Villon exhibited at documenta 1 (1955), documenta II (1959) and (posthumously) at documenta III (1964) and received numerous awards for his art, including the Grand Prize of the Venice Biennale in 1956.

The second oldest, Pierre Maurice Raymond Duchamp, moved to Paris Montmartre to live with his brother Jacques and began studying medicine at the Sorbonne in 1895. When he had to abandon his studies due to a chronic illness, he turned to sculpture and made a career as “Raymond Duchamp-Villon” (a pseudonym that perfectly distinguished him from his brothers Jacques and Marcel, who were both now well-known artists, while simultaneously serving as a link between them).

The important sculptor of Cubism had just begun to experiment with transferring Cubist principles to architecture when he was drafted and became a victim of World War I in October 1918.

Suzanne Duchamp, as a young girl, was able to pursue an artistic career without detours. From 1905 (at the age of 16), she attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, where she presented her first works, exploring Impressionism and Cubism. At 21, she married a local pharmacist, but the marriage quickly ended in divorce. Suzanne moved to Montparnasse in Paris to further her artistic career near her brother Marcel.

A career (as an artist) was even more difficult for a woman to achieve back then than it is today. Even though many women have had, or are currently having, different experiences, civilization has come a long way in this regard: there are masses of people who, regardless of gender, believe in the equality of all people and, moreover, no longer see power – coupled with the desire to keep as many others as possible away from power – as a desirable goal.

A brief aside for the many optimistic women who consider feminism a thing of the past and equality a long-since achieved goal: According to the current "Data Report on Gender Equality in the Federal Republic of Germany ," women in Germany—as of 2015—earn at least 20 percent less than men for roughly the same working hours. Regardless of which data is used to analyze earned income, this clearly means everywhere, in every profession.

This data report comes from the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. Logically thinking people will immediately notice that the ministry's name, besides referring to the smallest unit of people in society (the family), also mentions three groups of individuals whose concerns are obviously to be addressed politically in connection with this small unit: senior citizens, women, and youth. It's a shame, really, that for politicians, German men have nothing to do with families…

The subject of early history is not equality, but rather, in some cases, very recent history, as the dates of the introduction of women's suffrage in 20 European countries prove: 1906 Finland, 1913 Norway, 1915 Denmark, 1915 Iceland, 1917 Estonia, 1918 Latvia, 1918 Germany, 1918 Austria, 1918 Poland, 1918 Luxembourg, 1919 Netherlands, 1921 Sweden, 1928 Great Britain, 1931 Spain, 1944 France, 1945 Hungary, 1945 Slovenia, 1945 Bulgaria, 1946 Italy, 1952 Greece, 1971 Switzerland, 1984 Liechtenstein.

Ah, so the current “World Ranking of Art” (artfacts.net) confirms the 20% drama: only 100 women have access to the illustrious circle of the 500 most sought-after artists in the world; the remaining top spots are occupied by 400 men, 80%.

Anyone who still claims that feminism is outdated should either take another look at it or finally limit themselves to showing off the latest nail polish on YouTube or presenting themselves in high heels in the media.

For Suzanne Duchamp, the ranks of the powerful (along with their usual admiring followers eager to attain power) were certainly tightly closed at that time; like all female painters, she could expect to find it difficult to gain recognition. And yet, at the age of 22, Suzanne Duchamp had her first major exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, a fact usually attributed by (male) reporters to the increasing prominence of her brothers in the art world, rather than to any exceptional quality of her work.

After a creative hiatus due to the war, Suzanne Duchamp created her first Dadaist artworks, followed by further works and a marriage to a Swiss artist that stimulated her art. Her work evolved from Dadaismthrough representational art to abstraction ; she exhibited in Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the USA, and her works are now part of public collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York City).

Marcel Duchamp's next two sisters were born almost or just over a decade after him; Yvonne (* 1895) and Magdelaine (* 1898) appear in the reports no differently than in the paintings that their brother Marcel made of them.

Practice makes perfect

After primary school, Marcel Duchamp first went to a boarding school in Rouen from 1897 and then to the Lycée Corneille, where he passed the Baccalauréat de philosophie (high school diploma with a focus on philosophy) in 1904.

Duchamp began painting in 1902, at the age of 15. His first paintings were Impressionistic, a style that was mainstream at the time. He spent 1903 painting portraits and sketching family members and friends.

After graduating from high school, Duchamp went to the private art school Académie Julian in Paris for a few months, where he was able to live with his brother Jacques Villon.

During his time at the academy, he began Impressionist painting ; it would take some time and several detours before these explorations were reflected in his works.

First, military service stood in the way of a carefree future, and even then, more peacefully minded contemporaries devised ways to escape the violent drill or at least shorten the time: Duchamp volunteered for military service in October 1905, referring to a law that granted doctors, lawyers, skilled workers and craftsmen a reduced military service period of 1 year instead of 3.

During his artistic exercises, starting in May 1905, Duchamp had completed an apprenticeship in an art printing workshop , which now served him well as proof of his craft skills

Thus, he was able to return to Paris and continue working as early as October 1906; in July 1908 he moved to Neuilly near his brother Jacques Villon in Puteaux, whom he frequently visited during his time in Neuilly until October 1913.

During this time, Marcel Duchamp painted a lot, also tried his hand at illustration and drew caricatures for several magazines.

First exhibition and Puteaux group

In 1909, Marcel Duchamp exhibited twice at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, with two still very impressionistic paintings at the spring exhibition and with three works in the autumn: the still gentle and tame impressionistic work “On the Cliffs” (1908), ayay.co.uk/, and the already slightly cubist-influenced “Saint Sébastien” (1909).

For at Jacques Villon's place in Puteaux (on Sundays, in the garden) Duchamp had met a whole series of artists and writers – Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Roger de La Fresnaye, Jean Metzinger, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Picabia, Juan Gris – and discussed with them the “latest craze in painting”, the cubist works of Braque and Picasso.

Around 1911, Marcel Duchamp, like his brothers and the rest of the discussing artists, finally followed what the “modern age” (and Picasso and Braque since about 1908) demanded of art – they embraced Cubism wholeheartedly, and the so-called Puteaux group was formed.

As is often the case with artists' groups, trouble soon arose: The work “Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2” (Nu descendant un escalier no.2, www.philamuseum.org/) newly created in 1912 was immediately rejected by the Salon des Indépendants because it was too cubist, too cheeky, or too good for the Cubists around Gleizes and Metzinger (“went beyond their program,” as it is called in artistic, curatorial, and other circles).

Marcel Duchamp probably felt like a modern-day person (online or in person) traveling the world who unexpectedly stumbles into a meeting of a patriarchally run allotment association (apparently, these still exist today); he was fed up with “elite circles” of any kind: “It was a real turning point in my life,” his biographer Calvin Tomkins quotes him as saying, “I saw that after that I would never again be too interested in groups.”.

Old perfection, new perfection, and artistic shock

During his exhibitions in Paris, Duchamp had met, among others, the German painter Max Bergmann . At Bergmann's suggestion, Duchamp traveled to Munich at the end of June 1912, where he spent about two months studying the "Old Masters" in the Alte Pinakothek

Lucas Cranach's paintings impressed Duchamp; they influenced his last cubist painting, "The Bride" ( www.abcgallery.com/ ), which was created in Munich in the summer of 1912.

Even the first studies for “The Newlywed/Bride is undressed by her bachelors, even (or: Large Glass)” (www.dada-companion.com/, 1915 to 1923) are said to still show influences from Cranach.

In the autumn of 1912, influences from the modern era came into play, which would bring his previous artistic work to an end: Duchamp, along with Constantin Brâncuși and Fernand Léger, the third aviation exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, where the latest aircraft were presented, featuring the latest technical innovations that could be developed in the few years since the first flight of the first airplane, developed by Orville and Wilbur Wright, in 1903.

Duchamp must have come into contact with technology and its innovations for the first time; the effect was striking, he said to Brâncuşi:

“Painting is finished. Who can make something better than these propellers? You, perhaps?”

It wasn't, but the life of the painter Marcel Duchamp underwent a fundamental change under the influence of the perfect industrial form, the results and enormous impact of which are described in the second part of the article “Marcel Duchamp: Ready to make Art”