Duchamp's signed urinal asked who gets to call it art
What turns a urinal into art? In 1917 Marcel Duchamp painted "R. Mutt 1917" on one and titled it Fountain. The Rouen-schooled Frenchman (1887–1968), who spent his last 25 years in New York, is now grouped with Picasso and Braque as a shaper of modern art history, and his work is treated as conceptual art's ancestor.
Fourth of seven Duchamp children, with siblings Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Suzanne also artists, he studied briefly at Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, preferred billiards, learned printing during 1905 infantry service, and showed at the Salon d'Automne through brother Jacques's pull. Apollinaire mocked ugly nudes yet foresaw a reconciler of art and public. Cubist-Futurist motion studies climaxed in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 in 1912.
Cubist colleagues wanted the title changed; Duchamp taxi-ed the canvas home and cooled on groups, though he still joined Section d'Or. Barcelona showed the Nude first; the 1913 New York Armory Show made it a scandal for realistic-trained Americans. Munich notes, Roussel's stage machines, and Stirner's ego philosophy bent him toward The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even—the Large Glass—planned for more than a decade with technical drawing replacing painterly flourish.
Rather than keep painting, he took a librarian's post at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in 1913, read Henri Poincaré, and started testing chance. For 3 Standard Stoppages he let three metre-long threads fall one at a time from a height of a metre onto canvas, fixed their wavering curves with varnish, cut matching wooden templates, and packed everything into a croquet box. In 1919 he had a geometry textbook hung outdoors as a wedding present for his sister Suzanne, so that rain, sun and wind would slowly wreck its diagrams.
In a Houston talk titled On the Creative Act he divided art between two poles, the artist acting on intuition and the spectator who eventually becomes posterity, and he defined an art coefficient as the gap between what an artist meant and what slipped out unplanned. Appropriation artists including Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Sturtevant built on that idea. Years before, after touring an aviation show, he had told Constantin Brâncuși that painting was finished, since nobody could beat a propeller.
Source: Marcel Duchamp
