Art Of The Day Weekly

Did Duchamp kill painting?

PARIS – His name has remained forever linked to the "ready-made", and he is seen as the ancestor of conceptual art, therefore a divine figure of contemporary art. Given his games with words and his mockery (his "breeds of dust", his "quick nudes", his L.H.O.O.Q Mona Lisa), his optic experimentations and contamination of pure sciences, his production would be purely intellectual – and his obsessive liking for failures reinfores that image. Actually, Duchamp really was a painter and his artistic vocation was revealed to him when he visited the Salon d’Automne in 1905, the year of the Manet retrospective and the "cage of wild cats" by Matisse). For many years, at the beginnng of his career he painted many portraits, in particular of his family, landscapes in teh style of Cézanne, and characters in a Cubist sauce. It was only after his Nude walking down a staircase , which made him famous in the USA at the Armory Show in New York in 1913, that he followed other paths. The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou shows how this distance grew and yet was never complete: his last work, his Grand Verre which was endlessly being created, still has a lot from the pictural universe. Duchamp is against painting in the same way Guitry was against women: to the point of being for them.
• Marcel Duchamp. La peinture, même at Centre Pompidou, from 24 Octobre 2014 to 5 January 2015.