Who Was Marcel Duchamp and Why Was He So Important?
Between 1912 and 1914, Duchamp produced the Cubo-Futuristic The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, and two versions of a schematic, proto-Pop rendering of a machine used by confectioners to crush cocoa beans (The Chocolate Grinder); the latter would later appear as the central element in his magnum opus, The Large Glass. Meanwhile, in 1913, Duchamp mounted the front wheel of a bicycle to a stool vertically so it could spin freely. He told Tompkins that he kept it around his studio as a “a pleasant gadget.” In 1914 it was joined by a bottle-drying rack purchased at a Parisian department store, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville. With these objects,Duchamp crossed a Rubicon of art history, utterly changing the underlying assumptions about artistic practice. Now, anything could be art as long as the artist deemed it so. Duchamp took Braque’s and Picasso’s introduction of collage into painting to its logical conclusion, making concrete the leap from art to life. Still, Duchamp didn’t fully appreciate what he’d done until a 1915 sojourn to New …
