"Embodying the intellect of his literary contemporaries Marcel Proust and James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) has been aptly described by the painter Willem de Kooning as a one-man movement. Jasper Johns has written of his work as the ‘field where language, thought and vision act on one another.’ Duchamp has had a huge impact on twentieth-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as ‘retinal’ art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted, he said, ‘to put art back in the service of the mind.’"