Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968), French-born American artist whose work had a major impact on the direction of 20th-century art. By presenting unaltered, everyday objects as sculpture, Duchamp radically changed the course of modern art. He also helped introduce the European art movements of cubism and dada to the United States, and was influential in the surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. His emphasis on the intellectual aspects of art influenced many succeeding artists, especially those connected with the 1960s art movement known as conceptual art.

Born in Blainville, Duchamp enjoyed a comfortable childhood in a family unusually sympathetic to the arts: his grandfather was an engraver, and three of his five siblings (Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon, and Suzanne Valadon) became artists. Duchamp himself was painting in an impressionist style by the age of 15, adopting a more vibrantly colorful fauvist style by the age of 20. He soon turned, briefly but momentously, to cubism. His cubist Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania) was included in New York City’s groundbreaking Armory Show in 1913, the first major showing of modern art in the United States. This fragmented rendering of a woman in motion was derisively if memorably compared by one critic to an explosion in a shingle factory.

Duchamp was unfazed by the criticism, having already set himself in opposition to all art that he referred to as retinal because he felt it appealed to the eyes alone. In 1913, he exhibited a bicycle wheel turned upside down and mounted on a kitchen stool (Bicycle Wheel, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania). This was the first of what came to be known as readymades, ordinary objects made into art simply by changing their context—that is, by exhibiting them as art. Bicycle Wheel was soon followed by other readymades, most notoriously a urinal submitted collaboratively with American artist Joseph Stella to a 1917 New York City exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Entitled Fountain (1917, original lost) and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, Duchamp wrote of it soon after, "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it," and thereby "created a new thought for that object."

In 1915 Duchamp moved to New York City where he remained, for the most part, until 1923. In addition to the readymades, he produced a small collection of unusual paintings and objects during this time, including his mysterious and complex masterpiece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Also known as TheLarge Glass, it is made of lead foil, oil paint, and wire forms sandwiched between large panes of glass. The top half of the glass features a strange mechanical form that represents the bride, while the bottom half, representing the bachelors, includes diagrammatic renderings of both a coffee grinder and objects resembling dressmakers’ mannequins. Duchamp’s painting Tu M’ (1918, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut) introduced several new concepts to the process of making art, including the use of hired talent (in this case a professional sign painter) and real objects along with illusionistic ones (for example, a painted rip and an actual safety pin). Both ideas caught on with artists of the pop art movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Declaring TheLarge Glass still unfinished in 1923, Duchamp also announced that he was through with art and left New York City to return to Paris. Much of his energy was thereafter devoted to playing chess, but occasional artworks appeared, including a short motion picture called Anemic Cinema (1926), which he created in collaboration with American dada artist Man Ray. The title, in which anemic is an anagram for cinema, shows Duchamp’s love of wordplay. In the 1920s and 1930s he produced a series of motorized compositions painted on glass called Precision Optics, which, when rotated, gave the illusion of having three dimensions. These works provided a precedent for art that incorporated movement, later known as kinetic art.

Duchamp returned to live in New York City in 1942, becoming a citizen of the United States in 1954, although he continued to spend time abroad each year. After his death in 1968, it was discovered that Duchamp had been working for two decades on a monumental artwork assembled out of a variety of materials, Étant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau. 2. le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. the waterfall. 2. the illuminating gas, 1946-1966, Philadelphia Museum of Art). This disturbing and provocative work, which echoes themes from his Large Glass, presents a startlingly realistic woman made of leather and reclining on a bed of leaves before a mechanical waterfall. She is visible only through two peepholes drilled in a massive wooden door.