Marcel Duchamp's studio at 33 West 67th Street, New York City, 1917–18. Shown to the left is the 2nd version of Bicycle Wheel, 1916-17. The original 1913 version and this 2nd version are lost. The coatrack, titled Trap (Trébuchet), 1917, is on the floor, lower left.
The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art".[1] By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the found object became art.
Duchamp was not interested in what he called "retinal art"—art that was only visual—and sought other methods of expression. As an antidote to retinal art he began creating readymades in 1914, when the term was commonly used in the United States to describe manufactured items to distinguish them from handmade goods.
He selected the pieces on the basis of "visual indifference",[2] and the selections reflect his sense of irony, humor and ambiguity: he said "it was always the idea that came first, not the visual example... a form of denying the possibility of defining art."
The first definition of "readymade" appeared in André Breton and Paul Éluard's Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme: "an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist". While published under the name of Marcel Duchamp (or his initials, "MD", to be precise), André Gervais nevertheless asserts that Breton wrote this particular dictionary entry.[3]
Duchamp only made a total of 13 readymades over a period of time of 30 years.[4] He felt that he could only avoid the trap of his own taste by limiting output, though he was aware of the contradiction of avoiding taste, yet also selecting an object. Taste, he felt, whether "good" or "bad", was the "enemy of art".[5]
His conception of the readymade changed and developed over time. "My intention was to get away from myself", he said, "though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me'".[6]
Duchamp was unable to define or explain his opinion of readymades: "The curious thing about the readymade is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me."[7] Much later in life Duchamp said, "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."[1]
Robert Fulford described Duchamp's ready-mades as expressing "an angry nihilism".[8]
The objects themselves
By submitting some of them as art to art juries, the public, and his patrons, Duchamp challenged conventional notions of what is, and what is not, art. Some were rejected by art juries and others went unnoticed at art shows.
Most of his early readymades have been lost or discarded, but years later he commissioned reproductions of many of them.
Types of readymades
Readymades - un-altered objects
Assisted readymades - putting several readymades together taking away their use
Rectified readymades - an altered or marked readymade
Corrected readymades
Reciprocal readymades - a unique art work presented as a mass-produced utilitarian object[9]
(Note: Some art historians consider only the un-altered manufactured objects to be readymades. This list includes the pieces he altered or constructed.)
Bottle Rack (also called Bottle Dryer or Hedgehog) (Egouttoir or Porte-bouteilles or Hérisson), 1914. A galvanized iron bottle drying rack that Duchamp bought in 1914 as an "already made" sculpture, but it gathered dust in the corner of his Paris studio because the idea of "readymade" had not yet been born. Two years later, through correspondence from New York with his sister, Suzanne Duchamp, in France he intended to make it a readymade by asking her to paint on it "(from) Marcel Duchamp". However, Suzanne, who was looking after his Paris studio, had already disposed of it.
In Advance of the Broken Arm(En prévision du bras cassé), 1915. Snow shovel on which Duchamp carefully painted its title. The first piece the artist called a "readymade". New to America, Duchamp had never seen a snow shovel not manufactured in France. With fellow Frenchman Jean Crotti he purchased it from a stack of them, took it to their shared studio, painted the title and "from Marcel Duchamp 1915" on it, and hung it from a wire in the studio. It was eventually lost. Many years later, a replica of the piece is said to have been mistaken for an ordinary snow shovel and used to move snow off the sidewalks of Chicago.
Pulled at 4 pins, 1915. An unpainted chimney ventilator that turns in the wind. The title is a literal translation of the French phrase, "tiré à quatre épingles", roughly equivalent to the English phrase "dressed to the nines". Duchamp liked that the literal translation meant nothing in English and had no relation to the object.
Comb(Peigne), 1916. Steel dog grooming comb inscribed along the edge in white, "3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n'ont rien a faire avec la sauvagerie; M.D. Feb. 17 1916 11 a.m." ("Three or Four Drops of Height [or Haughtiness] Have Nothing to Do with Savagery.")
Traveller's Folding Item(...pliant,... de voyage), 1916. Underwood Typewriter cover.
Fountain, 1917. Porcelain urinal inscribed "R. Mutt 1917". The board of the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit, of which Duchamp was a director, after much debate about whether Fountain was or was not art, hid the piece from view during the show.[10] Duchamp quickly quit the society, and the publication of Blind Man, which followed the exhibition was devoted to the controversy. While still hiding his own participation in the piece, Duchamp indicated in a 1917 letter to his sister that a female friend was centrally involved in submitting this work. As he writes: "One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture."[11] The friend, whose address on West 88th Street appears on the object's submission ticket, was Louise Norton (later Varèse), though others have erroneously claimed the friend was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.[12]
Trap(Trébuchet), 1917. Wood and metal coatrack. Duchamp submitted it to a show at the Bourgeois Art Gallery and asked that it be placed near the entryway. It went unnoticed as art during the show.
Hat Rack(Porte-chapeaux), c. 1917. A wooden hatrack that Duchamp suspended from the ceiling of his studio.[13]
50 cc of Paris Air (50 cc air de Paris, Paris Air or Air de Paris), 1919. A glass ampoule containing air from Paris. Duchamp took the ampoule to New York City in 1920 and gave it to Walter Arensberg as a gift. The original was broken and replaced in 1949 by Duchamp. (Contrary to its title, the volume of air inside the ampoule was not actually 50 cubic centimeters, although when replicas were made in later decades, 50cm3 of air was used. The original ampoule is thought to have contained around 125cm3 of air.)
Fresh Widow, 1920.
The Brawl at Austerlitz, 1921.
Assisted readymades
Bicycle Wheel(Roue de bicyclette), 1913. Bicycle wheel mounted by its fork on a painted wooden stool. He fashioned it to amuse himself by spinning it, "...like watching a fire... It was a pleasant gadget, pleasant for the movement it gave." It is considered the first readymade, even though he did not have the idea for readymades until two years later. The original from 1913 was lost, and Duchamp recreated the sculpture in 1951. Bicycle Wheel is also said to be the first kinetic sculpture.[14]
With Hidden Noise(A bruit secret), 1916. A ball of twine between two brass plates, joined by four screws. An unknown object has been placed in the ball of twine by one of Duchamp's friends.
Unhappy readymade, 1919. Duchamp instructed his sister Suzanne to hang a geometry textbook from the balcony of her Paris apartment so that the problems and theorems, exposed to the test of the wind, sun and rain, could "get the facts of life." Suzanne carried out the instructions and painted a picture of the result.
Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, 1921. A perfume bottle in the original box. An intriguing punning object, it was auctioned in 2009 for $11.5 million.[15]
Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?, 1921. Marble cubes in the shape of sugar lumps with a thermometer and cuttle bones in a small bird cage.
Pharmacy(Pharmacie), 1914. Gouache on chromolithograph of a scene with bare trees and a winding stream to which he added two dots of watercolor, red and green, like the colored liquids in a pharmacy.
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. Pencil on a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa on which he drew a goatee and moustache. The name, when pronounced in French, is a coarse pun — "elle a chaud au cul", translating colloquially as "she's got a hot ass" or "her ass is on fire".[17]
Wanted, $2,000 Reward, 1923. Photographic collage on poster.
1964 Galleria Schwarz edition
In 1964, Duchamp authorized a limited edition release of replicas of fourteen of his readymades to be issued by his art dealer, Arturo Schwarz, through the Galleria Schwarz in Milan. The edition included eight sets for sale, two sets of artist's proofs (one for Duchamp and one for Schwarz), and two hors de commerce sets to be given to museums.[18] Schwarz replicated the works with oversight from Duchamp, taking "almost fanatical care" in reproducing them accurately, according to Duchamp.[19][20]
Critical reaction to Duchamp's decision to reproduce the readymades was generally negative. Artist Daniel Buren, for example, said that Duchamp had "sold out to commercialism".[21] As decades passed, however, the Galleria Schwarz replicas "gradually became mainstreamed and eventually became stand-ins for the lost originals, sharing their status and value", according to scholar Adina Kamien-Kazhdan.[22] Today, Schwarz's replicas are found in museums around the world.
Initial demand for the replicas was slow. One set was sold in 1969 to New York art dealer Arne Ekstrom, who then sold it to Indiana University Art Museum in 1971 for $35,000.[23] Another set was sold in 1971 to the National Gallery of Canada.[23] By 1974, much of the edition was still unsold, though Schwarz had raised the prices considerably; a complete set was listed for $450,000, and individual works started at $15,000.[24] Schwarz sold his remaining inventory at auction in 1985, except for one remaining complete set, which he sold to the National Museum of Modern Art in Japan in 1987.[25]
Research published in 1997 by Rhonda Roland Shearer questions whether Duchamp's "found objects" may actually have been created by Duchamp.[30] Her research of items like snow shovels and bottle racks in use at the time failed to turn up any identical matches to photographs of the originals. However, there are accounts of Walter Arensberg and Joseph Stella being with Duchamp when he purchased the original Fountain at J. L. Mott Iron Works. Such investigations are hampered by the fact that few of the original "readymades" survive, having been lost or destroyed. Those that still exist are predominantly reproductions authorized or designed by Duchamp in the final two decades of his life. Shearer also asserts that the artwork L.H.O.O.Q. which is recorded to be a poster-copy of the Mona Lisa with a moustache drawn on it, is not the true Mona Lisa, but Duchamp's own slightly-different version that he modelled partly after himself. The inference of Shearer's viewpoint is that Duchamp was creating an even larger joke than he admitted.[31]
↑ Cabanne: Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Thames and Hudson (1971), page 48. Cabanne: What determined your choice of readymades? Duchamp: That depended on the object. In general, I had to beware, at the end of fifteen days, you begin to like it or hate it. You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.
↑ Duchamp, Marcel trans. and qtd. in Gammel, Baroness Elsa, 224. According to Dawn Ades and Alastair Brotchie ("Marcel Duchamp Was Not a Thief"), this is a mistranslation. Duchamp's original letter reads: "Raconte ce détail 11 à la famille: Les Indépendants sont ouverts ici avec gros succès. Une de mes amies sous un pseudonyme masculin, Richard Mutt, avait envoyé une pissotière en porcelaine comme sculpture; ce n'était pas du tout indécent aucune raison pour la refuser. Le comité a décidé de refuser d'exposer cette chose. J’ai donné ma démission et c'est un potin qui aura sa valeur dans New York." Marcel Duchamp to Suzanne Duchamp, 11 April 1917 (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.); qtd. in Camfield, William A. "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917." Dada/Surrealism 16 (1987): 64-94.
Bailey, Bradley: "Before, During, and Beyond the Brillo Box: The Impact of Pop on the 1964 Edition of Duchamp's Readymades", Visual Resources, 34:3-4, pp. 347-363.
Cabanne, Pierre: Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Da Capo Press, Inc., 1979 (1969 in French), ISBN0-306-80303-8
Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 224.
Hulten, Pontus (editor): Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, The MIT Press, 1993. ISBN0-262-08225-X
Kamien-Kazhdan, Adina: Remaking the Readymade: Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica, Routledge, 2018. ISBN978-1-4724-7816-0
Tomkins, Calvin: Duchamp: A Biography. Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996. ISBN0-8050-5789-7
Judovitz, Dalia: Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. University of California Press, 1998. ISBN9780520213760
Jean-Marc Rouvière: Au prisme du readymade, incises sur l'identité équivoque de l'objet préface de Philippe Sers et G. Litichevesky, Paris L'Harmattan 2023. ISBN978-2-14-031710-1
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.
Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
A found object, or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Pablo Picasso first publicly utilized the idea when he pasted a printed image of chair caning onto his painting titled Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Marcel Duchamp is thought to have perfected the concept several years later when he made a series of ready-mades, consisting of completely unaltered everyday objects selected by Duchamp and designated as art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a standard urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed on a pedestal, resting on its back. In its strictest sense the term "ready-made" is applied exclusively to works produced by Marcel Duchamp, who borrowed the term from the clothing industry while living in New York, and especially to works dating from 1913 to 1921.
Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti was a French Dadaist painter, collagist, sculptor, and draughtsman. Her work was significant to the development of Paris Dada and modernism and her drawings and collages explore fascinating gender dynamics. Due to the fact that she was a woman in the male prominent Dada movement, she was rarely considered an artist in her own right. She constantly lived in the shadows of her famous older brothers, who were also artists, or she was referred to as "the wife of." Her work in painting turns out to be significantly influential to the landscape of Dada in Paris and to the interests of women in Dada. She took a large role as an avant-garde artist, working through a career that spanned five decades, during a turbulent time of great societal change. She used her work to express certain subject matter such as personal concerns about modern society, her role as a modern woman artist, and the effects of the First World War. Her work often weaves painting, collage, and language together in complex ways.
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to American artist Sol LeWitt's definition of conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Society of Independent Artists was an association of American artists founded in 1916 and based in New York.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, most often called The Large Glass, is an artwork by Marcel Duchamp over 9 feet (2.7 m) tall and almost 6 feet (1.76m) wide. Duchamp worked on the piece from 1915 to 1923 in New York City, creating two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. Duchamp's ideas for the Glass began in 1912, and he made numerous notes and studies, as well as preliminary works for the piece. The notes reflect the creation of unique rules of physics, and myth which describes the work.
Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, the inaugural exhibition by the Society to be staged at the Grand Central Palace in New York. When explaining the purpose of his readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice." In Duchamp's presentation, the urinal's orientation was altered from its usual positioning. Fountain was not rejected by the committee, since Society rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee, but the work was never placed in the show area. Following that removal, Fountain was photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in the Dada journal The Blind Man. The original has been lost.
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is a 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp. The work is widely regarded as a Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time. Before its first presentation at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants in Paris it was rejected by the Cubists as being too Futurist. It was then exhibited with the Cubists at Galeries Dalmau's Exposició d'Art Cubista, in Barcelona, 20 April–10 May 1912. The painting was subsequently shown, and ridiculed, at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.
Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? is a 1921 "readymade" sculpture by Marcel Duchamp. Specifically, Duchamp considered this to be an "assisted Readymade", this being because the original objects of which the work is made up had been altered by the artist. They consist of a birdcage, 152 white cubes, a medical thermometer, a piece of cuttlebone, and a tiny porcelain dish. The birdcage is made of painted metal and contains several wooden perches.
Object to Be Destroyed is a work by American artist Man Ray, originally created in 1923. The work consists of a metronome with a photograph of an eye attached to its swinging arm. After the piece was destroyed in 1957, later remakes in multiple copies were renamed Indestructible Object. Considered a "readymade" piece, in the style established by Marcel Duchamp, it employs an ordinary manufactured object, with little modification, as a work of art. Examples of the work are held in various public collections including Tate Modern London, MOMA New York and Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Bicycle Wheel is a readymade from Marcel Duchamp consisting of a bicycle fork with front wheel mounted upside-down on a wooden stool.
God is a circa 1917 sculpture by New York Dadaists Morton Livingston Schamberg and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. It is an example of readymade art, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1915 to describe his found objects. God is a 10½ inch high cast iron plumbing trap turned upside down and mounted on a wooden mitre box. The work is now in the Arensberg Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
L.H.O.O.Q. is a work of art by Marcel Duchamp. First conceived in 1919, the work is one of what Duchamp referred to as readymades, or more specifically a rectified ready-made. The readymade involves taking mundane, often utilitarian objects not generally considered to be art and transforming them, by adding to them, changing them, or simply renaming and reorienting them and placing them in an appropriate setting. In L.H.O.O.Q. the found object is a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century painting Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.
The Bottle Rack is a proto-Dada artwork created in 1914 by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp labeled the piece a "readymade", a term he used to describe his collection of ordinary, manufactured objects not commonly associated with art. The readymades did not have the serious tone of European Dada works, which criticized the violence of World War I, and instead focused on a more nonsensical nature, chosen purely on the basis of a "visual indifference".
In Advance of the Broken Arm, also called Prelude to a Broken Arm, is a 1915 sculpture by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp that consisted of a regular snow shovel with "from Marcel Duchamp 1915" painted on the handle. One explanation for the title is that without the shovel to remove snow, one might fall and break an arm. This type of humor is not atypical of dadaist work.
Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating is a fictitious work of art by Marcel Duchamp.
La Boîte-en-valise is a type of mixed media assemblage by Marcel Duchamp consisting of a group of reproductions of the artist's works inside a box that was, in some cases, accompanied by a leather valise or suitcase. Duchamp made multiple versions of this type between 1935 and 1966. Titled From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy [Boîte-en-valise], Duchamp conceived of the boxes as a portable museum:
Instead of painting something new, my aim was to reproduce the paintings and objects I liked and collect them in as small a space as possible. I did not know how to go about it. I first thought of a book, but I did not like the idea. Then it occurred to me that it could be a box in which all my works would be collected and mounted like in a small museum, a portable museum, so to speak. This is it, this valise.
Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette is a work of art by Marcel Duchamp, with the assistance of Man Ray. First conceived in 1920, created spring of 1921, Belle Haleine is one of the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp, or more specifically a rectified ready-made.
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