Marcel Duchamp - by Matthew Affron & Michelle Kuo & Ann Temkin (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An essential and lavishly illustrated visual compendium on the epoch-shifting artist whose radical vision reshaped art--and the museum--forever

More than any other modern artist, Marcel Duchamp challenged and transformed the very definition of art. Published to accompany the first North American retrospective of his work in more than 50 years, the volume features the world's largest collection of Duchamp's work, bringing together such iconic works as Fountain and Nude Descending a Staircase for the first time in decades. Beautifully illustrated with more than 400 works spanning six decades--including painting, sculpture, readymades, film, photography and ephemera--and featuring a deeply researched chronology interwoven with archival and documentary material, Marcel Duchamp offers a new generation the first opportunity to experience the breadth of Duchamp's revolutionary and provocative work, strongly associated with the Surrealist and Dada movements. An expansive introduction by curators Ann Temkin, Michelle Kuo and Matthew Affron explores Duchamp's radical rethinking of art and the museum, transformation of authorship, innovative exhibition and installation displays, and lifelong dedication to changing the relationship between art and life. Revealing new dimensions of his conceptual brilliance, subversive wit and lasting impact on generations of artists, Marcel Duchamp is a rich visual compendium and an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand an artist who changed the course of modern art.
Although Marcel Duchamp (American, born France, 1887-1968) defied definition or association with any single movement, he is perhaps the most impactful artist of the modern era in Europe as well as in the United States. Despite his place as a central figure in numerous artistic groups in both countries--including Cubism, Dada and Surrealism--Duchamp resisted categorization, prioritizing creative individuality. Though he is primarily remembered as an artist, he was also a curator, conservator, art advisor, professional chess player, writer, inventor and celebrity.

Review Quotes

[Duchamp's] retrospectives in the 1960s were almost posthumous; this one seems almost post-posthumous. Which is to say, once more, that he's still very much with us.--Hal Foster "The London Review of Books"

[The] exhibition is a treat and a success...--Ara H. Merjian "Art in America Reframed"

Duchamp helps us understand that 'art' shouldn't be thought of as a noun that picks out certain kindsof objects, but as a verb: We 'art' absolutely any object at all by using it to trigger thoughts andconversation.--Blake Gopnik "The New York Times"

Marcel Duchamp' functions as a multi-museum-sanctioned liturgy--the canonization of contemporary art's high priest, along with his orthodoxy. Its true subject is not Duchamp's development but his inevitability.--Lance Esplund "The Wall Street Journal"

There are many ... astonishments to be uncovered here, according to one's curiosity and affection for Duchampiana.--Mark Bloch "The Brooklyn Rail"

[Charts] how Duchamp invented contemporary art one idea at a time.--John Vincler "Cultured"

[Duchamp is] the reason art today can be gloriously inventive, wonderfully permissive, mystifyingly experimental, beautifully opaque.--Lisa Yin Zhang "Hyperallergic"

[Lays] out Duchamp's production in an excellent and richly annotated timeline.--Helen Molesworth "Artforum"

[Presents] Duchamp not only as the father of conceptual art but also as a techno-imaginative innovatorand semiotic pioneer who anticipated how we read images, language and reality today.--Elisa Carolle "The Observer"

Before Duchamp, works of art were made by artists. Afterward, art was whatever an artist made.--Marion Maneker "Puck"

Duchamp most certainly provided a new model for what being an artist looked like....--Nicole Rudick "Apollo"

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal on its head and called it art. With that, he earned his place in the canon as the great usurper of artistic norms, the enemy of yesteryear's tastemakers, the banisher of everything that came before him, and the godfather of art provocateurs.--Hakim Bishara "Hyperallergic"

Love isn't a word, or a concept, that one usually associates with Marcel Duchamp, the modernist master of irony and distance, but love--love of the mind and what it can do, love of bodies and play, love of freedom, love of what art can be, love of women, queerdom, poetry, and chance--is what makes 'Marcel Duchamp' such a wonder.--Hilton Als "The New Yorker"

Not all art that works with concepts is meant to be reduced to general communication; some is meant not to, to define a secret code, a specific language. Duchamp plays between the two, and the playing is the art. He's still a prophet in this telling, just one whose prophetic texts haven't yet been exhausted.--Ben Davis "Artnet"

The exhibition will reflect the loops and the reiterations, the false starts and loose ends of a singular career.--Ben ` Luke "The Art Newspaper"

This image-rich book will accompany the king of the readymade's first North American retrospective in 50 years, opening this April at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Can't wait for both the exhibition and the book.--Hakim Bishara "Hyperallergic"