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Marcel Duchamp was both an artist and a chess player, but until now, little was known of his chess activities. In analyzing Duchamp's games--seeing how he reacted in specific situations during play--we can better understand how his mind worked, and gain insight into the strategies that motivated his work as an artist. Duchamp saw a correlation between art and chess, and actively sought opportunities to combine the two seemingly unrelated disciplines. Not only did he love the game, but he was aware of the reputation of chess as an intensely cerebral pursuit, and to the end of his life, he remained committed to challenging the French adage "d'etre bete comme un peintre" ("to be stupid like a painter"), raising his art to equivalently complex, intellectual heights. Naumann shows us just how deeply intertwined the two activities were for Duchamp. ... Read more

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Duchamp and Chess Reconciled
I should say that, having an avid interest in both chess and art, a fair amount of the material presented here was known to me.The strength of this effort, however, is to present much disparate information as a coherent whole.Francis M. Naumann's essay, in particular, is very well done and constitutes the core of the book.He has reportedly delayed a writing on this subject for many years, and his long consideration of the subject is reflected in his assimilative skills and much good judgment throughout.For example, some past literature on this subject stretches to reach the conclusion that Duchamp's chess demonstrated, in chessic terms, iconoclastic hypermodernism.That theory simply cannot be supported.Not only does Naumann say so plainly, he barely gets diverted by those who have written otherwise.

Bradley Bailey focuses primarily on the relationship between chess and Duchamp's Large Glass.Like so much literature on Large Glass, he has little conclusive to say.Much of what he writes is in effect an argument that, due to various externalities (for example, the number of times that Large Glass was subsequently photographed with some type of chess imagery, to wit: the Eve Babitz game during the Pasadena exhibition), there must be some deep connection.Perhaps so, but what precisely that may be remains obscure at the conclusion of Bailey's essay.

Jennifer Shahade's contribution to the book, which was to annotate selected games, is the most frustrating only because it is plain that nobody carefully proofread the chess notation.This is a shame because I gather that Shahade's text strikes a good balance of providing reasonably sophisticated chess commentary, including interesting overall conclusions regardingthe strengths and weakness of Duchamp's play, without overloading the artworld types to too much chess detail.The problem, however, is that one cannot following along, as intended, with the move-by-move game annotation and see the moves from which Shahade draws her conclusions.From a purely chess, rather than art, perspective, this significantly undermines the value of the book.
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One hundred years after his birth, Marcel Duchamp remains an enigma; no other artist, perhaps, has produced so varied a group of masterpieces in so short a span of time. These eleven illustrated essays explore the structure and meaning of Duchamp's work as part of an ongoing critical enterprise that has just begun. Ranging from the Munich period and the development of the ready-mades to the last work, Etant donnés, they present the latest thinking on Duchamp and his ideas.

"Easily the best anthology of Duchamp studies since the 197S Duchamp, in Perspective."-- Charles F. Stuckey, Art in America

Rudolf Kuenzli is curator of the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa, editor of the journal Dada/Surrealism, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. Francis M. Naumann teaches at the Parsons School of Design and has written or numerous arts journals. ... Read more

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Marcel Duchamp left a large volume of correspondence, a thousand documents that form a unique source for our knowledge of the artist's personality and work. In his letters, Duchamp talks of his latest plans and works in progress. He discusses important projects, including the "ready-made" - a concept that was radically to change the course of 20th-century art. Francis Naumann has devoted 20 years to assembling all traceable letters, translating them and annotating them in this volume. Naumann also focuses on the historical content and provides a detailed introduction to each correspondent. In this way, she seeks to make Duchamp's life and thought real and accessible to experts and the art-loving public alike. The book contains all the letters in their original language (French or English), together with a translation where appropriate. ... Read more

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This book brings together for the first time Moira Roth's influential articles, lectures and interviews on the two men who embodied the very spirit of the avant-garde: Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.
Cage, who died in 1992, and Duchamp, who died in 1968, seemed to live on the permissive border of modernism, and later, of postmodernism. The artists have for almost thirty years fascinated, irritated, inspired, and daunted the author of these essays - Moira Roth.
At first they were an inspiration for her writing and teaching then, with their gradual transformation into 'classical' figures, she felt compelled to reconsider and re-evaluate them. ... Read more

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Great!
The more you read, the more you can enter into Duchamp's world!This one must definitly be one in your Duchamp's collection. Make yourself "READY MADE" ... Read more

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A critical analysis of postmodernism in the visual arts since the 1960s, this book focuses primarily on American texts that reference and construct Marcel Duchamp as the originator of postmodern art. Amelia Jones contends that Duchamp, through his 'readymades', (the standard terms used to describe Duchamp's works) has paradoxically served in a paternal role for post-1960s American artists, critics and art historians, who have attempted to construct a new tradition of artistic practice that counters the masculinist ideologies of Abstract Expressionism and Greenbergian modernism. Adapting feminist, psychoanalytic and Derridean conceptions of interpretation as an exchange of sexual identities, Jones offers highly charged readings that focus on the eroticism of Duchamp's works and on his theories of artistic production. She reconstructs Duchamp as an indeterminably gendered author whose gift to postmodernism might best be viewed in terms of the potential of his readymades to destructure the contradictory notions of sexual difference and subjectivity. ... Read more

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In this natural sequel to How to Imagine the authors direct their attention to the mythology and critical scaffolding that surrounds the enigmatic figure of Marcel Duchamp. What exactly is the value of his work today? How can we thread our way through the intricacies of his thought and achieve some greater understanding of its implications? Baruchello and Martin recapture the essence of Duchamp's singularly revolutionary art and discover as well the man behind the Artist. One again, the story is told in Baruchello's absorbing voice, at once and the same time a voice of authority and disarming modesty. This edition features ten photographs of Duchamp and his work (many taken by Baruchello). A selected bibliography on Duchamp is included. ... Read more

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Beginning with the instance in 1912 when Marcel Duchamp wrote in a note to himself, "No more painting, get a job," Thierry de Duve reviews in Pictorial Nominalism the implications of the readymade for art and representation.Arguing that the readymade belongs to that moment in the history of painting when both figuration and the practice of painting become "impossible," de Duve presents a psychoanalytically informed account of the birth of abstraction.Differing considerably from such thinkers as Clement Greenberg and Peter Burger, de Duve demonstrates that the readymade is the link between painting in particular and art at large. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent Book
This is a book all Duchamp scholars must have read at some point. It has particular relevance to ideas 'beyond' Duchamp as most art historians know him: the philosophical basis of his art in all its complexity is dealt with very well by the author. The book cam in top condition and very quickly: all serious students of Modern Art need to read De Duve's works. ... Read more

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Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincare. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision.Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The3 Standard Stoppages is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art.Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance. ... Read more

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Writings on one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, by some of its most celebrated writers and artists: Jasper Johns, Octavio Paz, John Cage, and more.

Best known for his cheeky conceptual works-like his signed urinals ("R. Mutt") and his graffitioed Mona Lisa-Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was also an extraordinary painter and sculptor (Nude Descending a Staircase) who changed the language of twentieth-century art and reigns with Picasso and Matisse as one of its greatest influences. Joseph Masheck has compiled a sampler of the best writing on Duchamp, with pieces that include Duchamp's obituary from Artforum, written by Jasper Johns; Octavio Paz on the ready-mades; a Duchamp post-mortem by Hans Richter; Donald Judd's investigation of Rose Sélavy; a "Counter-Avant-Garde" by Clement Greenberg; a consideration by Guillaume Apollinaire; and John Cage's "26 Statements on Marcel Duchamp." Illustrated with photographs of Duchamp's seminal pieces, and updated with a substantial preface that offers new scholarship as well as a fascinating consideration of why Duchamp's popularity has exponentially increased since this book first appeared, this is an essential volume for the Duchamp devotee. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

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Great buy
One of the most enjoyable art books I ever encountered. The writings of Duchamp are delightful, surprisingly so, considering the seemingly complex work. Filled all the gaps and questions I had aboutthis remarkable important, but underrepresented artist. ... Read more

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Seeing Through the 'Large Glass'
Marcel Duchamp, the Puck of modern art, left copious notes on the 'Large Glass', which he left 'definively unfinished' in 1923 after seven years' work. The complexity and mischief in this piece, and in Duchamp's wider approach to art, has traditionally been subjected to analysis that places teleological art history ahead of the confusion of cultural history. Linda Henderson's approach places Duchamp in the context of the scientific understanding of the time, and her comprehensive research has cut through to the core questions with which Duchamp engaged.

Looking at the 1920s from our time, we are afflicted by a cultural blindness to ideas that have fallen from favour. Henderson looks beyond the prejudices of orthodoxy, and considers Duchamp's own writings and the popular understanding of science and technology that held sway eighty years ago. This clarifies aspects of the 'Large Glass' on which other writers have been silent; the significance of early wireless technology, the lingering concept of the 'ether', and early cathode-tube researches.

Despite the density and unfamiliarity of the ideas presented, and the inherent difficulty of explaining Duchamp's conceptual barrage, Henderson lively and clear approach is an exemplary and honest engagement with the conditions of art production. In no sense does she engineer the evidence so that a streamlined art-historical position can purr smoothly; she presents the material that informed Duchamp's ideas, shows how he processed this material, and argues persuasively for a Duchamp who responded to his setting rather than a deified modernist who worked in the vacuum of his own genius. Good art history enhances our understanding of art, history, and society. Henderson's honesty, and her sense of scholarly security, make for an invaluable contribution to the literature on a crucial and cunning giant of modern art. ... Read more

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A must for Duchamp devotees everywhere!

This little introduction to the life and works of Marcel Duchamp was originally published to accompany a Duchamp retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Modelled on a children’s book it contains 12 dead-pan full-page colour illustrations of events in Duchamp’s life with an equally tongue-in-cheek, and entirely accurate, biography. The book was much admired at the time (Andy Warhol being an enthusiast, among others), this is its first appearance in English. ... Read more