Customer Reviews (1)

Special interest only
I cannot recommend this "as a read". It has value if you have a significant level of interest in this type of art. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Marcel Duchamp interviewed late in life.
This interview with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne provides clarity to the myth that surroundsDuchamp and his non art. Duchamp gave theinterview about 2 years before his death. He answers directly and incontext the meaning of his work and non work. Others books attempt to tellus not only what his production means but try to tell us what his wordsmean as well. This books makes clear that Duchamp did not like the artworld (although he used it to his advantage), he did not like art thatappealed to the eye, he did not make art, he amused himself making objectsand he played games. Its anhonest interview and needs no interpreters.You can understand the valve of this mans ideas and what they mean tocurrent conceptual art. Or is it conceptual non art. ... Read more

Book Description
Since 1914 Marcel Duchamp has been called all of these. No artist of the twentieth century has aroused more passion and controversy, nor exerted a greater influence on art--the very essence of which Duchamp challenged and redefined as concept rather than product by questioning its traditionally privileged optical nature. At the same time, he never ceased to be engaged, openly or secretly, in provocative and enigmatic activities and works that transformed traditional art-making procedures. This definitive monograph, written with the enthusiastic support of Duchamp's widow, challenges received ideas, misunderstandings, and misinformation ... Read more

Book Description
Why another book on Duchamp? Because of all the previous books on Duchamp. Arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, Duchamp, the son of a successful notary, was also a shrewd manager of his image and interests--so much so that many of those who have written about him have been dazzled by his self-created persona when trying to assess his elusive legacy and equally elusive character. Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare is not the first full-length biography of Duchamp, but it is the first to present him in all his human contradictions and to take a refreshingly objective look at his real contribution to modern art. The well-known facts are beautifully explored here: Duchamp's myriad personal relations (with family, lovers, collectors, and artists ranging from Man Ray, Picabia, and Breton to the Stettheimer sisters and the Arensbergs); the creation of major works such as the "readymades" and the "Large Glass"; his passion for chess and presumed abandonment of painting. But beyond this, author Alice Goldfarb Marquis looks past the diffident, humorous mask that Duchamp wore with friend and acquaintance alike, to explore the passions and insecurities that motivated many of his artistic and personal evolutions. She separates the artist from the con artist, to determine just how profound an influence Duchamp has really been. Based on numerous unpublished sources and first-hand interviews, Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare stands as a groundbreaking contribution to the ever-burgeoning field of Duchamp studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Rocking the Duchamp throne
If you believe in God, read the Calvin Tomkins bio instead.If you don't, read this one.If you're not sure, read 'em both.

I believe this is only the second book-length biography of the Dadaist, non-Dadaist (perhaps pre-post-Modernist) painter, artist, post-painter, icon and darling of many.Duchamp is a figure that inspires much talk of isms.He was embraced by the Surrealists, the Pop artists and experimental types during the Sixties, the Postmodernists of the Eighties, and a whole lot more since.By signing a urinal (or was it a toilet bowl?) he created much existentialist angst among the artistic classes.His legacy includes those who cart wheelbarrows full of junk into expensive gallery settings, as well as others almost as sauve as he was.He put his name on the map by throwing out the idea that art can only be made with materials bought in art stories, i.e. paints and clay.He for one preferred shopping in hardward stores.Was he a genius or a hoax?This is the question people like to debate.Certainly he was a humorist, and very ironical.Since his early disillusionment with the Art Establishment, he made much of the idea that the only thing left for art to do was shock.And he was very good at this.The superlative I'll add is that he inspired more thought about art than anyone else in the Twentieth Century.Painting will no longer be just "retinal" (or "painterly" as someone has translated this term).

If you enjoy this kind of back-and-forth, you will enjoy this book.Given he was a master ironist, it is fittingly ironical that he should get this more critical handling than usual, by Alice Goldfarb Marquis. Perhaps it's the sign of the times.In another even less kind book, Donald Kuspit blames him in part for ushing in the End of Art.(Surely rubbish, even if too much rubbish has indeed entered the so-called hallowed walls of art.)

You get the picture - if you want a fauning bio, this aint the one.But perhaps it's a necessary corrective after so much gushing.Marcel Duchamp once gave his own version of the dictum, "the only bad publicity is no publicity."By that measure, this volume, which is quite well researched, certainly adds to the MD stock.Ms. Marquis is as much about assessing the damage he has wrought on art as the things he has brought to it.Or to rephraze it from the point of view of a believer, of the damage others have wrought in his name.In one of the more shocking lines, she says that "the Avant-Garde has been marching to his beat ever since, as it marches off a cliff."Strong words, but perhaps this is a moment for art to take a new direction.

During his life Marcel Duchamp very much promoted the idea that there should be no single correct interpretation of his work, or any work.He saw the spectator as playing an important role in the creation of the art.And so it seems just to have this new biography, that veers from the traditional platitudes about the great man.While I don't necessarily subscribe to all the feminist interpretations now being circulated (Kuspit, Amelia Jones, Marquis) I nevertheless find it refreshing to hear this one.For instance: the Large Glass (his masterwork) is a temple to the female Christ... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Beginning of My Love Affair with Duchamp
This book is highly recommended.The information available within the covers is something that I could not find in my art history book.The reader will gain insight into Duchamp's views and his thoughts leading up to his decisions to take the road, artistically, that he did.Wonderfully written, glorious color photos and beautiful insights, I would recommend this book to anyone looking to add to a library. ... Read more

Book Description
"Drawn from several sources, this catalogue includes works by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray that address the enduring friendship and shared interests of these two artists. The works included explore five decades of the shared milieus and aesthetics of these artist-peers, both of whom so significantly altered the making and understanding of art in the twentieth century. Loosely grouped around thematic concerns, it includes works that exemplify the artists' fascination with the game of chess, the study of optics, and the influence of such diverse sources as African sculpture, as well as the photographic recording of their mutual friends, including portraits of artists, poets, and literary figures pivotal to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Ingeniously designed, this small volume is both a documentary of the artists' friendship, and a study of art in the early 1920s." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Marcel Duchamp/Man Ray:50 years of Alchemy
My son loved this book. The delivery was quick & the book exactly as described. A pleasure to purchase. ... Read more

Book Description
Marcel Duchamp was a famous expatriate, a wanderer, living and working in Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires and escaping from them in turn. But exile, argues T. J. Demos in this innovative reading, is more than a fact in Duchamp's biography. Exile--in the artist's own words, a "spirit of expatriation"--infuses Duchamp's entire artistic practice. Indeed a profound sense of dislocation--from geographical situation, national identity, and cultural conventions--deeply informs the mobile objects and disjunctive spaces of Duchamp's readymades and experimental exhibition installations.

Duchamp's readymade constructions, his installations for surrealist exhibitions in Paris and New York, and his "portable museum" (the suggestively named La boîte-en-valise), Demos writes, all manifest, define, and exploit the terms of exile in multiple ways. Created while the artist was living variously in New York, Buenos Aires, and occupied France, during the global catastrophes of war and fascism, these works express the anguish of displacement and celebrate the freedom of geopolitical homelessness. The "portable museum," a suitcase containing miniature reproductions of Duchamp's work, for example, represented a complex meditation--both critical and joyful--on modern art's tendency toward itinerancy, whereas Duchamp's 1942 installation design entangling a New York gallery in a mile of string announced the dislocated status that many exiled surrealists wished to forget.

Demos connects Duchamp's condition of exile to forms of displacement within photographic practice and modern museum exhibitions, theorized extensively at the time by Walter Benjamin, André Malraux, and Frederick Kiesler. He claims that in the period of fascism's elevation of the home as the site of national imagination, Duchamp's antinational identity became a form of resistance, just as his artistic practice represented a complex response to capitalism's increasing institutionalization and marketing of art. Duchamp's exile, writes Demos, defines a new ethics of independent life in the modern age of nationalism and advanced capitalism, offering a precursor to our own globalized world of nomadic subjects and dispersed experience. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Troubled Sleep
I don't know much about Marcel Duchamp yet I'm always eager to learn more, as with every passing year he seems to become, more and more, the central art figure of the last century, well, he and Andy Warhol.That's just one man's opinion of course, but I take it from T J Demos and his absorbing new look at Duchamp, that I'm not the only one who thinks so.To tell you the truth, I sort of bow down to Demos, whose book seems like a very model for cultural and visual criticism of a high order.It begins simply enough with a recitation, and little by little develops, with the stirring in or more material, and a careful sifting based on an ideological reading of history, into a complex and moving argument, responsive to change, responsive to our very moment.And incidentally it is another step in providing that comprehensive Duchamp biography we all hope is coming, for he examines in ways I haven't seen before some obscure alleys of Duchamp's life, and in doing so turns upside down some received wisdom that, until I read this book, I just accepted as a given, for that is my nature.

(There must be a connection between the conceit of "received wisdom" and the Duchampian "readymade" lurking under the surface, but I haven't worked it all out yet.My dad it was who pointed out to me that if one used Duchamp's famous "Fountain" piece as a urinal one would come a cropper, and the moral was, one must lay on one's side, one knee lifted toward's one chest, if one hopes to avoid the gleeful, sardonic, sorrowful goose of the master.

Anyhow, Demos explores at great length the aesthetic and socio political strategies that lurk behind the creation of Duchamp's "portable museum," the "dick-in-a-box" precursor subsequently developed by Justin Timberlake, our own great appropriator.Not only the nomadism of the 20th century, but a resistance to Fascist and Nazi ideology, lay behind this work.I have never seen critical attention of much worth paid to Duchamp's participation in the 1938 Surrealism Exposition, but it's fascinating to see it read as Duchamp's saying no to a raft of opposing and delimiting political positions.The readymade, slick, new and shiny, was hereafter to be rendered made "dirty," to use one of Demos' key words; no steel shovel now, but a forest of burlap and cotton sacks still filthy from having had coal in them (the way the bad child might find coal in his stocking in USA Christmas customs of the first half of the 20th century)--real coal, and real coal dust choking the air like our modern sterile office suddenly made all Hogwarts when the temp drops the open tube of toner at the Xerox machine.Demos considers the ways in which Duchamp's suitcase served to accelerate existing trends within the art world towards miniaturization and compression, again, when you're on the run you want to gather no moss, only your diamonds.An admirable openness to phenomena of all types characterizes Demos' bold, yet careful analyses.He sees what I imagine might be the big picture, some of the air in which our hero walked, something of the troubled sleep he longed to escape from.

... Read more

Book Description
texts by Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont

As the century draws to a close, it becomes increasingly clear how profoundly Marcel Duchamp influenced the trajectory of modem art. This remarkable book with its more than 1,300 illustrations covers 70 years of Duchamp's artistic production and traces his elusive personae across that same span. It documents his extraordinary achievements in painting and sculpture as well as his life-long involvement with chess, film, theater, and people - from intimate encounters to artistic liaisons.

Marcel Duchamp is designed as a double-faced publication: from one direction, entitled Works, it contains a catalogue reproducing Duchamp's paintings, sculptures, and miscellaneous objects (150 illustrated in color). From the other direction, entitled Ephémérides, unfolds a day-by-day account of the artist's life, organized by astrological sign. The greater part of this detailed chronology relies upon unpublished materials. It is enriched by 1,200 documents and photographs, including a number of works by Duchamp that have never before been reproduced. Each section is printed on a different color paper.

Sandwiched between these two sections is a concordance listing writings by and about Duchamp, a bibleography (letters sent by Duchamp), exhibition catalogues, a chronology of chess games, and a filmog­raphy.

Pontus Hulten, Director of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice between 1985 and 1989, is the chief curator of the Duchamp exhibition in Venice. Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont are Duchamp scholars who have devoted themselves exclusively to Duchamp studies for the past fifteen years. ... Read more

Book Description
Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968) was, without doubt, one of the most controversial artists of the twentieth century. Associated with cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, his invention of the “readymade” led him to produce some of the most iconic works of his era. While he is often cited as the most influential artist of his generation and is seen by many to be the progenitor of much of the conceptual and postmodern art of today, the writing published to date on Duchamp is often obscure and mired in theory.

Extensively illustrated and featuring Duchamp’s own writings, The Duchamp Book provides a much needed, accessible introduction to the artist. ... Read more

Book Description
Writings on one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, by some of its most celebrated writers and artists: Jasper Johns, Octavio Paz, John Cage, and more.

Best known for his cheeky conceptual works-like his signed urinals ("R. Mutt") and his graffitioed Mona Lisa-Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was also an extraordinary painter and sculptor (Nude Descending a Staircase) who changed the language of twentieth-century art and reigns with Picasso and Matisse as one of its greatest influences. Joseph Masheck has compiled a sampler of the best writing on Duchamp, with pieces that include Duchamp's obituary from Artforum, written by Jasper Johns; Octavio Paz on the ready-mades; a Duchamp post-mortem by Hans Richter; Donald Judd's investigation of Rose Sélavy; a "Counter-Avant-Garde" by Clement Greenberg; a consideration by Guillaume Apollinaire; and John Cage's "26 Statements on Marcel Duchamp." Illustrated with photographs of Duchamp's seminal pieces, and updated with a substantial preface that offers new scholarship as well as a fascinating consideration of why Duchamp's popularity has exponentially increased since this book first appeared, this is an essential volume for the Duchamp devotee. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

ARTIST AS ALCHEMIST
Duchamp was not an artist, but an alchemist. As a teen I had the opportunity to see Arturo Shwarz give a lecture on Duchamp, called "archetypal alchemical iconography & the work of Marcel Duchamp". Though much of what he said was lost on me, the bits I could make out spoke directly to my soul. A favorite artist of mine thus took on a far greater significance in my estimation, & the way I looked at life was never quite the same. This has got to be the definative work on Duchamp, from a man who was both his greatest protagonist,& a close personal friend. Shwarz was a great documenter of the 20th century avant-garde, & i feel very lucky to have known him. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Humor, Wit, and Genius
Bicycle wheel on stool. A urinal. A bottle rack. A comb. A mustached Mona Lisa. And other sordid odds and ends. Though his "Readymades" continue to shock the public as monstrosities to the art world, very few know the story behind the wit and audacity that is Marcel Duchamp. In this exhaustive album of Duchamp's oeuvre, Naumann gives compassion to "Duchamp's things," objects crucified by indifference and imperception, through his stunning layout of text and colored figures; the book itself is truly an aesthetic masterpiece. Albeit an art historian, Naumann does not digress into meditations on esoterica. Rather, he examines Duchamp's letters, interviews, speeches, notes, writings, and other primary source evidence to construct an enlightening and entertaining interpretation for each and every one of Duchamp's masterpieces. Exploring the philosophical questions at play in each work, Naumann explains to us Duhcamp's ideal of art and answers convincingly why the artist provocateur felt the need to abandon the jurisdiction of Taste and Aesthetics. For anyone brave enough to be enlightened about the complexity of a urinal or the phonetic pun behind L.H.O.O.Q (the mustached Mona Lisa), I urge you not to only read this book but to perceive it in its entirety. ... Read more

Book Description
Marcel Duchamp left behind a large volume of correspondence, more than a thousand documents forming a valuable archive of primary source materials on one the 20th Century's most important cutural figures. In his letters, Duchmap writes about his latest plans, works in progress, concepts such as the "ready-made," his passion for chess, the mundane details of life, as well as extraordinary ideas. The letters are reproduced in their entirety along with chronological and biographical data illumintaing the circumstances behind the letters. An essential volume for art historians and students of 20th Century culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A very accessible, comprehensive collection
This collection gathers selected correspondence of artist Marcel Duchamp, selecting carefully from a huge volume of letters to provide correspondence to many of his notable friends. The art historian author spent twenty years assembling, translating and annotating these letters; add historical context and background and you have a very accessible, comprehensive collection.

The Man Who Wrote to Everyone
Impeccibly researched, designed, and presented, these selected letters retain their original type, language, and format, so you feel like Duchamp's personality is laid bare. This book has been invaluable for me in understanding the person behind some of the 20th century's most amazing artistic practices. If you're interested in modern art, buy this book! ... Read more

Book Description
There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, chess champion and dreamer, dandy and recluse.

In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp's art, Joselit notes a consistent opposition between the material world and various forms of measurement, inscription, and quantification. Challenging conventional accounts, he describes the readymade strategy not merely as a rejection of painting, but as a means of producing new models of the modern self. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

For the Academics
Joselit's study of Duchamp is a top-notch academic book and for the non art history buffs, it will certainly be a challenging read. Joselit's vocabulary is immense and sophisticated and without direct references to the reproductions included in the text (ie. Nude Decending a Staircase, figure 1, p. 33) his assertations can be hard to follow. For those already familiar with Duchamp and his art, this book will take your knowledge to the next level. Joselit is an incredible modern scholar.

A work of impeccable scholarship
Thorough, rigorous and provocative.Joselit provides fresh insight into the intellectual basis of Duchamp's work and arrives at some startling conclusions, but never makes any flying leaps of his own-- his results stemfrom careful research and solid analysis.Jammin'! ... Read more