Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 in Blainville-Crevon, Normandy, into a family of artists (his brothers were the painter Jacques Villon and the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon). He began as a painter, and his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) — a Cubist-Futurist image of a figure in sequential motion — caused a sensation at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. But Duchamp quickly grew restless with what he called “retinal” art — art that merely pleased the eye — and embarked on a series of gestures that would challenge the very definition of art.
In 1917 he submitted a mass-produced porcelain urinal, signed “R. Mutt,” to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Fountain, as he titled it, was rejected, but the questions it raised — Can an ordinary object become art through the artist’s choice? Does art reside in the object or in the idea? — have dominated aesthetic debate ever since. His “readymades” (a bottle rack, a snow shovel, a coat rack) declared that the artist’s intellectual act of selection was more important than craft or skill.
Duchamp spent eight years creating The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass, 1915–1923), a cryptic, mechanomorphic work on glass, and then largely abandoned art for chess — though he was secretly working on Étant donnés, a mysterious installation revealed only after his death in 1968. His influence on Conceptual art, Pop art, Fluxus, and virtually every avant-garde movement of the late twentieth century is incalculable.