Marcel Duchamp Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art –and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.

Marcel Duchamp
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes.

Marcel Duchamp
A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these 'ready-mades' was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste.... in fact a complete anesthesia. One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the 'readymade'. That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.

Marcel Duchamp
My brother [the sculptor artist Raymond Duchamp-Villon had a kitchen in his little house in Puteaux, and he had the idea of decorating it with pictures by his buddies. He asked Gleizes, Metzinger, La Fresnaye, and I think Leger [all Cubist painters, then] to do some little paintings of the same size, like a sort of frieze. He asked me too, and I painted a coffee grinder which I made to explode.

Marcel Duchamp
In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called 'Pharmacy' after assign two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store an snow shovel on which I wrote 'In advance of the broken arm'. It was around that time that the word 'Readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation.

Marcel Duchamp
What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Marcel Duchamp
While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

Marcel Duchamp
Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.

Marcel Duchamp
Another aspect of the 'readymade' is its lack of uniqueness.... the replica of a 'readymade' delivering the same message; in fact nearly every one of the 'ready-made's existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.
Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-made's aided' and also works of assemblage.

Marcel Duchamp
The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.

Marcel Duchamp
The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem

Marcel Duchamp
.. the thing was to choose one [a ready-made object] that you were not attracted by.... and that was difficult because anything becomes beautiful if you look at it long enough...[My intention was to] completely eliminate the existence of taste, bad or good or indifferent.

Marcel Duchamp
The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place... All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Marcel Duchamp
I wanted to get away from the physical act of painting... For me the title ['Fresh Widow'], was very important... I was interested in ideas – not merely visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.

Marcel Duchamp
Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap which represents the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient', contained in the work.

Marcel Duchamp
Millions of artist create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.
In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally posterity include him in the primers of Art history.
I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act.

Marcel Duchamp
To be looked at [from the other side of his art-work 'The Glass'] with one eye, close to, for almost an hour.

Marcel Duchamp
If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases [it] creates a new image of the unit of length.

Marcel Duchamp
.. Yes, indeed, what have we been up to? I feel rather like I've retired to the country, in some remote province, for that's what my life is like in N. Y. I see few people and people don't try to see me anymore as they know they bore me. I write to the Arensberg's once a year and they do the same. There is a general weariness which, I think, is not confined to our generation. To tell the truth, most people prefer war to peace... Well, there you are, my dear Yvonne. Nothing as usual. Chess as much as possible: at least chess players don't talk -

Marcel Duchamp
If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All this decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

Marcel Duchamp
Another important point which you so very accurately sensed concerns the idea that the glass in actual fact is not meant to be looked at (with 'aesthetic' eyes). It should be accompanied by a 'literary' text, as amorphous as possible, which never took shape. And the two elements, glass for the eyes, text for the ears and understanding, should complement each other and above all prevent one or the other from taking on an aesthetic-plastic or literary form. All in all, I am hugely indebted to you for having stripped bare my Bride stripped bare.

Marcel Duchamp
The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.

Marcel Duchamp
The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realising it at the time.

Marcel Duchamp
I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work.

Marcel Duchamp
I wanted to kill art for myself.... a new thought for that object.

Marcel Duchamp