In the twenties, Surrealists proclaimed that words had stopped playing around and had begun to make love. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called ”Texticles,” the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass ), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Sélavy (”Eros, c’est la vie” or arouser la vie”drink it up”; celebrate life”). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century’s most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.

Notes « Certaines oeuvres sont indissociables de leur cheminement, des traces devenues illisibles qui les ont précédées. Pensées, amorces visuelles, travaux d'essai, ils peuvent être multiples mais quelquefois une seule expression suffit à les réunir ou à les appréhender [...].

This title offers a strikingly illustrated look at the hugely influential works, writings, and interviews of Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is one of the most famous and influential artists of the 20th century. Although often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, he avoided any overt alliances, instead preferring to explore his own forms of experimentation and the avant-garde. Even though Duchamp's creative period was notoriously short - he first started painting in 1908, but gave up practicing art in favour of chess in 1923 - his influence was crucial to the development of contemporary art. This magnificently illustrated volume provides readers with an outstanding exploration of his seminal works - from "Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2" which caused controversy when first exhibited in New York in 1912, to his final work "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1923" - as well as his key writings and interviews.

A one-time Fauvist, Cubist, Dadaist, and Surrealist, but an eternal chess player, Marcel Duchamp remains the avant-garde figure beyond all avant-garde figures of the past century. Provocative and brilliant, he radically challenged and changed accepted notions of art and its manufacture, and of the relationship between art and life. Marcel Duchamp, published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel under the curatorship of Harald Szeeman, endeavors to trace the different periods of Duchamp's oeuvre by means of a selection of his work focused mainly on those aspects that influenced Tinguely's own oeuvre. Additionally, the publication contains statements by Duchamp and essays by renowned Duchamp scholars on such topics as the emergence and development of the ready-made concept and its impact on the art of the 1960s.
Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing. --Marcel Duchamp
The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves. --Marcel Duchamp
Essays by Harald Szeeman, Dieter Daniels, Herbert Molderings and Jacques Caumont.
Clothbound, 9.5 x 11 in., 232 pages, 70 color and 130 b&w.