This exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW is made up of a number of works sourced mainly from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where most of Duchamp’s work was housed in the years leading up to and following his death. The show was sponsored by the Terra Foundation of American Art, but many of the works in it are not American. Duchamp himself was French and he spent time at different periods of his life in America.
The show’s major drawcards are the early paintings that date from the early teens of last century. In the beginning, Duchamp was experimenting with Impressionist formulae. His draughtsmanship is adequate but is better in the black-and-white drawings on show than in the oil paintings from the same period. His paintings from this period emphasise the paint and some of the works show him trying out unnatural colours in an attempt to achieve certain visual and aesthetic effects. He also did a lot of painting in the cubist style that Picasso and Georges Braque excelled in but Duchamp’s work is not of the same quality.
He does better with his paintings of a nude descending a staircase. There are a few similar studies with this theme in the show. They are done in a style we recognise today as similar to the style that the Italian Futurists were using for their works at around the same time. WWI made Duchamp travel to the US. When the US entered the war, he travelled to Brazil in an effort to escape the bellicosity, one presumes, of the public sphere there.
From the early teens of the 20th century the work that has aged best is that which examines industrially-produced objects that are normally used in a commercial sense. There are a couple of versions of a painting of a coffee grinding machine, and his ready-mades also take their inspiration from objects that had been produced in factories for various uses. There is a bottle rack, a bicycle wheel upside-down standing on its forks, and of course the iconic upside-down urinal. In these works Duchamp presages the Pop movement of the 60s by half a century. He takes his inspiration from the products of Capital, repurposing them and emphasising their abstract qualities. He thereby gives them a new signification, and also gives the spectator plenty of things to think about. What is beauty? What is value? How are our values affected by the importance we place on manufactured goods? What is art, in fact? Who decides? What are we? What is reality?
Duchamp was motivated not only by the urge to create beautiful things but also by a certain wish to poke fun at the establishment. On show is a magazine he was involved in the production of, one issue of which has on its cover an illustration. In this design, a figure in a painting on a wall is shown thumbing his nose at a blind man being led by a dog past the artwork on display. It’s like a drawing of Flaubert taking aim at the bourgeoisie. This kind of cheekiness lies at the core of Duchamp’s enterprise and is what likely saved him from being completely overlooked by posterity. His paintings dating from before the characteristic ones he is best known for are not very good, to be quite honest.
The exhibition in fact does not contain the major works for which Duchamp is now best known, which are very large and would have been difficult to transport and insure. While this is a pity, I felt that what was offered for view was more than instructive. Also on show are some posters Duchamp designed. One is for a chess competition and it dates, I think, from 1924. The design is marvellous, with cubes coloured black and white that are set at rakish angles to one another, as though a set of boxes had been thrown up in the air. The image neatly captures the essential quality of Duchamp’s playful, iconoclastic wit and sits in the imagination with a certain degree of panache as though offering a foretaste of the commercial-art inspired works of Andy Warhol.
I had known Duchamp from my years studying fine arts at university but this was the first time I had ever seen his really early stuff, the kinds of things that are so ordinary and unremarkable, were they from the studio of any other artist, that commentators who refer to the early days of conceptual art never even mention them even in passing. In this respect, this exhibition was very welcome although the rooms were not very crowded. Most of the visitors were older people. The crowd here was nothing like the one for the Taiwan exhibition upstairs in the gallery, which for at least two weekends running was packed with ethnic Chinese visitors of middle age with their young children.
The show’s major drawcards are the early paintings that date from the early teens of last century. In the beginning, Duchamp was experimenting with Impressionist formulae. His draughtsmanship is adequate but is better in the black-and-white drawings on show than in the oil paintings from the same period. His paintings from this period emphasise the paint and some of the works show him trying out unnatural colours in an attempt to achieve certain visual and aesthetic effects. He also did a lot of painting in the cubist style that Picasso and Georges Braque excelled in but Duchamp’s work is not of the same quality.
He does better with his paintings of a nude descending a staircase. There are a few similar studies with this theme in the show. They are done in a style we recognise today as similar to the style that the Italian Futurists were using for their works at around the same time. WWI made Duchamp travel to the US. When the US entered the war, he travelled to Brazil in an effort to escape the bellicosity, one presumes, of the public sphere there.
From the early teens of the 20th century the work that has aged best is that which examines industrially-produced objects that are normally used in a commercial sense. There are a couple of versions of a painting of a coffee grinding machine, and his ready-mades also take their inspiration from objects that had been produced in factories for various uses. There is a bottle rack, a bicycle wheel upside-down standing on its forks, and of course the iconic upside-down urinal. In these works Duchamp presages the Pop movement of the 60s by half a century. He takes his inspiration from the products of Capital, repurposing them and emphasising their abstract qualities. He thereby gives them a new signification, and also gives the spectator plenty of things to think about. What is beauty? What is value? How are our values affected by the importance we place on manufactured goods? What is art, in fact? Who decides? What are we? What is reality?
Duchamp was motivated not only by the urge to create beautiful things but also by a certain wish to poke fun at the establishment. On show is a magazine he was involved in the production of, one issue of which has on its cover an illustration. In this design, a figure in a painting on a wall is shown thumbing his nose at a blind man being led by a dog past the artwork on display. It’s like a drawing of Flaubert taking aim at the bourgeoisie. This kind of cheekiness lies at the core of Duchamp’s enterprise and is what likely saved him from being completely overlooked by posterity. His paintings dating from before the characteristic ones he is best known for are not very good, to be quite honest.
The exhibition in fact does not contain the major works for which Duchamp is now best known, which are very large and would have been difficult to transport and insure. While this is a pity, I felt that what was offered for view was more than instructive. Also on show are some posters Duchamp designed. One is for a chess competition and it dates, I think, from 1924. The design is marvellous, with cubes coloured black and white that are set at rakish angles to one another, as though a set of boxes had been thrown up in the air. The image neatly captures the essential quality of Duchamp’s playful, iconoclastic wit and sits in the imagination with a certain degree of panache as though offering a foretaste of the commercial-art inspired works of Andy Warhol.
I had known Duchamp from my years studying fine arts at university but this was the first time I had ever seen his really early stuff, the kinds of things that are so ordinary and unremarkable, were they from the studio of any other artist, that commentators who refer to the early days of conceptual art never even mention them even in passing. In this respect, this exhibition was very welcome although the rooms were not very crowded. Most of the visitors were older people. The crowd here was nothing like the one for the Taiwan exhibition upstairs in the gallery, which for at least two weekends running was packed with ethnic Chinese visitors of middle age with their young children.
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