Marcel Duchamp Books

In the twenties, Surrealists proclaimed that words had stopped playing around and had begun to make love. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called ”Texticles,” the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Sélavy (”Eros, c’est la vie” or “arouser la vie”—“drink it up”; “celebrate life”). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century’s most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.

Edited by Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe. Essays by Gerhard Graulich, Herbert Molderings.

Collects together a novel and a memoir of a triangular relationship during the early days of the Dada movement in New York along with its creative progeny, two magazines: The Blindman and Rongwrong. Henri-Pierre Roche is best known for his novel Jules et Jim, based on the three-sided relationship between himself, the artist Marcel Duchamp and the actress Beatrice Wood. A unique first-hand evocation of the three friends and lovers within their milieu, which included extraordinary characters such as Francis Picabia, Isadora Duncan, Arthur Cravan and many more.

In 1964, Calvin Tomkins spent a number of afternoons interviewing Marcel Duchamp in his apartment in New York City. It reveals him to be a man and an artist whose playful principles toward living freed him to make art that was as unpredictable, complex, and surprising as life itself

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is best-known for his "ready-mades" - such as the urinal, entitled "Fountain" and "signed" R. Mutt. This study tackles the enigma of this major 20th-century artist.

Thanks to Marcel Duchamp, we know that everything can become art and that there is no limit to thinking here. The first comprehensive exhibition in two decades shows Duchamp's works from all creative phases from 1902 to 1968. Through his early work of Post-Impressionist paintings, his caricatures and involvement with Cubism, to his iconic Readymakes, Duchamp's thinking is revealed. He created works with a persistent precision and stubborn anarchy peculiar to him, which only find their completion through us as viewers. In this way, the work changes with us and in time.

When Duchamp moved from Paris to New York in 1915, he was disappointed by the predominantly nature-based abstraction he observed, publicly proclaiming that American artists were too dependent on outmoded European traditions and had overlooked their greatest subjects--the skyscraper and the machine. Meanwhile, the artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz and his "291" gallery remained loyal to their belief in nature as a source of ongoing renewal for visual culture, and emphasized the crucial role that intuition and spirituality played in their creation of art. The crossfire between Duchamp and Stieglitz and their respective circles defined a critical moment in early twentieth-century American art. Debating Modernism includes reproductions of work by artists from both camps, from Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand to Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marsden Hartley. An essay by curator Debra Bricker Balken traces the threads of the debate through the 1910s and 20s, and also addresses the appearance of sexualized imagery in nearly all of these artists' works, a phenomenon that ironically unifies the two seemingly opposed camps. Jay Bochner's essay focuses on the artists' respective violations of American expectations about art.

Dank Marcel Duchamp wissen wir, dass alles zu Kunst werden kann und dem Denken hier keine Grenze gesetzt ist. Die erste umfassende Ausstellung seit zwei Jahrzehnten zeigt Duchamps Werke aus allen Schaffensphasen der Jahre 1902 bis 1968 zeigt. Über sein Frühwerk postimpressionistischer Gemälde, seine Karikaturen und Auseinandersetzung mit dem Kubismus bis zu seinen ikonischen Readymakes offenbart sich das Denken Duchamps. Er schuf mit einer ihm eigenen beharrlichen Genauigkeit und eigensinniger Anarchie Werke, die erst durch uns als Betrachtende ihre Vollendung finden. So verändert sich das Werk mit uns und in der Zeit.