French painter , sculptor and writer , active also in the USA. The art and ideas of Duchamp, perhaps more than those of any other 20th-century artist, have served to exemplify the range of possibilities inherent in a more conceptual approach to the art-making process. Not only is his work of historical importanceโfrom his early experiments with Cubism to his association with Dada and Surrealismโbut his conception of the ready-made decisively altered our understanding of what constitutes an object of art.
Duchamp refused to accept the standards and practices of an established art system, conventions that were considered essential to attain fame and financial success: he refused to repeat himself, to develop a recognizable style or to show his work regularly. It is the more theoretical aspects implicit to both his art and life that have had the most profound impact on artists later in the century, allowing us to identify Duchamp as one of the most influential artists of the modern era.
Duchamp was born into a family of artists. His older brothers Jacques Villon and Pierre-Maurice- Raymond Duchamp-Villon began their careers as illustrators but went on to make notable contributions to Cubism, while his younger sister Suzanne Duchamp became a painter and with her husband, Jean Crotti, co-founded Tabu, an offshoot of Dada.
At the age of 15 Duchamp tried his hand at painting, beginning a series of landscapes executed in an Impressionist style, such as Church at Blainville ; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. On completing his schooling in Rouen he joined his older brothers in Paris, with the idea of pursuing his career as an artist. In these years he made quick sketchbook drawings of his family and casual renderings of people he had seen on the streets of Paris, including a policeman, knife-grinder, gasman, vegetable vendor, peasant and funeral coachman; these provided a repertory of images he recalled in his later work.
This work, which later became his most famous painting, has often been described as a stylistic fusion of Cubism and Futurism, but Duchamp later maintained that at the time it was painted he had not yet seen any Futurist paintings at first hand; the first major Futurist exhibition in Paris opened at Bernheim-Jeune in February Duchamp withdrew his submission, an event that became the turning-point in his artistic career. During spring Duchamp continued to experiment with the imagery of Cubist forms in motion in a brilliant series of drawings and paintings that conflated human forms with mechanistic imagery.
