Marcel Duchamp

Alternate Titles

• Étant donnés

Description

"With 'The Great Hidden Inspirer', the fourth volume in the Poiesis series, the renowned Duchamp researcher Michael R. Taylor investigates the role of Duchamp as the 'secret mastermind' at decisive moments in art history. In his eponymous essay, 'The Great Hidden Inspirer,' Taylor reveals that it was Duchamp who, while in exile in New York between 1942 and 1947, helped Surrealism out of its crisis and gave the movement a new direction. The volume celebrates the 100th anniversary of what is probably Duchamp's most provocative stroke of genius, Fountain, and contains another one of Taylor's essays, 'Blind Man's Bluff,' which describes the backstory of how the urinal shook the art world. The attempts at the time to classify this provocative object are evidence of the difficulties its critics faced at the start of the twentieth century as they sought to free themselves from traditional aesthetic concepts."--Publisher's description.

Description

In his early thirties, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) convinced everyone that he had abandoned making art in favor of playing chess. But from 1946 to 1966, he was secretly at work in his studio on West 14th Street in New York City. There he produced his final masterpiece: Étant donnés: 1º la chute d'eau, 2º le gaz d’éclairage, composed of a battered wood door through which one views a prone, nude female, holding aloft an antique gas lamp against a landscape of trees, waterfall, and sky. Unveiled as a permanent installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in July 1969, the year after Duchamp’s death, it startled the art world with its explicit eroticism and voyeurism, as well as its trompe l’oeil realism. Since its public debut, Étant donnés has been recognized as one of the most important and enigmatic works of the 20th century. Published to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the original installation of Étant donnés and to accompany the first major exhibition on the artwork and its studies, this richly illustrated book presents a wealth of new research and documents that draw upon previously unpublished works of art and materials. The catalogue also examines the critical and artistic reception of Étant donnés, as evidenced by the subsequent work of Les Levine, Hannah Wilke, Robert Gober, Marcel Dzama, Ray Johnson, and other artists who have engaged with Duchamp’s provocative and challenging tableau-construction.

Subjects

Genres

• Exhibitions

Other Editions

• Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnésPhiladelphia Museum of Art2009-01-01
• Marcel DuchampHatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG2018-01-01