Marcel Duchamp Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

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

Marcel Duchamp
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 realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of 'ready-mades' to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my 'ready-mades' against such contamination.

Marcel Duchamp
People talk of Picasso as the leader of the Cubists but, strictly speaking, he is no longer a Cubist. Today he is a Cubist, tomorrow he will be something else. The only true Cubists are Gleizes and Metzinger.

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
The idea of movement.... just transferred from the Nude (Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 - Duchamp painted this in 1912) into a bicycle wheel (Bicycle wheel, his early ready-made from 1916-17).

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
Painting is over and done with. Who could do anything better than this propeller? Look, could you do that?

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
.. 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
Miro came of age as an artist just at the time World War 1. ended. With the end of the war came the end of all the new pre-war art conceptions. A young painter could not start as a Cubist or a Futurist, and Dada was the only manifestation at the moment. Miro began by painting farm scenes from the countryside of Barcelona, his native land... A few years later he came to Paris [circa 1914] and found himself among the Dadaists who were, at that time, transmuting into Surrealism. In spite of this contact Miró kept aloof from any direct influence and showed a series of canvases in which form submitted to strong colouring expressed a new two-dimensional cosmogony, in no way related to abstraction.

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
Based on the metaphysical implications of the Dadaist dogma.... Arp's Reliefs [carvings] between 1916 and 1922 are among the most convincing illustrations of that anti- rationalistic era... Arp showed the importance of a smile to combat the sophistic theories of the moment. His poems of the same period stripped the word of its rational connotation to attain the most unexpected meaning through alliteration or plain nonsense.

Marcel Duchamp
This long preamble just to tell you not to judge your own work as you are the last person to see it (with true eyes) – What you see neither redeems nor condemns it – All words used to explain or praise it are false translations of what is going on beyond sensations.
You are, as we all are, obsessed by the accumulation of principles or anti-principles which generally cloud your mind with their terminology and, without knowing it, you are a prisoner of what you think is a liberated education –
In your particular case, you are certainly the victim of the 'Ecole de Paris' [French abstract art movement which developed after world War 2.], a joke that's lasted for 60 years.

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
You were asking my opinion on your work of art, my dear Jean [Duchamp's brother-in-law Jean Crotti, who asked Duchamp his comment on an art-work he made]... Artists throughout the ages are like Monte Carlo gamblers and the blind lottery pulls some of them through and ruin others... I do not believe in painting per se – A painting is made not by the artist but by those who look at it and grant it their favors. In other words, no painters knows himself or what he is doing – There is no outward sign explaining why a Fra Angelico and a Leonardo [da Vinci] are equally 'recognized'. It all takes place at the level of our old friend luck.

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
Somebody in Germany [the German artist Joseph Beuys, who frequently visited America to discuss and to do performances] has been talking about my 'silence', saying that it is overrated. What does that mean?

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

Marcel Duchamp
This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage etc. [Duchamp is referring to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein,] is an easy way out and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-made's and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

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

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

Marcel Duchamp