Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French-American artist, chess player, and writer whose conceptual provocations between roughly 1913 and 1923 reshaped twentieth-century art and laid the intellectual groundwork for Dada, Surrealism, conceptual art, Pop, and much of what would later be called postmodernism. He is widely considered one of the most influential artists of the modern era.

Born in Blainville-Crevon, Normandy, in 1887, Duchamp was the younger brother of painter Jacques Villon and sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and he initially trained at the Académie Julian in Paris. His painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a scandal at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, instantly making him a notorious figure in the United States.

From 1913 onward Duchamp pioneered the readymade, a category of artwork made by selecting and reframing an ordinary manufactured object. The most famous, Fountain, a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt and submitted to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, was rejected by the hanging committee and survives only through Alfred Stieglitz's photograph; it is now treated as one of the foundational works of conceptual art. He also spent eight years on the large glass piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, completed in 1923.

Duchamp largely abandoned conventional art-making to play competitive chess, representing France in international team events, while secretly assembling his final installation Étant donnés over twenty years; it was unveiled at the Philadelphia Museum of Art only after his death in 1968.

The name Marcel is the French form of the Latin Marcellus, a diminutive of Marcus; it carries the sense of little warrior and is masculine.