Marcel Duchamp: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (UK: , US: ; French: [maʁsɛl dyʃɑ̃]; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French American artist, chess player, and inventor who played a key role in the development of the avant-garde in the United States and in New York City, where he spent the last 25 years of his life.

Duchamp was the first artist to elevate a toilet to the status of an art form. For his talk at the American Federation of the Arts in Houston, "On the Creative Act," for which he labeled himself a 'mere artist,' Duchamp said, "Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist, on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity...if we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out."

Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as one of the three artists who helped to establish the post-industrial perspective in art history, and his work is considered the progenitor of Conceptual art. His definition of the art coefficient, "an arithmatic relationship between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed," lay the groundwork for a more recent generation of artists working through appropriation art, such as Andy Warhol, Beatrice Wood, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Sturtevant.