AzizArt
August 2019
M a r c e l D u c h a m p
F a h r e l n is s a Z e i d
Director: Aziz Anzabi Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi Translator : Asra Yaghoubi Research: Zohreh Nazari Iranian art department: Mohadese Yaghoubi
1-Marcel Duchamp 21-Fahrelnissa Zeid
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Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968 was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art.He was careful about his use of the term Dada and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentiethcentury and twenty first-century art, and he had a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (such as Henri Matisse) as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind. Early life and education Marcel Duchamp was born at
Blainville-Crevon in Normandy, France, and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Émile Frédéric Nicolle , his maternal grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, paint, and make music together. Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp's seven children, one died as an infant and four became successful artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of: Jacques Villon (1875–1963), painter, printmaker Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876– 1918), sculptor Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889– 1963), painter. As a child, with his two elder brothers already away from home at school in Rouen, Duchamp was closer to his sister Suzanne, who was a willing accomplice in games and activities conjured by his fertile imagination. At eight years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers' footsteps 1
when he left home and began schooling at the LycĂŠe PierreCorneille, in Rouen. Two other students in his class also became well-known artists and lasting friends: Robert Antoine Pinchon and Pierre Dumont.For the next eight years, he was locked into an educational regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not an outstanding student, his best subject was mathematics and he won two mathematics prizes at the school. He also won a prize for drawing in 1903, and at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize, validating his recent decision to become an artist. He learned academic drawing from a teacher who unsuccessfully attempted to "protect" his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamp's true artistic mentor at the time was his brother Jacques Villon, whose fluid and incisive style he sought to imitate. At 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting his sister Suzanne in various poses and activities. That
summer he also painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils. Early work Duchamp's early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles. He experimented with classical techniques and subjects. When he was later asked about what had influenced him at the time, Duchamp cited the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whose approach to art was not outwardly anti-academic, but quietly individual. He studied art at the AcadĂŠmie Julian from 1904 to 1905, but preferred playing billiards to attending classes. During this time Duchamp drew and sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use verbal puns (sometimes spanning multiple languages), visual puns, or both. Such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life. In 1905, he began his compulsory military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment, working for a printer in Rouen. There he learned typography and printing
processes—skills he would use in and Alexander Archipenko. Poets his later work. and writers also participated. The Owing to his eldest brother group came to be known as the Jacques' membership in the Puteaux Group, or the Section d'Or. prestigious Académie royale de Uninterested in the Cubists' peinture et de sculpture seriousness, or in their focus on Duchamp's work was exhibited in visual matters, Duchamp did not the 1908 Salon d'Automne, join in discussions of Cubist theory and the following year in the and gained a reputation of being Salon des Indépendants. Fauves shy. However, that same year he and Paul Cézanne's proto-Cubism painted in a Cubist style and added influenced his paintings, although an impression of motion by using the critic Guillaume Apollinaire— repetitive imagery. who was eventually to become a friend—criticized what he called During this period Duchamp's "Duchamp's very ugly nudes" fascination with transition, change, ("les nus très vilains de Duchamp"). movement, and distance became Duchamp also became lifelong manifest, and as many artists of the friends with exuberant artist time, he was intrigued with the Francis Picabia after meeting him concept of depicting the fourth at the 1911 Salon d'Automne, dimension in art. His painting Sad and Picabia proceeded to Young Man on a Train embodies introduce him to a lifestyle of fast this concern: cars and "high" living. First, there's the idea of the In 1911, at Jacques' home in movement of the train, and then Puteaux, the brothers hosted a that of the sad young man who is in regular discussion group with a corridor and who is moving Cubist artists including Picabia, about; thus there are two parallel Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, movements corresponding to each Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert other. Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris,
Then, there is the distortion of the young man—I had called this elementary parallelism. It was a formal decomposition; that is, linear elements following each other like parallels and distorting the object. The object is completely stretched out, as if elastic. The lines follow each other in parallels, while changing subtly to form the movement, or the form of the young man in question. I also used this procedure in the Nude Descending a Staircase. In his 1911, Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'échecs) there is the Cubist overlapping frames and multiple perspectives of his two brothers playing chess, but to that Duchamp added elements conveying the unseen mental activity of the players. Works from this time also included his first "machine" painting, Coffee Mill (Moulin à café) (1911), which he gave to his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The later more figurative machine painting of 1914, "Chocolate Grinder" (Broyeuse de chocolat), prefigures the mechanism incorporated into
the Large Glass on which he began work in New York the following year. Nude Descending a Staircase Duchamp's first work to provoke significant controversy was Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un escalier n° 2) (1912). The painting depicts the mechanistic motion of a nude, with superimposed facets, similar to motion pictures. It shows elements of both the fragmentation and synthesis of the Cubists, and the movement and dynamism of the Futurists. He first submitted the piece to appear at the Cubist Salon des Indépendants, but Albert Gleizes asked Duchamp's brothers to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting, or to paint over the title that he had painted on the work and rename it something else. Duchamp's brothers did approach him with Gleizes' request, but Duchamp quietly refused. However, there was no jury at the Salon des Indépendants and Gleizes was in no position to reject the painting.The controversy, according to art
historian Peter Brooke, was not whether the work should be hung or not, but whether it should be hung with the Cubist group. Of the incident Duchamp later recalled, "I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that. "Yet Duchamp did appear in the illustrations to Du "Cubisme", he participated in the La Maison Cubiste (Cubist House), organized by the designer André Mare for the Salon d'Automne of 1912 (a few months after the Indépendants); he signed the Section d'Or invitation and participated in the Section d'Or exhibition during the fall of 1912. The impression is, Brooke writes, "it was precisely because he wished to remain part of the group that he withdrew the painting; and that, far from being ill treated by the group, he was given a rather privileged position, probably through the
patronage of Picabia"
The painting was exhibited for the first time at Galeries Dalmau, Exposició d'Art Cubista, Barcelona, 1912; the first exhibition of Cubism in Spain Duchamp later submitted the painting to the 1913 "Armory Show" in New York City. In addition to displaying works of American artists, this show was the first major exhibition of modern trends coming out of Paris, encompassing experimental styles of the European avant-garde, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. American show-goers, accustomed to realistic art, were scandalized, and the Nude was at the center of much of the controversy. Leaving "retinal art" behind At about this time, Duchamp read Max Stirner's philosophical tract, The Ego and Its Own, the study which he considered another turning point in his artistic and intellectual development. He called it "a remarkable book ... which advances no formal theories, but just keeps saying that the ego is always there in everything."
While in Munich in 1912, he painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings. He started The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even image, and began making plans for The Large Glass – scribbling short notes to himself, sometimes with hurried sketches. It would be more than ten years before this piece was completed. Not much else is known about the two-month stay in Munich except that the friend he visited was intent on showing him the sights and the nightlife, and that he was influenced by the works of the sixteenth century German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder in Munich's famed Alte Pinakothek, known for its Old Master paintings. Duchamp recalled that he took the short walk to visit this museum daily. Duchamp scholars have long recognized in Cranach the subdued ochre and brown color range Duchamp later employed. The same year, Duchamp also attended a performance of a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel's 1910 novel, Impressions d'Afrique, which featured plots that turned in on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets and humanoid
machines. He credited the drama with having radically changed his approach to art, and having inspired him to begin the creation of his The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass. Work on The Large Glass continued into 1913, with his invention of inventing a repertoire of forms. He made notes, sketches and painted studies, and even drew some of his ideas on the wall of his apartment. Toward the end of 1912, he traveled with Picabia, Apollinaire and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia through the Jura mountains, an adventure that Buffet-Picabia described as one of their "forays of demoralization, which were also forays of witticism and clownery ... the disintegration of the concept of art".Duchamp's notes from the trip avoid logic and sense, and have a surrealistic, mythical connotation. Duchamp painted few canvases after 1912, and in those he did, he attempted to remove "painterly" effects, and to use a technical drawing approach instead.
His broad interests led him to an exhibition of aviation technology during this period, after which Duchamp said to his friend Constantin Brâncuși, "Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?".Brâncuși later sculpted bird forms. U.S. Customs officials mistook them for aviation parts and attempted to collect import duties on them. In 1913, Duchamp withdrew from painting circles and began working as a librarian in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève to be able to earn a living wage while concentrating on scholarly realms and working on his Large Glass. He studied math and physics – areas where exciting new discoveries were taking place. The theoretical writings of Henri Poincaré particularly intrigued and inspired Duchamp. Poincaré postulated that the laws believed to govern matter were created solely by the minds that "understood" them and that no theory could be considered "true". "The things themselves are not what science
can reach..., but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality", Poincaré wrote in 1902.[28] Reflecting the influence of Poincaré's writings, Duchamp tolerated any interpretation of his art by regarding it as the creation of the person who formulated it, not as truth. Duchamp's own art-science experiments began during his tenure at the library. To make one of his favorite pieces, 3 Standard Stoppages , he dropped three 1meter lengths of thread onto prepared canvases, one at a time, from a height of 1 meter. The threads landed in three random undulating positions. He varnished them into place on the blue-black canvas strips and attached them to glass. He then cut three wood slats into the shapes of the curved strings, and put all the pieces into a croquet box. Three small leather signs with the title printed in gold were glued to the "stoppage" backgrounds. The piece appears to literally follow Poincaré's School of the Thread, part of a book on classical mechanics.
In his studio he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. Although it is often assumed that the Bicycle Wheel represents the first of Duchamp's "Readymades", this particular installation was never submitted for any art exhibition, and it was eventually lost. However, initially, the wheel was simply placed in the studio to create atmosphere: "I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. After World War I started in August 1914, with his brothers and many friends in military service and himself exempted Duchamp felt uncomfortable in Paris. Meanwhile, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 had scandalized Americans at the Armory Show, and helped secure the sale of all four of his paintings in the exhibition. Thus, being able to finance the trip, Duchamp decided to emigrate to the United States in 1915. To his surprise, he found he was a celebrity when he arrived in New York in 1915, where he quickly befriended art patron Katherine Dreier and artist Man
Ray. Duchamp's circle included art patrons Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, actress and artist Beatrice Wood and Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures. Though he spoke little English, in the course of supporting himself by giving French lessons, and through some library work, he quickly learned the language. Duchamp became part of an artist colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City. For two years the Arensbergs, who would remain his friends and patrons for 42 years, were the landlords of his studio. In lieu of rent, they agreed that his payment would be The Large Glass. An art gallery offered Duchamp $10,000 per year in exchange for all of his yearly production, but he declined the offer, preferring to continue his work on The Large Glass. Société Anonyme Duchamp created the Société Anonyme in 1920, along with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray. This was the beginning of his lifelong involvement in art dealing and collecting.
The group collected modern art The origin of the name Dada is works, and arranged modern art unclear; some believe that it is a exhibitions and lectures nonsensical word. Others maintain throughout the 1930s. that it originates from the By this time Walter Pach, one of Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and the coordinators of the 1913 Marcel Janco's frequent use of the Armory Show, sought Duchamp's words da, da, meaning yes, yes in advice on modern art. Beginning the Romanian language. Another with SociĂŠtĂŠ Anonyme, Dreier also theory says that the name "Dada" depended on Duchamp's counsel came during a meeting of the in gathering her collection, as did group when a paper knife stuck into Arensberg. Later Peggy a French-German dictionary Guggenheim, Museum of Modern happened to point to 'dada', a Art directors Alfred Barr and James French word for 'hobbyhorse'. Johnson Sweeney consulted with Duchamp on their modern art The movement primarily involved collections and shows. visual arts, literature, poetry, art Dada manifestoes, art theory, theatre, Dada or Dadaism was an art and graphic design, and movement of the European avant- concentrated its anti-war politics garde in the early 20th century. It through a rejection of the began in Zurich, Switzerland in prevailing standards in art through 1916, spreading to Berlin shortly anti-art cultural works. In addition thereafter.To quote Dona Budd's to being anti-war, Dada was also The Language of Art Knowledge, anti-bourgeois and had political Dada was born out of negative affinities with the radical left. reaction to the horrors of World Dada activities included public War I. This international movement gatherings, demonstrations, and was begun by a group of artists and publication of art/literary journals; poets associated with the Cabaret passionate coverage of art, politics, Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected and culture were topics often reason and logic, prizing nonsense, discussed in a variety of media. Key irrationality, and intuition. figures in the movement,
apart from Duchamp, included: Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Richard Huelsenbeck, Georg Grosz, John Heartfield, Beatrice Wood, Kurt Schwitters, and Hans Richter, among others. The movement influenced later styles, such as the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art, and Fluxus. Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism. New York Dada had a less serious tone than that of European Dadaism, and was not a particularly organized venture. Duchamp's friend Francis Picabia connected with the Dada group in Zürich, bringing to New York the Dadaist ideas of absurdity and "anti-art". Duchamp and Picabia first met in September 1911 at the
Salon d'Automne in Paris, where they were both exhibiting. Duchamp showed a larger version of his Young Man and Girl in Spring 1911, a work that had an Edenic theme and a thinly veiled sexuality also found in Picabia's contemporaneous Adam and Eve 1911. According to Duchamp, "our friendship began right there".A group met almost nightly at the Arensberg home, or caroused in Greenwich Village. Together with Man Ray, Duchamp contributed his ideas and humor to the New York activities, many of which ran concurrent with the development of his Readymades and The Large Glass. The most prominent example of Duchamp's association with Dada was his submission of Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. Artworks in the Independent Artists shows were not selected by jury, and all pieces submitted were displayed. However, the show committee insisted that Fountain was not art, and rejected it from the show. This caused an uproar among the Dadaists, and led Duchamp to resign from the board
of the Independent Artists.:181– 186 Along with Henri-Pierre RochÊ and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp published a Dada magazine in New York, entitled The Blind Man, which included art, literature, humor and commentary. When he returned to Paris after World War I, Duchamp did not participate in the Dada group.
Arm (1915), a snow shovel, also called In Advance of the Broken Arm, followed soon after. His Fountain, a urinal signed with the pseudonym "R. Mutt", shocked the art world in 1917. Fountain was selected in 2004 as "the most influential artwork of the 20th century" by 500 renowned artists and historians. In 1919, Duchamp made a parody of the Mona Lisa by adorning a Readymades cheap reproduction of the painting "Readymades" were found with a mustache and goatee. To this objects which Duchamp chose he added the inscription and presented as art. In 1913, L.H.O.O.Q., a phonetic game which, Duchamp installed a when read out loud in French Bicycle Wheel in his studio. quickly sounds like "Elle a chaud au However, the idea of Readymades cul". This can be translated as "She did not fully develop until 1915. has a hot ass," implying that the The idea was to question the very woman in the painting is in a state notion of Art, and the adoration of sexual excitement and of art, which Duchamp found availability. It may also have been "unnecessary". intended as a Freudian joke, My idea was to choose an object referring to Leonardo da Vinci's that wouldn't attract me, either alleged homosexuality. Duchamp by its beauty or by its ugliness. gave a "loose" translation of To find a point of indifference in L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down my looking at it, you see. below" in a late interview with Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying Arturo Schwarz. According to rack signed by Duchamp, is Rhonda Roland Shearer, considered to be the first "pure" readymade. Prelude to a Broken
the apparent Mona Lisa reproduction is in fact a copy modeled partly on Duchamp's own face.Research published by Shearer also speculates that Duchamp himself may have created some of the objects which he claimed to be "found objects". The Large Glass Duchamp worked on his complex Futurism-inspired piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) from 1915 to 1923, except for periods in Buenos Aires and Paris in 1918–1920. He executed the work on two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. He published notes for the piece, The Green Box, intended to complement the visual experience. They reflect the creation of unique rules of physics, and a mythology which describes the work. He stated that his "hilarious picture" is intended to depict the erotic encounter between a bride and her nine bachelors. A performance of the stage
adaptation of Roussel's novel Impressions d'Afrique, which Duchamp attended in 1912, inspired the piece. Notes, sketches and plans for the work were drawn on his studio walls as early as 1913. In order to concentrate on the work free from material obligations, Duchamp found work as a librarian while living in France. After immigrating to the United States in 1915, he began work on the piece financed by the support of the Arensbergs. The piece is partly constructed as a retrospective of Duchamp's works, including a three-dimensional reproduction of his earlier paintings Bride (1912), Chocolate Grinder (1914) and Glider containing a water mill in neighboring metals (1913–1915), which has led to numerous interpretations. The work was formally declared "Unfinished" in 1923. Returning from its first public exhibition in a shipping crate, the glass suffered a large crack. Duchamp repaired it, but left the smaller cracks in the glass intact, accepting the chance element as a part of the piece.
Joseph Nechvatal has cast a considerable light on The Large Glass by noting the autoerotic implications of both bachelorhood and the repetitive, frenetic machine; he then discerns a larger constellation of themes by insinuating that autoeroticsm — and with the machine as omnipresent partner and practitioner — opens out into a subversive pan-sexuality as expressed elsewhere in Duchamp's work and career, in that a trance-inducing pleasure becomes the operative principle as opposed to the dictates of the traditional male-female coupling; and he as well documents the existence of this theme cluster throughout modernism, starting with Rodin's controversial Monument to Balzac, and culminating in a Duchampian vision of a techno-universe in which one and all can find themselves welcomed. Until 1969 when the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed Duchamp's Étant donnés tableau, The Large Glass was thought to have been his last major work.
Kinetic works Duchamp's interest in kinetic works can be discerned as early as the notes for The Large Glass and the Bicycle Wheel readymade, and despite losing interest in "retinal art," he retained interest in visual phenomena. In 1920, with help from Man Ray, Duchamp built a motorized sculpture, Rotative plaques verre, optique de précision ("Rotary Glass Plates, Precision Optics"). The piece, which he did not consider to be art, involved a motor to spin pieces of rectangular glass on which were painted segments of a circle. When the apparatus spins, an optical illusion occurs, where the segments appear to be closed concentric circles. Man Ray set up equipment to photograph the initial experiment, but when they turned the machine for the second time, a belt broke, and caught a piece of the glass, which after glancing off Man Ray's head, shattered into bits. After moving back to Paris in 1923, at André Breton's urging, with financing by Jacques Doucet, "
Duchamp built another optical device based on the first one, Rotative Demisphère, optique de précision (Rotary Demisphere, Precision Optics). This time the optical element was a globe cut in half, with black concentric circles painted on it. When it spins, the circles appear to move backward and forward in space. Duchamp asked that Doucet not exhibit the apparatus as art. Rotoreliefs were the next phase of Duchamp's spinning works. To make the optical "play toys", he painted designs on flat cardboard circles and spun them on a phonographic turntable. When spinning, the flat disks appeared three-dimensional. He had a printer produce 500 sets of six of the designs, and set up a booth at a 1935 Paris inventors' show to sell them. The venture was a financial disaster, but some optical scientists thought they might be of use in restoring threedimensional stereoscopic sight to people who have lost vision in one eye. In collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret, Duchamp filmed early versions of the Rotoreliefs and they named
the film, Anémic Cinéma (1926). Later, in Alexander Calder's studio in 1931, while looking at the sculptor's kinetic works, Duchamp suggested that these should be called "mobiles". Calder agreed to use this novel term in his upcoming show. To this day, sculptures of this type are called "mobiles" Musical ideas Between 1912 and 1915, Duchamp worked with various musical ideas. At least three pieces have survived: two compositions and a note for a musical happening. The two compositions are based on chance operations. Erratum Musical, written for three voices, was published in 1934. La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical is unfinished and was never published or exhibited during Duchamp's lifetime. According to the manuscript, the piece was intended for a mechanical instrument "in which the virtuoso intermediary is suppressed". The manuscript also contains a description for "An apparatus automatically recording fragmented musical periods," consisting of a funnel,
several open-end cars and a set of numbered balls.These pieces predate John Cage's Music of Changes (1951), which is often considered the first modern piece to be conceived largely through random procedures. In 1968, Duchamp and John Cage appeared together at a concert entitled "Reunion", playing a game of chess and composing Aleatoric music by triggering a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard. Rrose Sélavy "Rrose Sélavy", also spelled Rose Sélavy, was one of Duchamp's pseudonyms. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase Eros, c'est la vie, which may be translated as "Eros, such is life." It has also been read as arroser la vie ("to make a toast to life"). Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray showing Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it.
Duchamp used the name in the title of at least one sculpture, Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? (1921). The sculpture, a type of readymade called an assemblage, consists of an oral thermometer, a couple of dozen small cubes of marble resembling sugar cubes and a cuttlefish bone inside a birdcage. Sélavy also appears on the label of Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921), a readymade that is a perfume bottle in the original box. Duchamp also signed his film Anemic Cinema (1926) with the Sélavy name. The inspiration for the name Rrose Sélavy has been thought to be Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's librarian at The Morgan Library & Museum (formerly The Pierpont Morgan Library) who, following his death, became the Library's director, working there for a total of forty-three years. Empowered by J. P. Morgan, and then by his son Jack, Greene built the collection buying and selling rare manuscripts, books and art.
Rrose Sélavy, and the other pseudonyms Duchamp used, may be read as a comment on the fallacy of romanticizing the conscious individuality or subjectivity of the artist, a theme that is also a prominent subtext of the readymades. Duchamp said in an interview, "You think you're doing something entirely your own, and a year later you look at it and you see actually the roots of where your art comes from without your knowing it at all." From 1922 the name Rrose Sélavy also started appearing in a series of aphorisms, puns, and spoonerisms by the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos. Desnos tried to portray Rrose Sélavy as a long-lost aristocrat and rightful queen of France. Aphorism 13 paid homage to Marcel Duchamp: "Rrose Sélavy connaît bien le marchand du sel" ‒ in English: "Rrose Sélavy knows the merchant of salt well"; in French the final words sound like Marchamp Du-cel. Note that the 'salt seller' aphorism – "mar-chand-dusel" – is a phonetic rearrangement
of the syllables in the artist's name: "mar-cel-du-champ." (Duchamp's compiled notes are entitled, 'Salt Seller'.) In 1939 a collection of these aphorisms was published under the name of Rrose Sélavy, entitled, Poils et coups de pieds en tous genres. Personal life Throughout his adult life, Duchamp was a passionate smoker of Habana cigars. Duchamp became a United States citizen in 1955. In June 1927, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor; however, they divorced six months later. It was rumored that Duchamp had chosen a marriage of convenience, because Sarazin-Lavassor was the daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer. Early in January 1928, Duchamp said that he could no longer bear the responsibility and confinement of marriage, and they were soon divorced. Between 1946 and 1951 Maria Martins was his mistress. In 1954, he and Alexina "Teeny" Sattler married. They remained together until his death.
Fahrelnissa Zeid 7 January 1901 – 5 September 1991 was a Turkish artist best known for her large-scale abstract paintings with kaleidoscopic patterns. Also using drawings, lithographs, and sculptures, her work blended elements of Islamic and Byzantine art with abstraction and other influences from the West. Zeid was one of the first women to go to art school in Istanbul.She lived in different cities and became part of the avant-garde scenes in Istanbul, pre-war Berlin and post-war Paris. Her work has been exhibited at various institutions in Paris, New York, and London, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1954. In the 1970s, she moved to Amman, Jordan, where she established an art school. In 2017, Tate Modern in London organized a major retrospective of the artist and called her "one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century".Her largest work to be sold at auction, Towards a Sky (1953), sold for just under one million pounds in 2017. In the 1930s, she married into the Hashemite royal family of Iraq, and
was the mother of Prince Ra'ad bin Zeid and the grandmother of Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad.
Biography Early life Fahrelnissa Zeid was born Fahrünissa Şakir , into an elite Ottoman family on the island of Büyükada. Her uncle, Cevat Çobanlı Pasha served as the Grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire from 1891 to 1895[citation needed]. Zeid’s father Şakir Pasha was appointed ambassador to Greece, where he met Zeid’s mother Sara İsmet Hanım.In 1913, Zeid’s father was fatally shot and her brother, also named Cevat, was tried and convicted of his murder. Zeid began drawing and painting at a young age. Her earliest known surviving work is a portrait of her grandmother, painted when she was 14. In 1919, Zeid enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts for Women, in Istanbul. 21
In 1920 at the age of nineteen, many social events in her role as an Zeid married the novelist İzzet ambassador’s wife. After the Melih Devrim.For their annexation of Austria in March honeymoon, Devrim took Zeid to 1938, Prince Zeid and his family Venice where she was exposed to were recalled to Iraq, taking up European painting traditions for the residence in Baghdad. first time.They had three children together. Her eldest son, Faruk Zeid became depressed in Baghdad (born 1921), died of scarlet fever and on the advice of a Viennese in 1924. doctor returned to Paris after a Her son Nejad (born 1923) went short time. She spent the next on to become a painter, and her years of her life traveling between daughter Şirin Devrim (born 1926) Paris, Budapest, and Istanbul, became an actress. attempting to immerse herself in Zeid travelled to Paris in 1928 and painting and recover. By 1941, she enrolled at the Académie Ranson, was back in Istanbul and focusing where she studied under the on her painting. painter Roger Bissière. Upon her return to Istanbul in 1929, Zeid Zeid became involved with the D enrolled at the Istanbul Academy Group of Istanbul, an avant-garde of Fine Arts. group of painters working in the Her brother Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı newly formed Turkish Republic was a novelist and her sister Aliye under Mustafa Kemal Berger was a painter. Atatürk.Although her association 1930–1944 with the group was short-lived, Zeid divorced Devrim in 1934, exhibiting with the D Group from and married Prince Zeid bin 1944 gave Zeid the confidence to Hussein of Iraq, who was begin exhibiting on her own. The appointed the first Ambassador artist opened her first personal exhibition in her home in Maçka, of the Kingdom of Iraq to Istanbul in 1944. Germany in 1935. The couple moved to Berlin where Zeid hosted
1945–1957 In 1945, Zeid cleared out the parlor rooms of her apartment in Istanbul and held her first solo exhibition.In 1946, after two more solo exhibitions at İzmir in 1945 and in Istanbul in 1946, Zeid relocated to London where Prince Zeid Al-Hussein became the first Ambassador of the Kingdom of Iraq to the Court of St James's. Zeid continued to paint, turning a room in the Iraqi Embassy into her studio.
many high society members attended her openings and exhibitions. Art critic Maurice Collis reviewed her 1948 exhibition and they subsequently became friends. The prominent French art critic and curator Charles Estienne became a major proponent of Zeid’s work.
Over the next decade, living between London and Paris, Zeid made some of her strongest works, experimenting with monumental abstract canvases that immerse the viewer in kaleidoscopic universes From 1947, Zeid’s practice became through their heavy use of line and more complex and her work vibrant colour.Zeid exhibited at transitioned from figurative Galerie Dina Vierny in 1953, painting to abstraction. Zeid was showing her most recent abstract influenced by the abstract styles works such as The Octopus of coming out of Paris in the Triton, and Sargasso Sea. The post-war period. She uniquely exhibition travelled to the Institute fused her Persian, Byzantine, of Contemporary Arts in London in Cretan, and Oriental roots with 1954. In the mid-1950s Zeid was at concepts, styles and techniques of the height of her career. In this Modernism in her painterly period, she became friends with a practice. group of international artists such as Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Dubuffet She exhibited in London at Saint and Serge Poliakoff, who George’s Gallery in 1948. Queen experimented with gestural Elizabeth The Queen Mother abstraction. attended the opening. Due to her position in the Iraqi Royal Family,
1958–1991 In 1958, Zeid convinced her Prince Raad, married and moved to husband Prince Zeid al-Hussein Amman, Jordan. In 1970, Prince not to return to Baghdad as acting Zeid Al-Hussein died in Paris and regent while his great nephew, Zeid moved to join her son in King Faisal II, went on vacation as Amman in 1975. She founded The he usually did. The couple went to Royal National Jordanian Institute their holiday home on the island Fahrelnissa Zeid of Fine Arts in of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples. On 1976, and for the next fifteen years 14 July 1958 there was a military she taught and mentored a group coup in Iraq and the entire royal of young women until her death in family was assassinated. 1991. Prince Zeid and his family narrowly escaped death, Retrospectives and they were given only Museum Ludwig held her first 24-hours to vacate the Iraqi retrospective in the western world Embassy in London.The coup in 1990.In October 2012, a number halted Zeid’s career as a painter of her paintings were sold at and hostess in London. auction by Bonhams for a total of Zeid and her family moved into £2,021,838, setting a world record an apartment in London and at for the artist. the age of fifty-seven, In 2017, Tate Modern in London Zeid cooked her first meal.The organized a major retrospective of experience prompted her to begin the artist.According to an article in painting on chicken bones, later The Guardian, the exhibition aimed creating sculptures from the to lift the artist "out of obscurity to bones cast in resin, called ensure thatshe does not become paléokrystalos. In her painting, yet another female artist forgotten she began to by history." The central gallery of move away from abstraction, and the exhibition hosted large-scale, started to paint portraits of her abstract paintings of Zeid from the family and others close to her. late 1940s and 1950s. A few years later, her youngest son,
Exhibited in this room, her fivemeter work titled My Hell (1951) was shown in the UK in her 1954 exhibition at the ICA London. The last gallery was devoted to portraits that Zeid concentrated on in her last years in Amman, as well as resin sculptures.All the works in the exhibition were loaned from international collections and Tate Modern acquired one of the paintings, Untitled C, "so she can now be part of our narrative," according to Tate Modern Director Frances Morris. Curated by Kerryn Greenberg, Curator International Art and Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern, the exhibition traveled to Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in late 2017, and will be on view at the Sursock Museum in Beirut in
spring 2018.Istanbul Modern lent eight works to the retrospective exhibition and also organized the exhibition Fahrelnissa Zeid in spring 2017 with works from its collection, focusing on Zeid's practice between the 1940s and 1970s.Istanbul Modern director Levent Çalıkoğlu stated, "The belated interest of Western museums and art community in Zeid’s works. . . is restoring the value she deserves." The biography Fahrelnissa Zeid: Painter of Inner Worlds, written by Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, a former student of Zeid's, was published in 2017 to coincide with the retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern. In 2019 she was commemorated with a Google Doodle.
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