Dreier and Duchamp, modernism’s dynamic duo

January 19, 2009

"Dreier and Duchamp. Duchamp and Dreier. As dynamic artist duos go, the pairing of Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp does not have the familiar ring of Picasso and Braque, or Johns and Rauschenberg. But it should, and "The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America" at the Phillips Collection here may begin to make it so."

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The flag: Michael Taylor picks Marcel Duchamp

January 19, 2009

"The biting satire of [Duchamp’s] portrait of George Washington reflects the artist’s nihilistic mood during the Second World War, which had brought back painful memories of the jingoistic patriotism that had led to the senseless loss of so many of his friends and even family members, including his oldest brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon, during the First World War."

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Influances and Originality

January 19, 2009 In his article Reinventing the wheel, Jonathan Jones states that Duchamp's "big idea - that any ordinary "readymade" object can be chosen by the artist as a work of art - has sunk so deep into modern culture that he is imagined almost as a biblical prophet, a remote figure of authority."  Jones argues that today the ideas behind Duchamp's readymades are taken for granted and we often forget what a wholly original and unprecedented concept thte readyma.. read more...

Marcel Duchamp’s Legacy to 20th Century Art

January 17, 2009 "The `readymades,'as Duchamp called them, borrowing an English word he picked up in New York, are usually understood as critical pranks that show how arbitrary is the marriage of object and meaning or intent in traditional artworks. "In `The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp,'Jerrold Seigel, professor of history at New York University, has a less confrontational view of Duchamp that sets the artist apart from the refractory high jinks of Dada with which he is common.. read more...

Museum of Hoaxes: Marcel Duchamp

January 17, 2009

"Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) always held the snobbishness of art collectors and gallery owners in disdain. While he was a revolutionary artist with at least one eternal masterpiece (‘Nude Descending a Staircase’), he was also a supreme prankster to those few who ‘got the joke.’"

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Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell

January 14, 2009 "Currently on view in Measure of Time, an evolving exhibition examining temporality and duration in American art of the past century, are works from the BAM collections by two ancestors of the assemblage aesthetic celebrated in Semina Culture: the consummate intellectual gamesman Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, maker of poetically evocative box constructions.".. read more...

Dust Breeding

January 13, 2009

"Duchamp decided to visit America.
He began the Glass in New York in 1915.
He applied lead wires to the transparent glass in the geometric shaps and designs he desired.
The work went achingly slow.
For one part of his Glass–the seives– Duchamp decided to use actual dust."

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Towards a Definition

January 12, 2009 "The complexity of the deceivingly simple-looking Readymades has challenged many over the past century.  Trying to pin down the collection of Readymades into a workable body of pieces, many have attempted to seperate them into seperate catergories according to their relative degrees of 'purity'.  The formation of such a scale on which to rate the readymades requires a basis for comparison, a point from which to gage degrees of variation: namely a comprehensive .. read more...

Anemic Cinema

January 11, 2009 "Duchamp used the initial payment on his inheritance to make Anemic Cinema and to go into the art business (Calvin Tomkins). The film was shot in Man Ray's studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret. Various versions were made in 1920, 1923 and eventually in 1926. This is the only film directed by French artist Marcel Duchamp, whose name is associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements. As with similar avantgarde works made by Man Ray, Hans Richter.. read more...