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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

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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

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One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was a master of self-invention who carefully regulated the image he projected through self-portraiture and through his collaboration with those who portrayed him. During his long career, Duchamp recast accepted modes for assembling and describing identity, indelibly altering the terrain of portraiture. This groundbreaking book (which accompanies a major exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery) demonstrates the ways in which Duchamp willfully manipulated the techniques of portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the art world.

Although scholars have explored Duchamp's use of aliases, little attention has been paid to how this work played into, and against, existing portrait conventions. Nor has any study yet compared these explicitly self-constructed projects with the large body of portraits of Duchamp by others. Inventing Marcel Duchamp showcases approximately one hundred never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp. The (broadly defined) self-portraits and self-representations include the famous autobiographical suitcase Boîte-en-Valise and Self-Portrait in Profile, a torn silhouette that became very influential for future generations of artists. The portraits by other artists include works by Duchamp's contemporaries Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, Beatrice Wood, and Florine Stettheimer as well as portraits by more recent generations of artists, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Sturtevant, Yasumasa Morimura, David Hammons, and Douglas Gordon.

Since the mid-twentieth century, as abstraction assumed a position of dominance in fine art, portraiture has been often derided as an art form; the images and essays in Inventing Marcel Duchamp counter this, and invite us to rethink the role of portraiture in modern and contemporary art.

Distributed for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Exhibition:
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
March 27, 2009–August 2, 2009 ... Read more

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Inventing Marcel DuChamp
The seller was very responsive to my emails and my book got to me by the date that I needed it.Thank you!! ... Read more

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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

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detailed analysis of an erotic masterpiece
It is rare to encounter a book (or an exhibition) centred on a single piece of art. Etant donnes, Marcel Duchamp's late eroic masterpiece, is housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The work is seen through two peepholes in a wooden door. It consists of a faceless naked woman lying in a field, legs spread wide apart and holding a gas lantern. In the background is a painted and photographed landscape.

The first two thirds of the book consists of liberally illustrated essays meticulously describing the genesis, construction, installation andlegacy of Duchamp's construction. There are also additional technical articles concerning the work. The latter part of the catalogue consists of illustrations, artworks, photographs and documents related to Etant donnes. I would warn potential purchasers of a prurient nature that a significant number of the illustrations are of an erotic nature, albeit tastefully presented. Perhaps the book should be given a M rating!

With my previous sentences in mind, I am reluctant to observe that I derived great pleasure from reading this excellent catalogue! Of course the pleasure was purely aesthetic. It is worth noting that Duchamp's work created quite a stir at its unveiling in 1969. Nowadays, 40 years down the track, most people would hardly bat an eyelid. This excellently printed book is warmly recommended.

Erotic Lanscape
If you buy one modern art book this year, this should be the one. It is the catalogue for the current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where most of Duchamp's works are kept.

It thoroughly documents the inception, over a period of twenty years (until Duchamp's death in 1968) of his most important work, "Etant donnés: 1/ La chute d'eau, 2/ Le gaz d'éclairage", a work that sums up all of the artist's theories and - above all -mysteries (at the time of the creation of "Etant donnés...", Duchamp was thought to have completely retired from being an active artist). Though it is sealed behind two closed antique wooden doors through which two tiny holes have been pierced for one sole viewer at a time to be able to peep through them, this work is a door-opener: it opens to a myriad of interpretations and ways of making art that are still relevant today (as the catalogue rightly points out, a whole chapter being devoted to its influence on contemporary artists such as Robert Gober or Marcel Dzama).

The book is a trove of previously unpublished documents on the creation of the work, but also on its installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an installation supervised by the late Anne d'Harnoncourt (director of the museum for more than 20 years and who passed away recently). It is enriched by numerous color illustrations and is destined to become a collector's piece in its own right. ... Read more

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A New York Times Notable Book of 1996
Booklist Editor's Choice, 1996

The celebrated, full-scale life of the century's most influential artist. One of the giants of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp changed the course of modern art. Visual arts, music, dance, performance--nothing was ever the same again because he had shifted art's focus from the retinal to the mental. Duchamp sidestepped the banal and sentimental to find the relationship between symbol and object and to unearth the concepts underlying art itself. The author's intimacy with the subject and glorious prose style, wit, and deep sense of irony--"the only antidote to despair"--make him the perfect writer to bring this stunning life story to intelligent readers everywhere.
Amazon.com Review
MarcelDuchamp, born into an artistic middle-class French family in 1887,first gained recognition as an artist in 1913 when he submitted hispainting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 to the ArmoryShow in New York. The newspapers latched onto it after discoveringthat there was no trace of a nude, or even a real figure, in thepainting, which came to symbolize the movement of modern arttoward absurdity, humor, and avant-garde disregard forexpectations. As an artist, Duchamp never matched the success andrecognition of his most well-known work; later in his career, his works of"art" consisted of signed ceramic urinals.Calvin Tomkins, a writer forThe New Yorker who befriended Duchamp in New York in the 1960s,has written the first full-length biography of the enigmatic Dadaist. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

MARCEL DUCHAMP
Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp; A Biography, 1996.
A John Macrae Book, Henry Holt & Company
ISBN:91012444195
465 pages
$32.95


Ever question the validity of that "urinal" that was passed off as art in all your Art History books?Well, this book provides the answer not only to the story behind it, but why it still is considered the harbinger of modern art. Marcel Duchamp, perhaps one of the most enigmatic and important 20th century masters of art, furnishes Tomkins with a beguiling yet lovable, complex yet simple topic in this 465-page study. This chronological study of Duchamp's very prodigious life encompasses the most important years for modern art and the two most important geographical hotspots, Paris and New York.

This biography is clearly a tour de force on 20th century art; its genesis and its evolution. Refreshingly not a dry stylistic analysis, the book is a thoughtful narrative into the why of modern art.This reviewer highly recommends this biography not only for its extensively researched content, but also for its narrative-style writing.

BRILLIANT!
I wholeheartedly recommend this wonderful book to everyone who knows how to read English. Marcel Duchamp was perhaps the premier iconclast of the twentieth century, and the runners up might be Buckminster Fuller & LeCorbusier.The book is NOT a boring monograph; it is a lot of fun to read. Tompkins is a Duchamp enthusiast but manages to wade through the mythologyand bull to present the reader with the rosetta stone of Duchamp's life andart.Whether you took a twentieth century art survey in college and onlyknow Duchamp as the guy who wrote R. Mutt on an upside-down urinal or youhave read any number of books about the artist you should read this book!Tompkins sucks the reader right into the mind of Duchamp on the first pagewith a discussion and analysis of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors,Even, one the the greatest and most misunderstood and unappreciated worksof the last century.I was an Art History major in college and hencesuffered through so many authoritative, pretentious, dry, bland,misinformed, prejudiced and yawn-inducing books that it was such a pleasureto stumble onto Tompkin's Duchamp, which is a reader's book, totally aptsince Duchamp was a man's man, a genius, not a theorizing weasal.Thisbook is important because it inspires everyone to question everything youtake for granted, and enjoy puns and jokes and the lighter side of life,and that art is there for everyone, not for patrons and the elite, for youand me, and that the contrary notion is absurd.

A wonderful, though-provoking biography
DUCHAMP: A BIOGRAPHY is a wonderful biography of the artist whom, Tompkins argues persuasively, is the most influential of our almost-completed century.That the art work must be a mental act (a 'cosa mentale,'Leonardo da Vinci had argued many years before); that to be truly creativewe need to work AGAINST our esthetic expectations; that art should aspireto be 'non-retinal': these are only some of Duchamp's major perceptionsincluded in this book.What is particularly enjoyable is the way inwhich Tompkins meshes DuChamps' remarkable life -- one of the most sexuallyattractive of men, a chess player at the highest levels, an extraordinarilycharming and easy person (yet a man who, not matter how much he tried toavoid the repetitive patterns involved in 'art,' was always the consummateartist)with the works of art and 'readymades' which emerged in and fromthat life. Duchamp's life makes for wonderful reading. What I mostrecommend about the book is that it stimulates one's own thinking,challenging so much of our conventional beliefs -- in art, in convention,in the concepts of both accomplishment and genius.

A fascinating, well-written, accessable biography.
As an artist interested in Marcel Duchamp and his works, I foud this book to be very informative. It's a book that will fascinate even those who have little interest in modern art.

You Don't Have to Like Modern Art!
You don't have to like modern art to enjoy this remarkable biography about the most influention and controversial artists of the twentieth century.Tompkins explores the various interpretations of the art of Marcel Duchamp, most amusing of which is that of the artist himself (he was very laissez-fair when it came to expounding upon his own art).If the reader is not a fan of modern art (least of all the Dada movement) he or she will still find pleasure in reading about the life and times of this man of extreme wit and humor.The book reads like a who's-who of the pre and post world war II art world.Dealers, artists, and collectors who filled Duchamps world are just as amusing as characters in a comical work of fiction.The day to day life of people like Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst, Francis Picabia and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Katherine Dryer, and Andre Breton, and the ever popular and exclusive members of the surrealist group is explored in comical detail.This book can also be looked at as a crash course in twentieth art history.Duchamp is explored in the most scholarly manner, but Tompkins keeps his study on a level that makes it easy to read. ... Read more

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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. ... 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

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

Product 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.

Prior praise for Alice Goldfarb Marquis:
An excellent job. Marquis has caught the man and the epoch. . . A splendid accomplishment in research and writing. --Thomas Hoving on Alfred H. Barr: Missionary for the Modern
Superb, vivid, dynamic biography. . .Captures a world of museum and art-world politics rarely glimpsed by the public. --Publishers Weekly onAlfred H. Barr: Missionary for the Modern
A lively, detailed history of public arts funding that doesn't shy away from either the hard facts or most of the hard questions. --The New York Times on On Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding

By Alice Goldfarb Marquis.

Clothbound, 6 x 9 in., 400 pages, 24 color and 65 b&w ... Read more

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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

Product 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 (2)

A hidden tresure about Marcel
Wonderful book with new insights and information not found in other books. If you are interested in Duchamp and think you have run out of reading material then take a look you will not be disappointed

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

Product 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

Customer Reviews (2)

Good Duchamp Book!
I was happy to find this book in a used book store.Duchamp books are relatively hard to find, and some of the best ones are very expensive.I scanned the table of contents and the back cover so you can see what is here.It is a good sized 8.4 x 11 inch paperback filled with illustrations and important essays.I think of it as a very good addition to my art library and to my Duchamp collection in particular.Worth the low prices offered on Amazon!

A Classic
"Marcel Duchamp has changed the history of modern art. His impact on the 20th century is rivaled only by that of Picasso and Matisse...." "Nude Descending a Staircase," "The Bride Stipped Bare by Her Bachelors," and the Readymades are landmarks in the art of our century, but reference to them only begins to suggest the scope of DuChamp's oeuvre...."

This book contains
- a documented photographic survey of Duchamp's works (over 90 pp)
- 10 original essays by scholars and critics
- passages from DuChamp's prose
- comments from contemporaries
- documentary illustrations
- a DuChamp chronology (over 20 pp)
- bibliography (10 pp)

My favorites among the essays are Tancock's "The Influence of Marcel Duchamp" and Lucy Lippard's collation "The Romantic Adventures of an Adversative Rotarian or Allreadymadsomuchoff."

Hardback in cloth-covered boards with a sewn binding; large format; with dustjacket; 334 pp and over 300 illustrations, mostly black and white.
... Read more

Product Description
By his own testimony, Marcel Duchamp considered painting a "means of expression, not an end in itself. One means of expression among others, and not a complete end for life at all." His legendary "Large Glass," for example, can be seen as simply the culmination or sum of numerous experiments conducted over an eight-year period. For this reason, every aspect of his oeuvre--painting, installation, writing, interviews--is of potentially equivalent interest, and any Duchamp primer needs to present his more ephemeral contributions, in aphorisms, diagrams and conversation, alongside his visual experiments. Works, Writings, Interviews does this job splendidly, exploring the artist's many-faceted activities, analyzing his work as an entirety and gathering his key interviews and writings. ... 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

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The Duchamp scholars represented here are among the leading European and American critics of their generation. Their 11 essays offer lively nd diverse perspectives on the artist, focusing on the major issues surrounding his contribution: the philosophical implications of Duchamp's skepticism, eroticism, and paradoxical acceptance of contradiction; the events leading to the creation of the infamous Fountain; a rigorous reading of the Large Glass by Jean Suquet that appears here in English for the first time, as does André Gervais's exhilarating voyage through Duchamp's puns, aphorisms,and word plays; a reinterpretation of Duchamp's late works as ready mades; the influence of scientific models on his art, and of the gender-based teaching of drawing in the Third Republic on his - or Rrose Sélavy's - peculiar use of mechanical drawing.

Thierry de Duve is Director of Studies, Association de préfiguration de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Copublished with the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design ... Read more

Product Description
Recounts the Duchamp's artistic achievements in painting and sculpture, as well as his involvements with chess, film, theater, and people, and provides more than 1,300 reproductions of his works. ... Read more

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This extraordinary volume chronicles the friendship, working relationship, and synchronicity between two of the 20th-century's most innovative and influential artists--Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Joseph Cornell (1903-1972). 110 color photos. 200 duotones.Amazon.com Review
Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp... In Resonance is abeautiful catalog of works by both of the artists, accompanied byeight essays that explore their work and their relationship. Theseessays include marvelous anecdotes and information about both thepersonal and artistic lives of the artists and how deeply theyinfluenced one another. Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was a somewhatreclusive American artist from Queens, New York, who was known for hissmall theatrical box constructions. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) wasborn in France and was an integral part of the avant-garde artworld--he is often called the father of contemporary art. The focus ofthe book revolves around the "Duchamp Dossier," a varied collection ofobjects from Duchamp that Cornell collected. "There's no way ofknowing whether the dossier was made in collaboration with Duchamp orwhether Duchamp knew of it at all, although it seems likely that hemay have suspected it existed. It contained various things thatDuchamp had clearly given to Cornell." The complete contents of thedossier are reproduced in this volume at 60 percent of their actualsize.

What is so fascinating about the dossier is that it is something of aphysical map of the interactions between Cornell and Duchamp. Alongwith the photo reproductions there is a complete and extremelydetailed inventory of the dossier, including such information as thetext of letters and type of postage. Also in the book is acomprehensive chronology of the lives of both artists. The book, ahefty 344 pages, includes 126 color plates and 320 halftoneimages. --Jennifer Cohen ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Enthralling.
Duchamp is undeniably intriguing. His art has covered numerous styles, forms, concepts, etc.. His hermetic, curious existence is fascinating as well, and thanks to some of the essays in this wonderful book, newperspective is shown.Joseph Cornell's art never made the same impact asDuchamp, but it really can't be argued that he is extremely talented.It'shard to give a decent review of this. I've found it to be one of the mostfascinating books about art ever, which is an incredibly hard task.

Cornell/Duchamp "Collaboration"
This book is the catalogue for an exhibition on the intersection of the works of Duchamp and Cornell, specifically the "Duchamp Dossier," a peculiar collection of art and trash that Cornell kept on a shelf in his house. Since it was not discovered until after his death, one can only guess whether he considered it an art piece, though he was known for compiling such "explorations," as he called them, throughout his life. The book contains a large number of beautiful color plates of both artists' work, though many of Duchamp's major pieces are not reproduced (the Cornell plates are more comprehensive). The accompanying texts are not dense critiques but, for the most part, anecdotal narratives with the occasional interpretive aside. For such a large book, it was a fast read and very entertaining. The two artists in question are visual poets rather than painters per se, and there are many creative similarities between them despite their wholly different lifestyles and personalities. Worth buying if you are a Duchamp fanatic like myself, especially for the images.

Best Compilation Yet
I haven't actually bought this book yet, in hopes of receiving it for Christmas, but I spent an indordinant amount of time looking at it in a bookstore - and even went back to admire it again.I love Joseph Cornell'swork, and have perused all available volumes with pictures of his artwork,and this is the most complete and beautiful.His shadow boxes aredisplayed one per page - page after page, which is such a treat!I'm alsoa Marcel DuChamp fan and think it's genius to combine their work in onebook.The likenesses and juxtapositions are facinating, and make thiscompilation a must have. ... Read more

Product Description
"Thierry de Duve has sought, in this remarkable text, to 'understand whyMarcel Duchamp was such a great artist.' A task that calls uponresources beyond those of art history, art criticism, and aestheticanalysis, of all which the author is master. . . . The tone is wry,urbane, informed, and urgent; and it is a tribute to his appreciation ofthe depth of his subject that he takes us further in our understandingthan we have ever seen before, but leaves us with the sense that moreremains to be said than anyone before had imagined." -- Arthur C. Danto,Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University; andart critic, The Nation

Kant after Duchamp brings together eight essays around a central thesiswith many implications for the history of the avant-gardes. AlthoughDuchamps readymades broke with all previously known styles, Thierry deDuve observes that he made the logic of modernist art practice thesubject matter of his work, a shift in aesthetic judgment that replacedthe classical "this is beautiful" with "this is art." De Duve employsthis shift in a re-reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment thatreveals the hidden links between the radical experiments of Duchamp andthe Dadaists and mainstream pictorial modernism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

For the French Post-Structuralist Lover
If you have a background in French critical theory, arising from the 1970's, this book will be a totally fascinating one.If not...you may be baffled, find the book not what you expected, and get angry that you've spent this much money on a work you can't understand.Be forewarned.That having been said, Thierry de Duve is one of the most outstanding contemporary art theoriticians writing today.His slant on Duchamp and Duchamp's impact on subsequent modern/contemporary art is without parallel.

Kant was a Lutheran
What's missing in this marvelous book is a discussion of Kant's Lutheran religious aspect.Most philosophers treat him as a secular philosopher, but he wasn't.The assault on Christianity by the entire left has seemingly eclipsed the fact that all of the great 19th century thinkers were Lutherans: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, of course, but also Nietzsche (who was raised as a Lutheran and whose seventeen prior generations of father, grandfather, etc., had been Lutheran pastors), Marx raised in a Lutheran household, and so on.

What Duchamp does is knock out the otherworldly purposiveness that Kant claimed for art.Thierry de Duve aborts the seriousness of his discussion by neglecting the theological dimension of Kant's inquiry.

However, this is still a great book albeit a limited one, as he could have gone further to the heart of the culture wars by contrasting the Sadean nature of the surrealist enterprise with the Christian nature of the Kantian.

Subliminal
A difficult question posed and a difficult answer given. In struggling with two of the most influential personnas in our culture, De Duve does himself, and aesthetics good. Long and convoluted (to the extreme ofworking out a symbolic logic of Duchamp?) this is nonetheless a great book ... Read more