Nude Descending Staircase, Museum
of Art, Philadelphia (1912). |
In 1920 Duchamp moved to America, and shortly
thereafter gave up painting. Instead he wanted to focus on playing and
studying chess, which he fairly much did for the rest of his life. His
wife, after gluing his chess pieces to the board, divorced him shortly
after. Within a few years, he felt he had reached the heights of his ability
as a chess player, and switched to correspondence chess and became a chess
journalist. As he grew older, he often made little copies of his oil
paintings, drawings, collages and ready-mades
that would fit into a case. He wanted to create a sort of portable museum.
The Box in a Suitcase was so popular by collectors that he had
to make lots of versions over 20 years. This showed that copies could
also count as art, just like everyday objects.
Duchamp died in 1968. Several retrospective
exhibitions of his work took place, including at the Tate Gallery, Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Art Museum. In 2004, his Fountain
was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 artists
and critics in Britain. Although he is considered one of the masters of
modern art, his work is often considered really boring to look at. It
is after all, difficult to get enthusiastic about a shovel or urinal.
To speak ill of Duchamp is to invite the wrath of the art establishment,
for whom conceptual art is regarded as the cutting edge of 21st century
creativity - witness Tracey Emin's 2008 role in curating a room for the
London Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, or the prices paid for 'works
of art' by Damien Hirst - but while Duchamp's work was significant in
his day, now it looks rather tired and old-fashioned. Even so, he remains
one of the great iconoclasts in the history
of art in the 20th century.
|
