Marcel Duchamp Short Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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The only man in the past whom I really respect was Georges Seurat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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 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
The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Marcel Duchamp
In French there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and all that retinal painting.

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 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 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
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