How can we not remember that one hundred and thirty-four years ago, on July 28, 1887, Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville, northern France. In 1912 he painted the definitive version of “Nude Descending a Staircase” and in 1913, exhibited at the Armory Show in New York, this work caused a great sensation. Duchamp anticipated the birth of the Dada movement, dated to 1916. From 1913, having abandoned traditional painting and drawing, he devoted himself to experimental art forms that would be included in his great work of 1915-23, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.” In 1914 he created the first ready-mades (everyday objects, sometimes with modifications, presented as works of art) destined to have revolutionary effects in the art world. In 1917 came the “Fountain,” the upside-down urinal signed with the pseudonym “Richard Mutt,” which marked a turning point in art at the time and still develops its influence today. In New York in 1920, he created motorized structures and invented Rrose Sélavy, his female alter ego. He returned to Paris in 1923 and seemed to abandon art for the game of chess. In 1942 he settled permanently in New York and became a U.S. citizen in 1955. In the 1940s he was in contact with the Surrealists who had emigrated to New York because of World War II. In 1946 he began to create “Etant donnés: 1. the waterfall 2. the illuminating gas,” a large assemblage on which he would work secretly for the next twenty years. Duchamp died near Paris on October 2, 1968.
