Marcel Duchamp

Monday, 03 December 2012

Marcel Duchamp - In His Own Words (Part 1)

Marcel Duchamp clip from The Shock of the New (1982)

In celebration of the museum's recent acquisition of Marcel Duchamp's

..." width="225" height="168" class="playvideo1 gotop" onClick="activateTab('playlist1'); return false" style="display: block;" />

Marcel Duchamp and Maya Deren First Part

Open Collage in a new Window

Email the Collage

Loading suggestions ...

Armory Show
Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of US National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. The exhibition ran in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, from February 17 until March 15, and became an important event in the history of American art, introducing astonished New Yorkers, accustomed to realistic art, to modern art. The show served as a catalyst for American artists, who became more independent and created their own "artistic language".
The Armory Show was the first exhibition mounted by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and was run by their president, Arthur B. Davies, secretary Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach. It displayed some 1,300 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 avant-garde European and American artists. Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist works were represented.

wn.com/Armory_Show
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( /ˈbweɪnəs ˈɛəriːz/ or /ˈaɪrɪs/,Spanish: [ˈbwenos ˈaiɾes]) is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after Greater Sao Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent. Greater Buenos Aires conurbation, which also includes several Buenos Aires Province districts, constitutes the third-largest conurbation in Latin America, with a population of around thirteen million.
The city of Buenos Aires is not a part of Buenos Aires Province, nor is it the Province's capital, but an autonomous district. In 1880, after decades of political infighting, Buenos Aires was federalised and removed from Buenos Aires Province. The city limits were enlarged to include the towns of Belgrano and Flores (both are currently neighborhoods of the city). The 1994 constitutional amendment granted the city autonomy, hence its formal name: Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (Autonomous City of Buenos Aires). Its citizens first elected a Chief of Government (i.e. Mayor) in 1996; before, the Mayor was directly appointed by the President of the Republic.

wn.com/Buenos_Aires
Haute-Normandie
Upper Normandy (French: Haute-Normandie, IPA: [ot nɔʁmɑ̃di]; Norman: Ĥâote-Normaundie) is one of the 27 regions of France. It was created in 1984 from two départements: Seine-Maritime and Eure, when Normandy was divided into Lower Normandy and Upper Normandy. This division continues to provoke controversy, and some continue to call for reuniting the two regions. However, the name Upper Normandy existed prior to 1956 and referred by tradition to territories currently included within the administrative region: the Pays de Caux, the Pays de Bray (not that of Picardy), the Roumois, the Campagne of Le Neubourg, the Plaine de Saint André and the Norman Vexin. Today, most of the Pays d'Auge, as well as a small portion of the Pays d'Ouche, are located in Lower Normandy.
Rouen is the regional capital, historically important with many fine churches and buildings, including the tallest cathedral tower in France. The region's largest city, in terms of metropolitan population, is Le Havre. The region is twinned with the London Borough of Redbridge in England. Its economy is centered around agriculture, industry, petrochemicals and tourism.

wn.com/Haute-Normandie
Israel Museum
Coordinates: 31°46′21″N 35°12′16″E / 31.772378°N 35.204525°E / 31.772378; 35.204525
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Hebrew: מוזיאון ישראל,ירושלים‎, Muze'on Yisrael, Yerushalayim) was founded in 1965 as Israel's national museum. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, near the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A uniquely designed building on the grounds of the museum, the Shrine of the Book, houses the Dead Sea Scrolls and artifacts discovered at Masada.
Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek was the driving spirit behind the establishment of the museum, one of the leading art and archaeology museums in the world. The Israel Museum is the largest cultural institution in the State of Israel and is ranked among the world’s leading art and archaeology museums. The Museum houses encyclopedic collections, including works dating from prehistory to the present day, in its Archaeology, Fine Arts, and Jewish Art and Life Wings, and features the most extensive holdings of biblical and Holy Land archaeology in the world. In just forty-five years, thanks to a legacy of gifts and generous support from its circle of patrons worldwide, the Museum has built a far-ranging collection of nearly 500,000 objects, representing the full scope of world material culture. with some 7,000 objects and works currently online.

wn.com/Israel_Museum
Museum of Modern Art
Coordinates: 40°45′41″N 73°58′40″W / 40.761484°N 73.977664°W / 40.761484; -73.977664
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media.
MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. It also houses a restaurant, The Modern, run by Alsace-born chef Gabriel Kreuther.
The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue (corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street) in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became treasurer. At the time, it was America's premier museum devoted exclusively to modern art, and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism.

wn.com/Museum_of_Modern_Art
Seine-Maritime
Seine-Maritime (French pronunciation: [sɛn.ma.ʁi.tim]) is a French department in the Haute-Normandie region in northern France. It is situated on the northern coast of France, at the mouth of the Seine, and includes the cities of Rouen and Le Havre. Until 1955 it was named Seine-Inférieure.
The department can be split into three main areas:
The département was created in 1790 as Seine-Inférieure, one of five departements that replaced the former province of Normandy. In 1800 five arrondissements were created within the département, namely Rouen, Le Havre, Dieppe, Neufchatel and Yvetot, although the latter two were disbanded in 1926. On 18 January 1955 the name of the département was changed to Seine-Maritime, in order to provide a more positive-sounding name and in-keeping with changes made in a number of other French departements.
In 1843 the railway from Paris reached the region. The département is connected to the adjacent Eure department via the Tancarville and Pont de Normandie bridge crossings of the Seine.

wn.com/Seine-Maritime
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art. It is a network of four art museums: Tate Britain, London (previously known as the Tate Gallery, founded 1897), Tate Liverpool (founded 1988), Tate St Ives, Cornwall (founded 1993) and Tate Modern, London (founded 2000), with a complementary website, Tate Online (created 1998). There are plans to open a TATE in Southampton in 2020. It is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Tate is used as the operating name for the corporate body which was established by the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 as The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery.
The gallery was founded in 1897, as the National Gallery of British Art. When its role was changed to include the national collection of Modern Art as well as the national collection of British art, in 1932, it was renamed the Tate Gallery after sugar magnate Henry Tate of Tate & Lyle, who had laid the foundations for the collection. The Tate Gallery was housed in the current building occupied by Tate Britain which is situated in Millbank, London. In 2000, the Tate Gallery transformed itself into the current-day Tate, or the Tate Modern, which consists of a federation of four museums: Tate Britain which displays the collection of British art from 1500 to the present day; Tate Modern which is also in London, houses the Tate's collection of British and International Modern and Contemporary Art from 1900 to the present day. Tate Liverpool, in Liverpool has the same purpose as Tate Modern but on a smaller scale, and Tate St Ives displays Modern and Contemporary Art by artists who have connections with the area. All four museums share the Tate Collection. One of the Tate's most publicised art events is the awarding of the annual Turner Prize, which takes place at Tate Britain.

wn.com/Tate_Gallery

Albert Gleizes
Albert Gleizes (Paris, 8 December 1881 – Avignon, 23 June 1953), was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists. He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art. He was a member of the Society of Independent Artists, founder of the Ernest-Renan Association, and both a founder and participant in the Abbaye de Creteil. Gleizes exhibited regularly at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris; he was also a founder, organizer and director of Abstraction-Création. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s much of his energy went into writing (e.g., La Peinture et ses lois (Paris, 1923), Vers une conscience plastique: La Forme et l’histoire (Paris, 1932) and Homocentrisme (Sablons, 1937).

wn.com/Albert_Gleizes
Alexander Archipenko
Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko (also referred to as Olexandr, Oleksandr, or Aleksandr) (Ukrainian: Олександр Порфирович Архипенко, Romanized: Olexandr Porfyrovych Arkhypenko) (May 30, 1887 – February 25, 1964) was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist.
Alexander Archipenko was born in Kiev, in present-day Ukraine (at the time a part of the Russian Empire) to Porfiry Antonowych Archipenko and Poroskowia Vassylivna Machowa Archipenko; he was the younger brother of Eugene Archipenko.
From 1902 to 1905, he attended the Kiev Art School (KKHU), after which he continued his education in the arts as the student of S. Svyatoslavsky in 1906 (also in Kiev). In the same year he had an exhibition in Kiev, together with Alexander Bogomazov. That same year, Archipenko moved to Moscow, where he had a chance to exhibit his work in some group shows.
He moved to Paris in 1908 and was a resident in the artist's Colony La Ruche, among émigré Russian artists: Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Nathan Altman.

wn.com/Alexander_Archipenko
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing abstract sculptures he called "mobiles". In addition to mobile and "stabile" sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.
Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1898. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in Philadelphia. Calder’s grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland and immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868. He is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia's City Hall tower.
Calder’s mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter who studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She then moved to Philadelphia where she met Alexander Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Calder’s parents were married on February 22,1895.

wn.com/Alexander_Calder
Alexina Duchamp
Alexina "Teeny" Duchamp (January 6, 1906 – 1995) was the second wife of artist and chess player, Marcel Duchamp.
She was born Alexina Sattler in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1906. The youngest daughter of prominent surgeon Robert Sattler, Alexina was nicknamed "Teeny" by her mother Agnes Mitchell because of her low birth weight.
Sattler at first thought of becoming an artist and went to Paris in 1921, where for a time she studied sculpture with Constantin Brâncuşi at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. She first met Marcel Duchamp in 1923 at a ball given in her honor by American sculptor Mariette Benedict Mills, the mother of a close friend. In 1929 Teeny married Pierre Matisse, the youngest son of Fauve artist Henri Matisse. They had three children: Jacqueline, Paul, and Peter. Throughout 1938, Henri Matisse made a series of portrait sketches of Alexina. When her husband was mobilized in Paris at the outbreak of World War II, she ran his gallery for some months. In 1949 Pierre and Teeny separated due to Pierre's infidelity with Patricia Kane Matta. She received in the subsequent divorce settlement many important paintings.

wn.com/Alexina_Duchamp
André Breton
André Breton (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃dʁe bʁətɔ̃]; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".
Born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, he studied medicine and psychiatry. During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24, and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.
Breton married his first wife, Simone Kahn, on 15 September 1921. The couple relocated to rue Fontaine # 42 in Paris on 1 January 1922. The apartment on rue Fontaine became home to Breton's collection of more than 5,300 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art.

wn.com/André_Breton
Catherine Perret
Catherine Perret is associate professor of modern and contemporary aesthetics and theory at Nanterre University (Paris X). She obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy and is known for her work on Walter Benjamin, most notably by her book "Walter Benjamin ou la critique en effet". Dr. Perret was the director of the Art of Exhibition Department at Paris X. She served as a program director at the Collège International de Philosophie from 1995 to 2001. She is a recipient of the prestigious title Chevalier des Palmes académiques. Dr. Perret is currently responsible for the Centre de recherche sur l'art, philosophie, esthétique (CRéART - PHI) at Paris X.

wn.com/Catherine_Perret
Constantin Brâncuşi
Constantin Brâncuși (Romanian pronunciation: [konstanˈtin brɨnˈkuʃʲ]; surname sometimes spelled Brâncuș; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian-born sculptor who made his career in France. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His abstract style emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Famous Brâncuși works include the Sleeping Muse (1908), The Kiss (1908), Prometheus (1911), Mademoiselle Pogany (1913), The Newborn (1915), Bird in Space (1919) and The Column of the Infinite (Coloana infinitului), popularly known as The Endless Column (1938). Considered the pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture.
Brâncuși grew up in the village of Hobiţa Romania, Gorj, near Târgu Jiu, close to Romania's Carpathian Mountains, an area known for its rich tradition of folk crafts, particularly woodcarving. Geometric patterns of the region are seen in his later works.

wn.com/Constantin_Brâncuşi
Eugenio Granell
Eugenio Fernández Granell (28 November 1912 – 24 October 2001) was an artist often described as the last Spanish Surrealist painter.
Born in A Coruña in the autonomous community of Galicia, Eugenio Fernández Granell started out as a political radical and a musician. In 1927 he set up the magazine SIR (Sociedad Infantil Revolucionaria) with his brother Mario, and in 1928 enrolled at the Escuela Superior de Música del Real Conservatorio in Madrid. Among his friends were Maruja Mallo, Joaquín Torres García, Alberto Sánchez and Ricardo Baroja. A member of the POUM (Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification) during the Civil War, he contributed actively to newspapers such as La Nueva Era, La Batalla and El Combatiente Rojo.
In 1939, he went into exile. After arriving in France, he was held in internment camps for several months, but was eventually able to escape to Paris. While in the French capital, he struck up friendships with Benjamin Péret and Wifredo Lam. His affiliation with Trotsky made him the enemy of fascists and Stalinists and steered him towards a life marked by changes of residence. As María Zambrano said, during the first half of the twentieth century, Spain was a “master of dispersal and wastefulness” as it forced many of its most outstanding artists and intellectuals into a painful flight to other countries. Granell was one of those exiles, residing in France, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and New York. In the Dominican Republic, he was in the company of other Spanish exiles, including artists José Vela Zanetti and Josep Gausachs.

wn.com/Eugenio_Granell
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of Pop art.
Léger was born in Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897–1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles,Yvelines in 1902–1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts; he also applied to the École des Beaux-Arts but was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gérôme and others, while also studying at the Académie Julian. He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of Impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mère (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907.

wn.com/Fernand_Léger
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia (born François Marie Martínez Picabia, 22 January 1879 – 30 November 1953) was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.
Francis Picabia was born in Paris of a French mother and a Spanish-Cuban father who was an attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven. Some sources would have his father as of aristocratic Spanish descent, whereas others consider him of non-aristocratic Spanish descent, from the region of Galicia. Financially independent, Picabia studied under Fernand Cormon and others at the École des Arts Decoratifs in the late 1890s.
In 1894, Picabia financed his stamp collection by copying a collection of Spanish paintings that belonged to his father, switching the originals for the copies, without his father's knowledge, and selling the originals. Fernand Cormon took him into his academy at 104 boulevard de Clichy, where Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec had also studied. From the age of 20, he lived by painting; he subsequently inherited money from his mother.

wn.com/Francis_Picabia
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement (characterized by the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix) with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social commentary in his work.
Courbet painted figurative compositions, landscapes, seascapes, and still-lifes. He courted controversy by addressing social issues in his work, and by painting subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the rural bourgeoisie, peasants, and working conditions of the poor. His work belonged neither to the predominant Romantic nor Neoclassical schools. History painting, which the Paris Salon esteemed as a painter's highest calling, did not interest Courbet, who stated that "the artists of one century [are] basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century ..." Instead, he believed that the only possible source for a living art is the artist's own experience.

wn.com/Gustave_Courbet
Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) (French pronunciation: [ˈʒyl ɑ̃ˈʁi pwɛ̃nkaˈʁe]) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until it was solved in 2002–2003. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.
Poincaré made clear importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.

wn.com/Henri_Poincaré
Henri-Pierre Roché
Henri-Pierre Roché (28 May 1879 – 9 April 1959) was a French author who was deeply involved with the artistic avant-garde in Paris and the Dada movement.
Roché was born in Paris, France. In 1898, he was an art student at the Académie Julian.
Roché was a respected journalist as well as an art collector and dealer. At the turn of the 20th century, he became close friends with a number of young artists from the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris including: Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Marie Vassilieff, and also from Montmartre: Max Jacob, and Pablo Picasso. He was at home in the world of artists, collectors, and gallerists. He introduced Leo and Gertrude Stein to Picasso in November 1905. Leo described Roché as “a tall man with an inquiring eye under an inquisitive forehead, wanted to know something more about everything. He was a born liaison officer, who knew everybody and wanted everybody to know everybody else." Roché is also mentioned in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, chapter 3, in much the same terms. She particularly remembered him for having read Three Lives and recognized early her value as a writer.

wn.com/Henri-Pierre_Roché
Irene Gammel
Irene Gammel is a literary historian, biographer, and curator. She has published numerous books including Baroness Elsa, a groundbreaking cultural biography of New York Dada artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Looking for Anne of Green Gables, revealing the hidden life of Canadian author L.M. Montgomery during the writing of her classic novel Anne of Green Gables. Together with Suzanne Zelazo, Gammel published Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto by Florine Stettheimer, and Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the first major English collection of the Baroness's poems. Both books were selected for the New York Times’ notable art books for 2011.
Gammel teaches at Ryerson University [1] in Toronto. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture and is the Director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre.
Gammel holds a PhD (1992) and MA (1987) in English from McMaster University, and a Staatsexamen’s degree from the Universität des Saarlandes in Germany. She taught at the University of Prince Edward Island and held Visiting Professorships at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Erfurt Universität in Germany. She also served as the President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. In 2009, she was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

wn.com/Irene_Gammel
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.
Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia. He completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother. Recounting this period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in." He began drawing when he was three and has continued doing art ever since.
Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters. He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949. In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.

wn.com/Jasper_Johns
Jean Metzinger
Jean Metzinger (Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger) (June 24, 1883 – November 3, 1956) was a French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, born in Nantes, France. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, appear to have been influenced by the Neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist (Chromoluminarism) and Fauvism styles. From 1908 he was directly involved with Cubism, both as an artist and principle theorist of the movement. Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme" in 1912. Metzinger was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists.
Jean Metzinger came from a prominent military family. His great-grandfather, Nicolas Metzinger (18 May 1769 - 1838 [58]), Captain in the 1st Artillery Regiment on Horse, and Knight of the Legion of Honour, had served under Napoleon Bonaparte. Following the early death of his father, Eugène Francois Metzinger, Jean pursued interests in mathematics, music and painting. By 1900 he was a student at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, working under Hippolyte Touront, a well-known portrait painter who taught an academic, conventional style of painting. Jean Metzinger, however, was interested in the current trends in painting.

wn.com/Jean_Metzinger
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

wn.com/John_Cage
Juan Gris
José Victoriano (Carmelo Carlos) González-Pérez (March 23, 1887 – May 11, 1927), better known as Juan Gris (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxwaŋ ˈgɾis]), was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life. His works, which are closely connected to the emergence of an innovative artistic genre—Cubism—are among the movement's most distinctive.
Born in Madrid, Gris studied mechanical drawing at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas in Madrid from 1902 to 1904, during which time he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905, he studied painting with the academic artist José Maria Carbonero. It was in 1905 that José González adopted the more distinctive pseudonym Juan Gris.
In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, then in 1915 he was painted by his friend, Amedeo Modigliani. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. Although he submitted darkly humorous illustrations to journals such as Le Rire, L'assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de Paris, Gris began to paint seriously in 1910, and by 1912 he had developed a personal Cubist style. His portrait of Picasso in 1912 is a significant early Cubist painting done by a painter other than Picasso or Braque. Although Gris regarded Picasso as a teacher, Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that "Juan Gris was the only person whom Picasso wished away".

wn.com/Juan_Gris
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Italian pronunciation: [leoˈnardo da ˈvintʃi] pronunciation (help·info); April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519, Old Style) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.

wn.com/Leonardo_da_Vinci
Man Ray
Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) (August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Described as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements; although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Ray produced major works in a variety of media and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer, even though he considered himself a painter above all. Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, with the artist coining the term "Rayographs" in reference to himself.
Whilst appreciation for Ray's work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was not forthcoming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since.^{[citation needed]}
From the time he began attracting attention as an artist until his death more than sixty years later, Man Ray allowed little of his early life or family background to be known to the public, even refusing to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.

wn.com/Man_Ray
Marc Allégret
Marc Allégret (22 December 1900 – 3 November 1973) was a French screenwriter and film director.
Born in Basel, Basel-Stadt, Switzerland, he was the elder brother of Yves Allégret. Marc was educated to be a lawyer. Allégret became André Gide's lover when he was fifteen and Gide was forty-seven. Later, Marc was to fall briefly under the spell of Cocteau, who Gide feared would "corrupt" him.
Marc's father, Elie Allégret, had originally been hired by Gide's mother to tutor her son in light of his weak grades in school, after which he and his charge became fast friends. In 1895 Elie was best man at Gide's wedding.
After filming a 1927 trip to the Congo with Gide, he chose to pursue a career in the motion picture industry. His relationship with Gide ended after that trip, as Allégret found out that he preferred women after having experiences with Congolese women. They nevertheless remained close friends until Gide's death in 1951. After working and training as an assistant director, in 1931 he directed his first feature Mam'zelle Nitouche and the following year received much acclaim for his film, Fanny. He went on to a long career during which he wrote numerous scripts and directed more than fifty films.

wn.com/Marc_Allégret
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968; French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl dyˈʃɑ̃]) was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim and other prominent figures, thereby helping to shape the tastes of Western art during this period.
Duchamp challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions. He famously dubbed a urinal art and named it Fountain, though in a 1917 letter to his sister Duchamp indicates that a female friend, possibly the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, conceived of the urinal as sculpture and sent it to him under the pseudonym Richard Mutt. Duchamp produced relatively few artworks, while moving quickly through the avant-garde circles of his time.

wn.com/Marcel_Duchamp
Max Ernst
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
Ernst was born on April 2, 1891, in Brühl, near Cologne, the third of nine children of a middle-class Catholic family. His father Philipp Ernst was a teacher of the deaf and an amateur painter. A devout Christian and a strict disciplinarian, he inspired in his son a penchant for defying authority, while his interest in painting and sketching in nature influenced Max Ernst to take up painting himself. In 1909 Ernst enrolled in the University of Bonn, studying philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry. He visited asylums and became fascinated with the art of the mentally ill patients; he also started painting this year, producing sketches in the garden of the Brühl castle and portraits of his sister and himself. In 1911 Ernst befriended August Macke and joined his Die Rheinischen Expressionisten group of artists, deciding to become an artist. In 1912 he visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where works by Pablo Picasso and post-Impressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin profoundly influenced his approach to art. His own work was exhibited the same year together with that of the Das Junge Rheinland group, at Galerie Feldman in Cologne, and then in several group exhibitions in 1913.

wn.com/Max_Ernst
Max Stirner
Johann Kaspar Schmidt (October 25, 1806 – June 26, 1856), better known as Max Stirner was a German philosopher who was one of the forerunners in nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism, and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism. Stirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum in German, which translates literally as The Unique One and his Property). This work was first published in 1844 in Leipzig, and has since appeared in numerous editions and translations.
Stirner was born in Bayreuth, Bavaria. What little is known of his life is mostly due to the Scottish born German writer John Henry Mackay, who wrote a biography of Stirner (Max Stirner - sein Leben und sein Werk), published in German in 1898 (enlarged 1910, 1914), and translated into English in 2005.
Stirner was the only child of Albert Christian Heinrich Schmidt (1769–1807) and Sophia Elenora Reinlein (1778–1839). His father died of tuberculosis on the April 19, 1807 at the age of 37. In 1809 his mother remarried to Heinrich Ballerstedt, a pharmacist, and settled in West Prussian Kulm (now Chełmno, Poland).

wn.com/Max_Stirner
Picabia
Francis Picabia (born François Marie Martínez Picabia, 22 January 1879 – 30 November 1953) was a French painter, poet, and typographist, associated with both the Dada and Surrealist art movements.
Francis Picabia was born in Paris of a French mother and a Spanish-Cuban father who was an attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven. Some sources would have his father as of aristocratic Spanish descent, whereas others consider him of non-aristocratic Spanish descent, from the region of Galicia. Financially independent, Picabia studied under Fernand Cormon and others at the École des Arts Decoratifs in the late 1890s.
In 1894, Picabia financed his stamp collection by copying a collection of Spanish paintings that belonged to his father, switching the originals for the copies, without his father's knowledge, and selling the originals. Fernand Cormon took him into his academy at 104 boulevard de Clichy, where Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec had also studied. From the age of 20, he lived by painting; he subsequently inherited money from his mother.

wn.com/Picabia
Pontus Hultén
Karl Gunnar Vougt Pontus Hultén (21 June 1924 – 26 October 2006) was a Swedish art collector and museum director. Pontus Hultén is regarded as one of the most distinguished museum professionals of the twentieth century. He was the pioneering former head of the Museum for modern art in Stockholm and in the 1970s he was invited to participate in the creation of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where he was its first director in 1974-1981.
Pontus Hultén was born in Stockholm; he studied art history at Stockholm University and during the 1950s he was a curator at a small art gallery and also organized film screenings. In 1958, he curated the exhibition Constructivist Design at Galerie Lambert Weyl, Paris.
In 1960, Hultén was named head of the Moderna Museet, shaping the museum into a powerhouse of modern art. Under Hultén, the Moderna Museet was to be one of the most dynamic contemporary art institutions of the 1960s. During his tenure, the museum played a seminal role in bridging the gap between Europe and America, staging numerous exhibitions with works by early modern artists like Vincent van Gogh, modernists Paul Klee, René Magritte, Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky, and also Swedish artists including Sven Erixson, Bror Hjorth and Sigrid Hjertén.

wn.com/Pontus_Hultén
Raymond Roussel
Raymond Roussel (Paris, January 20, 1877 - Palermo, July 14, 1933) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau roman.
Roussel was the third and last child in his family, with a brother Georges and sister Germaine. In 1893, at age 15, he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire for piano. A year later, he inherited a substantial fortune from his deceased father and began to write poetry to accompany his musical compositions. At age 17, he wrote Mon Âme, a long poem published three years later in Le Gaulois. By 1896, he had commenced editing his long poem La Doublure when he suffered a mental crisis. After the poem was published on June 10, 1897 and was completely unsuccessful, Roussel began to see the psychiatrist Pierre Janet. In subsequent years, his inherited fortune allowed him to publish his own works and mount luxurious productions of his plays. He wrote and published some of his most important work between 1900 and 1914, and then from 1920 to 1921 traveled around the world. He continued to write for the next decade, but when his fortune finally gave out, he made his way to a hotel in Palermo, where he died of a barbiturate overdose in 1933. He is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

wn.com/Raymond_Roussel
René Clair
René Clair (11 November 1898 – 15 March 1981) born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960.
René Clair was born and grew up in Paris in the district of Les Halles, whose lively and picturesque character made a lasting impression on him. His father was a soap merchant; he had an elder brother, Henri Chomette (born 1896). He attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1914 he was studying philosophy; his friends at that time included Raymond Payelle who became the actor and writer Philippe Hériat. In 1917, at the age of 18, he served as an ambulance driver in World War I, before being invalided out with a spinal injury. He was deeply affected by the horrors of war that he witnessed and gave expression to this in writing a volume of poetry called La Tête de l'homme (which remained unpublished). Back in Paris after the war, he started a career as a journalist at the left-wing newspaper L'Intransigeant.

wn.com/René_Clair
Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941) was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to bold use of colour, and a clear love of experimentation of both depth and tone.
Robert Delaunay was born in Paris, the son of George Delaunay and countess Berthe Félicie de Rose. While he was a child, Delaunay's parents divorced, and he was raised by his mother's sister Marie and her husband Charles Damour, in La Ronchère near Bourges. When he failed his final exam and said he wanted to become a painter, his uncle in 1902 sent him to Ronsin's atelier for decorative arts in Belleville. Aged 19 he left Ronsin to focus entirely on painting and contributed six works to the Salon des Indépendants in 1904. He traveled to Brittany where he was influenced by the group of Pont-Aven and in 1906 contributed works he painted in Brittany to the 22nd Salon des Indépendants, where he met Henri Rousseau.

wn.com/Robert_Delaunay
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993.
Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City as well as on Captiva Island, Florida until his death from heart failure on May 12, 2008.
Rauschenberg was born as Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of Dora Carolina (née Matson) and Ernest R. Rauschenberg. His father was of German and Cherokee ancestry and his mother of Anglo-Saxon descent. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians. Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, France, where he met the painter Susan Weil. In 1948 Rauschenberg and Weil decided to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

wn.com/Robert_Rauschenberg
Roger de la Fresnaye
Roger de La Fresnaye (English pronunciation: /rɔˈʒeɪ də la frɛˈneɪ/; 11 July 1885 – 27 November 1925) was a French cubist painter.
La Fresnaye was born in Le Mans where his father, an officer in the French army, was temporarily stationed. The La Fresnayes were an aristocratic family whose ancestral home, the Château de La Fresnaye, is in Falaise. His education was classically based, and was followed from 1903 to 1904 by studies at the Académie Julian in Paris, and from 1904 to 1908 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. From 1908 he studied at the Académie Ranson under Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier, whose joint influence is evident in early works such as Woman with Chrysanthemums, 1909. This demonstrates the dreamlike symbolist ambience and stylistic character of work by the Les Nabis group.
From 1912 to 1914 La Fresnaye was a member of the Section d'Or group of artists, and his work demonstrates an individual response to cubism. He was influenced by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, but his work has a more decorative than structural feel and his prismatic colours reflect the influence of Robert Delaunay. He was a member of the Puteaux Group, an orphist offshoot of cubism led by Jacques Villon. His most famous work is The Conquest of the Air, 1913, which depicts himself and his brother outdoors with a balloon in the background.

wn.com/Roger_de_la_Fresnaye
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), known as Salvador Dalí (Catalan pronunciation: [səɫβəˈðo ðəˈɫi]), was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres, Spain.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.
Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics.

wn.com/Salvador_Dalí
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.

wn.com/Samuel_Beckett
Stefan Banz
Stefan Banz is an artist, who was born in 1961 in Sursee and grew up in Menznau, Switzerland. In 1989, he co-founded the Kunsthalle Luzern and served as its artistic director until 1993. From 1994 to 1997, he was an artistic adviser for the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Zurich, where he organised exhibitions with Gerhard Richter, Francis Picabia, Bruce Nauman and others. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions in international galleries, art institutions and museums, such as [[Württembergischer Kunstverein]], Stuttgart; Migros Museum, Zurich; Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Kunsthaus Zurich, Walker Art Center Minneapolis. He has also written plays, novels, theoretical texts and critical essays about artists and personalities such as Jacques Derrida, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Nauman, Frank Zappa and Marcel Duchamp. In 2000, he received the Manor Art prize, as well as the Recognition Award from the City of Lucerne, Switzerland. In 2005, he was the curator for the Swiss Pavilion at the 51st Biennale in Venice. He was also a Member of the Swiss Federal Art Committee from 2001 to 2007. Since 2004, he works together with Caroline Bachmann under the name of Bachmann/Banz, Website: http://www.bxb.ch.

wn.com/Stefan_Banz
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo.
Gould's most significant contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record.
Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and has received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields (or "magisteria") whose authorities do not overlap.

wn.com/Stephen_Jay_Gould
Vitaly Halberstadt
Vitaly Halberstadt (20 March 1903, Odessa – 25 October 1967, Paris) was a French chess player, problemist and, above all, a noted endgame study composer.
Born in Odessa, Russian Empire (currently Ukraine), he emigrated to France. In 1925, he shared 1st with Abraham Baratz in the 1st Paris City Chess Championship, tied for 5-6th in the 2nd Paris-ch 1926 (Leon Schwartzmann won), tied for 5-6th at Hyères 1926 (Baratz won), shared 1st with Peter Potemkine at Paris 1926, tied for 5-7th in the 3rd Paris-ch 1927 (Baratz won), tied for 10-11th in the 4th Paris-ch 1928 (Baratz won), tied for 1st-3rd with Marcel Duchamp and J.J. O'Hanlon at Hyères 1928, took 8th in the 6th Paris-ch 1930 (Josef Cukierman won), took 6th in the 7th Paris-ch 1931 (Eugene Znosko-Borovsky won), took 3rd in the 8th Paris-ch 1932 (Oscar Blum won), and took 9th at Paris 1938 (L'Echiquier, Baldur Hoenlinger won).
In 1932, he published with Marcel Duchamp "L'Opposition et les cases conjugées sont réconciliées", a chess manual dedicated to several special end-game problems, for which Duchamp designed the layout and cover. Halberstadt is also an author of "Curiosités tactiques des finales" (1954).

wn.com/Vitaly_Halberstadt
Wolfgang Paalen
Wolfgang Paalen (July 7, 1905 in Vienna – September 24, 1959 in Taxco, Mexico) was an Austrian-Mexican painter and theorist.
Wolfgang Paalen was born in Vienna in 1905, as the first of four sons of the Austrian-Jewish merchant and inventor Gustav Robert Paalen, and his German wife, the actress Clothilde Emilie Gunkel. The first years of his life he spent between Vienna and Styria where his father had a fashionable health resort. 1912 the family moved to Berlin and to the Silesian city of Żagań, where his father had bought a castle, the St. Rochusburg. Wolfgang Paalen went to different schools in Sagan, before his parents engaged a private teacher.
In 1919, the family moved to Rome, where the Paalens received many guests, such as Leo von König who became Wolfgang's first teacher. In 1924, he went back to Berlin where he applied for the Academy without success. In 1925, he exhibited in the Berliner Sezession and went through a further formation in aesthetics, deeply influenced by Julius Meier-Graefe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the Gestalt theory of Max Wertheimer. After another year of studies in Paris and Cassis (1925/26) where he met Jean (Janco) Varda and Georges Braque, he visited the art school of Hans Hofmann in Munich and Saint Tropez until 1928.

wn.com/Wolfgang_Paalen
Yves Arman
wn.com/Yves_Arman

Marcel Duchamp - Anemic Cinema

Marcel.Duchamp.-.Anemic.Cinema.(1926).DVDrip...

published: 20 Apr 2007

author: Lottedyskolia

Marcel Duchamp - In His Own Words (Part 1)

Marcel Duchamp Discusses His Work...

published: 26 Nov 2007

author: svsugvcarter

Duchamp interviews

Marcel Duchamp in French and English in 1966....

published: 05 Mar 2008

author: bamchum

The Secret of Marcel Duchamp

An elaborate peepshow put together over twenty years. Including archive footage of the eni...

published: 06 Aug 2009

author: OvationTV

Marcel Duchamp clip from The Shock of the New (1982)

www.imdb.com from part 1: The Mechanical Paradise look for torrent...

published: 17 Jul 2008

author: super9876

Marcel Duchamp speaks about his work

Marcel Duchamp speaks about his work...

published: 11 Dec 2008

author: ArtPatrolTV

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Dreams that Money can Buy: a film by Hans Richter with many artists. This is a Duchamp's f...

published: 01 Mar 2007

author: imaduba

"Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise"

In celebration of the museum's recent acquisition of Marcel Duchamp's "Box in a Valise," o...

published: 02 May 2012

author: Dartmouth

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp(July 28, 1887 -- October 2, 1968) was a French artist (he became an America...

published: 07 May 2012

author: DistantMirrors

Marcel Duchamp - Archive Footage

Archive bbc footage of the artist Marcel Duchamp...

published: 30 Jun 2008

author: lsfsuper

Marcel Duchamp and Maya Deren First Part

Witch's cradle (1943), unfinished work by Maya Deren with Marcel Duchamp. Remember First P...

published: 11 Jun 2007

author: imaduba

Marcel Duchamp - Anemic Cinema

moving spirals and text in alternating shots a classic by Duchamp...

published: 24 Jul 2006

author: auteurgirl

Marcel Duchamp part 1/4

Marcel Duchamp 28/7/1887 -- 2/10/ 1968 english subs...

published: 16 Nov 2010

author: whitelip1

Marcel Duchamp - Wiki Article

(28 July 1887 -- 2 October 1968; French pronunciation: maʁsɛl dyˈʃɑ̃) was a French artist ...

published: 01 Nov 2012

author: WikiPlays

Design42day

Client: Design42day Role: Design, Animation, Compositing Format:1280x720 Typography: Ipek ...

published: 14 Sep 2010

author: Onur Senturk

SILENCE OF DEATH directed by Mani Nasry (16MM FILM) 1ST YEAR RYERSON UNIVERSITY STUDENT FILM

IMDB PAGE www.imdb.me/maninasry This Scene expresses- FEAR- noun: an emotion experience...

published: 22 Jun 2009

author: MANI NASRY

Naked Chess

Jennifer Shahade, two-time U.S. Women's Champion plays chess against a naked man and talks...

published: 15 Apr 2009

author: jen

Nude descending a staircase

published: 18 Oct 2010

author: Diego Lama

<li class="playlistitemli thumbnail border_color">
        <div class="video_facebook">
            <a href="http://web.archive.org./web/20121203120241/http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://wn.com/marcel_duchamp&t=<%= title %>" title="Share this video" data-title="Share this video" target="_blank" style="target-name: new; target-new: tab;"></a>
        </div>

photo: AP / Lefteris Pitarakis

File - Kenyan Paulo Nzili, right, with Wambugu Wa Nyingi, left, stand outside the Royal Courts of Justice, in central London, Thursday, April 7, 2011, as four elderly Kenyans who claim that they were severely beaten and tortured by British officers during an anti-colonial rebellion in the 1950s are taking their case to court in London.

Archive sheds light on dark British past

Al Jazeera

30 Nov 2012

- For historians, it represents a treasure trove of boundless rewards and an opportunity to revisit some of the most enduring myths about Britain's colonial past. But for some of those still living with the physical and psychological scars, the release of thousands of previously secret government-held documents offers fresh hope of finally gaining a measure of justice for their suffering under British rule ... 1096 Source .. Al Jazeera ... ;">....(size: 22.4Kb)

photo: USAF / Senior Airman Patrice Clarke

File - U.S. Army Capt. Peggy Hu, Zabul Provincial Reconstruction Team civil affairs, speaks with a local child during a routine patrol in the local area Nov. 21, 2012, in Afghanistan.

'Taliban attackers' target US Afghanistan base

BBC News

02 Dec 2012

There have been "multiple explosions" near an airfield at a US base in eastern Afghanistan, Nato has said. Afghan intelligence officials told the BBC seven suicide attackers targeted the base in Jalalabad, and witnesses said that gunfire was heard ... Counter claims ... There were no Nato casualties in the attack, officials said ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)

photo: UN / Shareef Sarhan

File- A view of the outer perimeter of Palestine Stadium, severely damaged by Israeli air strikes in Gaza City earlier this week, 19 November, 2012.

The End of Jewish Power

WorldNews.com

02 Dec 2012

Article by WN.com Guest Writer Gilad Atzmon. Israel suffered a humiliating defeat at The UN recently. The nations of the world stood up and said NO to the Jewish state - NO to Israeli occupation, NO to Israeli human rights abuse, NO to Jewish racism. In effect, they stood up and confessed to serious Zio-fatigue ... This is a very good news indeed. But interestingly, this united opposition to Israel is not in response to Israeli strength ... ....(size: 2.6Kb)

photo: AP / Patrick Semansky

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, center, steps out of a security vehicle as he is escorted into a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2012, for a pretrial hearing.

Pfc. Manning: From Bloody Eagle to Bloody Cage

WorldNews.com

02 Dec 2012

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Much like the United States, the Vikings were a paradoxical and duplicitous civilization. Not only were they highly skilled shipbuilders and tremendous explorers, not to mention their expertise in the fishing, farming and trading industries, but they helped establish and contribute to the nation-states of France, England, Ireland, Germany, Russia, and Iceland ... This came to mind when Pfc....(size: 5.5Kb)

photo: US NARA

Dr. Martin Luther King giving his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963.

The Other 'Black' Friday

WorldNews.com

30 Nov 2012

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. Staring at the quote on the small granite monument which read. "They said to one another, behold here comes the dreamer...Let us slay him...And we shall see what will become of his dreams," I tried to understand that fateful moment when a shot shattered heaven and earth ... Martin Luther King, Jr. Straining my ears, I tried to hear Rev. Abernathy cry out, "Oh my God, Martin's been shot!" ... Dr....(size: 6.5Kb)

timeline:
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001

Christmas gifts 2012: the best art books

The Guardian

30 Nov 2012

Michael Prodger on the artists that caught his eye this year. Haunting landscapes … detail from Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. Photograph. Corbis/© The Gallery Collection/Corbis ... A Life (Profile) ... His What Are You Looking At? (Viking) is a gallop through 150 years of modern art in which he ticks off the innumerable "isms" that have sprouted since Marcel Duchamp displayed a urinal as a work of art in 1917 ... ....(size: 6.9Kb)

Martin Creed's residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art coming to a close

Chicago Tribune

29 Nov 2012

It can be hard to take Martin Creed seriously. This most likely delights the British artist, whose work fills the Museum of Contemporary Art from top to bottom, inside and out, as part of a yearlong residency ending in December ... At the MCA, crumpled balls of white copier paper litter the floor of other artists' exhibits ... It's litter ... I wish I'd had the guts ... Echoing Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, Creed stacks up used cardboard boxes ... ....(size: 6.2Kb)

Koreans flush with pride over toilet park

The Columbus Dispatch

28 Nov 2012

Get Email Updates. Afternoon Update Email Newsletter. Afternoon Update, sent weekday afternoons, keeps you up to date with breaking news and updates from later in the day. Current home-delivery subscribers may add Digital D, 24/7 E-Edition and unlimited premium Dispatch.com access, for a ... Other exhibits at the park include Korean traditional squat toilets, European bedpans, and Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture Fountain, a porcelain urinal ... ....(size: 4.9Kb)

World's first toilet theme park flush with success

Canberra Times

28 Nov 2012

Kindergarden children look at a statue of a Korean boy responding to the call of nature at the Toilet Culture Park in Suwon. Photo. KIM HONG-JI ... Kindergarden children look at a statue of a man responding to the call of nature at the Toilet Culture Park in Suwon. Photo. Reuters ... Photo ... Other exhibits at the park include Korean traditional squat toilets, European bedpans, and Marcel Duchamp's sculpture "Fountain," a porcelain urinal ... ....(size: 3.4Kb)

Chronicler of Conflict

Wall Street Journal

28 Nov 2012

By ERIC GIBSON. New York ... George Bellows. Metropolitan Museum of Art ... All were active in the early decades of the 20th century, breaking with the Beaux-Arts naturalism of their predecessors to embrace aspects of modernism in the years leading up to 1913—when the radical forms of their European contemporaries such as Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp entered the American bloodstream with the Armory Show in New York City....(size: 6.4Kb)

The News Matrix: Wednesday 28 November 2012

The Independent

28 Nov 2012

Arafat's body is exhumed for tests. Grave-diggers have hacked through the several metres of concrete protecting Yasser Arafat's body to obtain bone samples that could reveal whether he was poisoned. Many Palestinians believe their former President was assassinated by Israel, which it denies ... MORE. Back-to-work scheme a 'miserable failure' ... Among the exhibits are traditional squat toilets, bedpans and Marcel Duchamp's Fountain sculpture ... ....(size: 6.6Kb)

World's first toilet park flush with success in Korea

Indian Express

27 Nov 2012

There were no takers.Other exhibits at the park include Korean traditional squat toilets, European bedpans, and Marcel Duchamp's sculpture "Fountain," a porcelain urinal ... contd. PAGE. 12 . Single Page Format ....(size: 1.6Kb)

World's first toilet park flush with success

Otago Daily Times

27 Nov 2012

Rodin's Thinker is pondering even harder than usual as he sits astride a toilet at what has been dubbed the world's first theme park dedicated to the humble restroom - a monument to one South Korean man's vision ... Other exhibits at the park include Korean traditional squat toilets, European bedpans, and Marcel Duchamp's sculpture "Fountain," a porcelain urinal ... "But now it is totally different." ...  . Reuters. ....(size: 3.1Kb)

Toilet park flush with success

Stuff

27 Nov 2012

Rodin's Thinker is pondering even harder than usual as he sits astride a toilet at what has been dubbed the world's first theme park dedicated to the humble restroom - a monument to one South Korean man's vision ... There were no takers. Other exhibits at the park include Korean traditional squat toilets, European bedpans, and Marcel Duchamp's sculpture Fountain, a porcelain urinal ... "But now it is totally different." ... Ad Feedback. - Reuters....(size: 2.8Kb)

World's First Toilet Park Flush With Success in S. Korea

Jakarta Globe

27 Nov 2012

Suwon, South Korea. Rodin's Thinker is pondering even harder than usual as he sits astride a toilet at what has been dubbed the world's first theme park dedicated to the humble restroom — a monument to one South Korean man's vision ... There were no takers. Other exhibits at the park include Korean traditional squat toilets, European bedpans, and Marcel Duchamp's sculpture Fountain, a porcelain urinal ... "But now it is totally different."....(size: 2.6Kb)

IoS visual art review: 1913: The Shape of Time, Henry Moore Institute, LeedsTracing the Century, ...

The Independent

25 Nov 2012

How long a century of art is, and how short ... It was the end of an era, and the beginning of one ... More brazen yet, Marcel Duchamp made 3 Standard Stoppages by dropping metre-long threads on to strips of wet canvas, gluing these to glass slides, putting the slides in a box and declaring the result art ... But they didn't ... Some artists got what was happening, some didn't; some, such as Duchamp and Picasso, were too busy inventing it to care ... ....(size: 5.3Kb)

105 artists are right at home in Prairie Village ranch

Kansas City Star

24 Nov 2012

From boyhood on, heâs been known as âTopperâ â John âTopperâ Johntz of Prairie Village. How he got the nickname is hazy, perhaps referring to top grades in school ... Heâs been to the Tony Awards every year for more than 30 years ... On a single wall ... Willem de Kooning, Jacques Lipchitz, Peter Max, George Segal, Frank Szasz, Marcel Duchamp, Auguste Rodin, Man Ray, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg ... Henry Moore ... ....(size: 8.5Kb)

Nazis Faced Mythic Resistance, Selfish Picasso in Paris

Bloomberg

22 Nov 2012

The French have been slow in coming to terms with one of the darkest chapters of their history, the German Occupation in World War II ... “L’Art en Guerre ... The venue is well chosen ... The show starts with the big retrospective of Surrealism, organized by Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp in 1938, the last highlight of the pre-war years when Paris was the undisputed art capital of the world ... By then, Breton and Duchamp had fled to the U.S ... ....(size: 6.0Kb)

timeline:
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001

"Duchamp" redirects here. For other uses, see Duchamp (disambiguation).

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2010)

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: style and content. Please help improve this article if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (January 2011)

Marcel Duchamp
250px Marcel Duchamp playing chess in 1952. (Kay Bell Reynal photo in the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.)
Birth name	Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp
Born	(1887-07-28)28 July 1887 Blainville-Crevon, France
Died	2 October 1968(1968-10-02) (aged 81) Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Nationality	French, became a U.S. citizen in 1955
Field	Painting, sculpture, film
Movement	Dada, Surrealism
Works	Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) Fountain (1917) The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23) Etant donnés (1946–66)

Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968; French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl dyˈʃɑ̃]) was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century,^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5] Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim and other prominent figures, thereby helping to shape the tastes of Western art during this period.^[6]

Duchamp challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions. He famously dubbed a urinal art and named it Fountain, though in a 1917 letter to his sister Duchamp indicates that a female friend, possibly the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, conceived of the urinal as sculpture and sent it to him under the pseudonym Richard Mutt.^[7] Duchamp produced relatively few artworks, while moving quickly through the avant-garde circles of his time.

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. - Marcel Duchamp^[8]

Life [link]

Marcel Duchamp's parents' house in Blainville-Crevon.

File:DuchampBrothers.jpg

Three Duchamp brothers, left to right: Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon in the garden of Jacques Villon's studio in Puteaux, France, 1914, (Smithsonian Institution collections.)

Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the Haute-Normandie region of France, and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Emile 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 older brothers already away from home at school in Rouen, Duchamp was close to his sister Suzanne, who was a willing accomplice in games and activities conjured by his fertile imagination. At 10 years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers' footsteps when he left home and began schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, in Rouen. For the next 7 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.

Duchamp was throughout his adult life a passionate smoker of Habana cigars^[9]

Early work [link]

Duchamp's early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles. He experimented with classical techniques and subjects, as well as with Cubism and Fauvism. 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 Académie 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 visual and/or verbal puns. Such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life.

In 1905, he began his compulsory military service, working for a printer in Rouen. There he learned typography and printing processes – skills he would use in his later work.

Due to his eldest brother Jacques' membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamp's work was exhibited in the 1908 Salon d'Automne. The following year his work was featured in the Salon des Indépendants. Of Duchamp's pieces in the show, critic Guillaume Apollinaire--who was to become a friend—criticized what he called "Duchamp's very ugly nudes." Duchamp also became lifelong friends with exuberant artist Francis Picabia after meeting him at the 1911 Salon d' Automne, and Picabia proceeded to introduce him to a lifestyle of fast cars and 'high' living.

In 1911, at Jacques' home in Puteaux, the brothers hosted a regular discussion group with other artists and writers including Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Roger de la Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, and Alexander Archipenko. The group came to be known as the Puteaux Group, and the artists' work was dubbed Orphic cubism. Uninterested in the Cubists' seriousness or in their focus on visual matters, Duchamp did not join in discussions of Cubist theory, and gained a reputation of being shy. However, that same year he painted in a Cubist style, and added an impression of motion by using repetitive imagery.

During this period Duchamp's fascination with transition, change, movement and distance became manifest, and like many artists of the time, he was intrigued with the concept of depicting a "Fourth dimension" in art.

Works from this period included his first "machine" painting, Coffee Mill (Moulin à café) (1911), which he gave to his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The Coffee Mill shows similarity to the "grinder" mechanism of the Large Glass he was to paint years later.

In his 1911, Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'echecs) 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. (Notably, "échec" is French for "failure".)

File:Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase.jpg

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). Oil on canvas. 57 7/8" x 35 1/8". Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Nude Descending a Staircase No.2 [link]

Main article: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

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 jurist 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. 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."^[10]

He later submitted the painting to the 1913 "Armory Show" in New York City. The exhibition was officially named the International Exhibition of Modern Art, displayed works of American artists, and was also the first major exhibition of modern trends coming out of Paris. 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 [link]

At about this time, Duchamp read Max Stirner's philosophical tract, The Ego and Its Own, the study of 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."^{[citation needed]}

While in Germany in 1912, he painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings and he started "Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors" image, and began making plans for The Large Glass – scribbling short notes to himself, sometimes with hurried sketches. It would be over 10 years before this piece was completed. Little else is known about the two-month stay in Germany except that the friend he visited was intent on showing him the sights and the nightlife.

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.

Towards 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.".^[11] 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 instead to use a technical drawing approach.

His broad interests led him to an exhibition of aviation technology during this period, after which Duchamp said to his friend Constantin Brâncuşi, "Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?".^[11] Brâncuşi later sculpted bird forms, which U.S. Customs officials mistook for aviation parts and for which they attempted to collect import duties.

In 1913, Duchamp withdrew from painting circles and began working as a librarian in the Bibliotèque 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 in which 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.^[12] 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.^[13]

Duchamp's own art-science experiments began during his tenure at the library. To make one of his favorite pieces, 3 Standard Stoppages (3 stoppages étalon), he dropped three 1-meter 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 each of 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. It is often assumed that the Bicycle Wheel represents Duchamp's first of his "Readymades", this particular installation was never submitted for any art exhibition, and 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."^[14]

After World War I was declared in 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 show. 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.

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 Duchamp declined the offer, preferring to continue his work on The Large Glass.

Société Anonyme [link]

Duchamp created the Société Anonyme in 1920, along with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray. This was the beginning of his life-long involvement in art dealing and collecting. The group collected modern art works, and arranged modern art exhibitions and lectures throughout the 1930s.

By this time Walter Pach, one of the coordinators of the 1913 Armory Show, sought Duchamp's advice on modern art. Beginning with Société Anonyme, Dreier also depended on Duchamp's counsel in gathering her collection, as did Arensberg. Later Peggy Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art directors Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney consulted with Duchamp on their modern art collections and shows.

Dada [link]

This section called "Dada" needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2011)

Fountain 1917

New York Dada had a less serious tone than that of European Dadaism, and was not a particularly organized venture. Duchamp's friend 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." ^[15] 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 amongst the Dadaists, and led Duchamp to resign from the board of the Independent Artists.^[16]

Along with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp published a Dada magazine in New York, titled 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.

Readymades [link]

Main article: Readymades of Marcel Duchamp

"Readymades" were found objects which Duchamp chose and presented as art. In 1913, Duchamp installed a Bicycle Wheel in his studio. However, the idea of Readymades did not fully develop until 1915. The idea was to question the very notion of Art, and the adoration of art, which Duchamp found "unneccessary"^[17]

My idea was to choose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.^[17]

Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, is considered to be the first "pure" readymade. Prelude to a Broken 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.^[18]

In 1919, Duchamp made a parody of the Mona Lisa by adorning a cheap reproduction of the painting with a mustache and goatee. To this he added the inscription L.H.O.O.Q., a phonetic game which, when read out loud in French quickly sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul". This can be translated as "She has a hot ass", implying that the woman in the painting is in a state of sexual excitement and availability. It may also have been intended as a Freudian joke, referring to Leonardo da Vinci's alleged homosexuality. Duchamp gave a "loose" translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down below" in a late interview with Arturo Schwarz.

According to Rhonda Roland Shearer, the apparent Mona Lisa reproduction is in fact a copy modeled partly on Duchamp's own face.^[19] Research published by Shearer also speculates that Duchamp himself may have created some of the objects which he claimed to be "found objects".

[edit] The Large Glass

Main article: The Large Glass

File:Duchamp LargeGlass.jpg

The Large Glass (1915–23) Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection

Duchamp worked on his complex Futurism inspired piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) from 1915 to 1923, with the exception of 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.

The piece was inspired by a performance of the stage adaptation of Roussel's novel Impressions d'Afrique which Duchamp attended in 1912. Notes, sketches and plans for the work were drawn on Duchamp's 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 emigrating to the United States in 1915, he commenced his work on the piece financed by the support of the Arensbergs.

The piece is partially 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 opened for numerous interpretations. The work was formally declared "Unfinished" in 1923. Going home from its first public exhibition, the glass broke in its shipping crate and received a large crack in the glass. Duchamp repaired it, but left the cracks in the glass intact, accepting the chance element as a part of the piece.

Until 1969 when the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed Duchamp's Etant donnés tableau, The Large Glass was thought to have been his last major work.

Kinetic works [link]

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, in which the segments appear to be closed concentric circles.

Man Ray set up equipment to photograph the initial experiment, but when they turned the machine on 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.^[20]

After moving back to Paris in 1923, at André Breton's urging and through the financing of 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 backwards and forwards in space. Duchamp asked that Doucet not exhibit the apparatus as art.^[21].

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 three-dimensional stereoscopic sight to people who have lost vision one eye.^[22]

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."^[23]

Musical Ideas [link]

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 carss and a set of numbered balls.^[24] 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.^[25]

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.^[26]

Rrose Sélavy [link]

Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp). 1921. Photograph by Man Ray. Art Direction by Marcel Duchamp. Silver print. 5-7/8" x 3"-7/8". Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Main article: 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. These included at least one sculpture, Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy? (1921). The sculpture, a type of readymade called an assemblage, consists of an oral thermometer, and several dozen small cubes of marble resembling sugar cubes inside a birdcage.

The inspiration for the name "Rrose Sélavy" may have been Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan's librarian of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Following the death of J.P. Morgan, Sr., Greene became the Library's director, working there for a total of forty-three years. Empowered by the Morgans, she built the library collection, buying and selling rare manuscripts, books and art.^{[citation needed]}

Transition from art to chess [link]

In 1918, Duchamp took leave of the New York art scene, interrupting his work on the Large Glass, and went to Buenos Aires, where he remained for nine months and often played chess. He even carved from wood his own chess set, with the assistance of a local craftsman who made the knights. He moved to Paris in 1919, and then back to the United States in 1920. Upon his return to Paris in 1923, Duchamp was, in essence, no longer a practicing artist although he did work on several projects towards his death. Instead, his main interest was now chess, which he studied for the rest of his life to the exclusion of most other activities.

Duchamp can be seen, very briefly, playing chess with Man Ray in the short film Entr'acte (1924) by René Clair. He designed the 1925 Poster for the Third French Chess Championship, and as a competitor in the event, finished at fifty percent (3–3, with two draws). Thus he earned the title of chess master. During this period his fascination with chess so distressed his first wife that she glued his pieces to the board. Duchamp continued to play in the French Championships and also in the Chess Olympiads from 1928–1933, favoring hypermodern openings such as the Nimzo-Indian.

Sometime in the early 1930s, Duchamp reached the height of his ability, but realized that he had little chance of winning recognition in top-level chess. In following years, his participation in chess tournaments declined, but he discovered correspondence chess and became a chess journalist, writing weekly newspaper columns. While his contemporaries were achieving spectacular success in the art world by selling their works to high-society collectors, Duchamp observed, "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."^{[citation needed]} On another occasion, Duchamp elaborated, "The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."^{[citation needed]}

In 1932, Duchamp teamed with chess theorist Vitaly Halberstadt to publish L'opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled), known as corresponding squares. This treatise describes the Lasker-Reichhelm position, an extremely rare type of position that can arise in the endgame. Using enneagram-like charts that fold upon themselves, the authors demonstrated that in this position, the most Black can hope for is a draw.

The theme of the "endgame" is important to an understanding of Duchamp's complex attitude towards his artistic career. Irish playwright Samuel Beckett was an associate of Duchamp, and used the theme as the narrative device for the 1957 play of the same name, Endgame In 1968, Duchamp played an artistically important chess match with avant-garde composer John Cage, at a concert entitled "Reunion." Music was produced by a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard, triggered sporadically by normal game play.^[26]

On choosing a career in chess, Duchamp said, "If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him—as if anyone could—but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted."^[27] Duchamp left a legacy to chess in the form of an enigmatic endgame problem he composed in 1943. The problem was included in the announcement for Julian Levi's gallery exhibition "Through the Big End of the Opera Glass", printed on translucent paper with the faint inscription: "White to play and win." Grandmasters and endgame specialists have since grappled with the problem, with most concluding that there is no solution.^[28]

Artistic involvement and marriages [link]

Although Duchamp was no longer considered to be an active artist, he continued to consult with artists, art dealers and collectors. From 1925 he often traveled between France and the United States, and made New York's Greenwich Village his home in 1942. He also occasionally worked on artistical projects such as the short film Anemic Cinema (1926), Box in a Valise (1935–41), Self Portrait in Profile (1958) and the larger work Etant Donnés (1946–66).

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 soon thereafter they were divorced.^[29]

From the mid-1930s onwards, he collaborated with the Surrealists, however, he did not join the movement despite the coaxing of André Breton. From then until 1944, together with Max Ernst, Eugenio Granell and Breton, Duchamp edited the Surrealist periodical VVV, and also served as an advisory editor for the magazine View, which featured him in its March 1945 edition, thus introducing him to a broader American audience.

In 1954, he and Alexina "Teeny" Sattler married, and they remained together until his death. Duchamp became a United States citizen in 1955.

His influence on the art world remained behind the scenes until the late 1950s, when he was "discovered" by young artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were eager to escape the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. He was a co-founder of the international literary group Oulipo in 1960.

Interest in Duchamp was reignited in the 1960s, and he gained international public recognition. 1963 saw his first retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, and in 1966 the Tate Gallery hosted a large exhibit of his work. Other major institutions, including the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed, with large showings of Duchamp's work. He was invited to lecture on art and to participate in formal discussions, as well as sitting for interviews with major publications.

As the last surviving member of the Duchamp family of artists, in 1967 Duchamp helped to organize an exhibition in Rouen, France, called "Les Duchamp: Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp." Parts of this family exhibition were later shown again at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.

Exhibition design [link]

Duchamp was the designer of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, which was held at the Gallerie des Beaux-arts, Paris. The show featured more than 60 artists from different countries, including approximately 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations.

The surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act, and called on Duchamp to do so. At the exhibition's entrance he placed Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi This work consisted of a taxicab rigged to produce a drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat, and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back. In this way Duchamp greeted entering patrons, who were in full evening dress.

Surrealist Street filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various surrealists. The main hall was a simulation of a dark subterranean cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling. Illumination was provided only by a single light bulb,^[30] so patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art.

An installation by Wolfgang Paalen was composed of oak leaves and a water-filled pond with water lilies and reeds, while the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Around midnight, the visitors witnessed the dancing shimmer of a sparsely dressed girl who suddenly arose from the reeds, jumped on a bed, shrieked hysterically, then disappeared just as quickly. Much to the surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.

In 1942, for the First Papers of Surrealism show in New York, surrealists again called on Duchamp to design the exhibition. This time he wove a three-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works.^[31] Duchamp made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring young friends to the opening of the show. When the finely dressed patrons arrived, they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls, and skipping rope. When questioned, the children were told to say "Mr. Duchamp told us we could play here." Duchamp's design of the catalog for the show included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.

File:Etant donnes.jpg

Etant donnés, 1946–1966, mixed media, Philadelphia Museum of Art. This was posthumously and permanently installed in the museum in 1969

[edit] Etant donnés

Main article: Etant donnés

Duchamp's final major art work surprised the art world that believed he had given up art for chess 25 years earlier. Entitled Etant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage ("Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas"), it is a tableau, visible only through a peep hole in a wooden door.[2] A nude woman can be seen lying on her back with her face hidden, legs spread, and one hand holding a gas lamp in the air against a landscape backdrop.[3] Duchamp had worked secretly on the piece from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio while even his closest friends thought he had abandoned art.

Death and burial [link]

Duchamp's grave in Rouen, France.

Marcel Duchamp died on 2 October 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and is buried in the Rouen Cemetery, in Rouen, France. His grave bears the epitaph, "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent;" or "Besides, it's always other people who die."

Legacy [link]

A quotation erroneously attributed to Duchamp suggests a negative attitude toward later trends in 20th-century art:

This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

However, this was actually written in 1961 by fellow Dadaist Hans Richter, in the second person, i.e. "You threw the bottle-rack...". Although a marginal note in the letter suggests that Duchamp generally approved of the statement, Richter did not make the distinction clear until many years later.^[32]

Duchamp's attitude was actually more favorable, as evidenced by another statement made in 1964:

Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since [Gustave] Courbet, in favor of retinal painting.... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.^{[citation needed]}

The Prix Marcel Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp Prize), established in 2000, is an annual award given to a young artist by the Centre Georges Pompidou. In 2004, as a testimony to the legacy of Duchamp's work to the art world, his Fountain was voted "the most influential artwork of the 20th century" by a panel of prominent artists and art historians.

Notes [link]

^ "Duchamp:A biography". http://www.amazon.com/Duchamp-Biography-Calvin-Tomkins/dp/0805057897. "Regarded by many in the art world as the most influential artist of the century"
^ "Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. - Review - book review". http://www.dada-companion.com/duchamp/archive/aia_2000_nodelman.pdf.
^ "Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp". http://www.understandingduchamp.com/author/duchamp.html.
^ "Duchamp & Androgyny: The Concept and its Context". http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/articles/graham/graham1.html.
^ "Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare". http://www.mfa.org/collections/publications/marcel-duchamp.
^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography.
^ Gammel, 224-225.
^ Marcel Duchamp, from Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957.
^ see him on film [1]
^ Tomkins 1996, p. 83
^ ^a ^b Mink, J. (2004). Duchamp. Taschen.
^ Poincaré, H. (1902) Science and Hypothesis. London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., p. xxiv.
^ Mink, J. (2000). Marcel Duchamp. Art as Anti-Art. Taschen Verlag.
^ Mink, J. (2004) Duchamp. Taschen, p. 48.
^ Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia - Edited by Jennifer Mundy; TATE 2008; p. 12
^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 181–186.
^ ^a ^b Interview, BBC TV, 1966 "Duchamp interviews"
^ "Duchamp's urinal tops art survey", BBC News, 1 December 2004.
^ Marting, Marco De (2003). "Mona Lisa: Who is Hidden Behind the Woman with the Mustache?". Art Science Research Laboratory. http://www.artscienceresearchlab.org/articles/panorama.htm. Retrieved 27 April 2008.
^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 227–228.
^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 254–255.
^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 301–303.
^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 294.
^ Petr Kotik. Liner Notes to CD "The Music of Marcel Duchamp", Edition Block + Paula Cooper Gallery, 1991.
^ Randel, Don Michael. 2002. The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. ISBN 0-674-00978-9.
^ ^a ^b "Becoming Duchamp" by Sylvère Lotringer
^ Brady, Frank: Bobby Fischer: profile of a prodigy, Courier Dover Publications, 1989; p. 207.
^ Beliavsky, A & Mikhalchishin, A: Winning Endgame Technique Batsford, 1995.
^ Hulten, Pontus. Marcel Duchamp, Work and Life: Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, 1887–1968. Pages 8–9 June (1927) to 25 January (1928). ISBN 0-262-08225-X.
^ Marcel Duchamp
^ Marcel Duchamp
^ "(Ab)Using Marcel Duchamp: The Concept of the Readymade in Post-War and Contemporary American Art" by Thomas Girst at toutfait.com, Issue 5, 2003

References [link]

Tomkins, Calvin: Duchamp: A Biography, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996. ISBN 0-8050-5789-7
Seigel, Jerrold: The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp, University of California Press, 1995. ISBN 0-520-20038-1
Hulten, Pontus (editor): Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, The MIT Press, 1993. ISBN 0-262-08225-X
Yves Arman: Marcel Duchamp plays and wins, Marcel Duchamp joue et gagne, Marval Press, 1984
Cabanne, Pierre: Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Da Capo Press, Inc., 1979 (1969 in French), ISBN 0-306-80303-8
Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Duchamp Bottles Belle Greene: Just Desserts For His Canning by Bonnie Jean Garner (with text boxes by Stephen Jay Gould)
Gibson, Michael: Duchamp-Dada, (in French, Nouvelles Editions Françaises-Casterman, 1990) International Art Book Award of the Vasari Prize in 1991.
Sanouillet, Michel and Peterson, Elmer: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. NY: Da Capo Press, 1989. ISBN 0-306-80341-0
Sanouillet, Michel and Matisse, Paul: Marcel Duchamp : Duchamp du signe suivi de Notes, Flammarion, 2008. ISBN 978-2-08-011664-2
Catherine Perret Marcel Duchamp, le manieur de gravité, Ed. CNDP, Paris, 1998
Banz, Stefan (ed), Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall, JRP-Ringier, Zürich, 2010. ISBN 978-3-03764-156-9

External links [link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Marcel Duchamp

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp works

Philadelphia Museum of Art houses the Arensbergs' large collection of Duchamp's work. (website)
The Israel Museum has many of Duchamp's works in its Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art. (website)
Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art
An explanation about the "Roue de bicyclette" by Duchamp (website)
Dossier : Marcel Duchamp, Centre Pompidou
Philadelphia Museum of Art Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'echecs) (1911).
Philadelphia Museum of Art The Green Box. Notes and studies for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. (1915–1923)
Rotoreliefs (1920s)
Anémic Cinéma film (1926)

Essays by Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp: The Creative Act (1957) Audio

General resources

Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp Andrew Stafford: – animated explanations.
Marcel-Duchamp.com Étant donné – annual review published by L'association pour l'etude de Marcel Duchamp.
Toutfait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal
MarcelDuchamp.org – Personal website dedicated to Duchamp.
MarcelDuchamp.net – Art Science Research Laboratory site about researching Duchamp.
Marcel Duchamp – Olga's Gallery pages with biography and images.
Marcel Duchamp Rotoreliefs – animated.
Marcel Duchamp (DADA Companion) – the Online Research Companion.
Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Poraiture – online exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
profile at ChessGames.com
Oral history interview with Eve Babitz, 2000 Jun 14, a model of Duchamp's from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Essays about Duchamp

Audio and video

Duchamp audio CD Musical Erratum + In Conversation at LTM
Voices of Dada, Futurism & Dada Reviewed and Surrealism Reviewed – readings by Duchamp on audio CDs
UbuWeb – Music, lectures, and film
Duchamp's Legacy with Richard Hamilton and Sarat Maharaj from Tate Britain. (RealPlayer required.)
Audio of Marcel Duchamp's 'Some texts from "A l'infinitif"' (1912–20). Recorded by Aspen magazine (4:00) published on the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine @ Ubuweb

v t e Marcel Duchamp

Paintings	Apolinère Enameled Bicycle Wheel Bottle Rack The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even Étant donnés Fountain L.H.O.O.Q. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 Rrose Sélavy Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?

Related links	Readymades of Marcel Duchamp Jacques Villon Raymond Duchamp-Villon Suzanne Duchamp

Wikimedia	Marcel Duchamp at Wikiquote Marcel Duchamp at Commons Marcel Duchamp at Wiktionary Marcel Duchamp at Wikibooks Marcel Duchamp at Wikisource Marcel Duchamp at Wikinews

Authority control: LCCN: n80057220 | VIAF: 36917441 | WorldCat

Persondata
Name	Duchamp, Marcel
Alternative names	Duchamp, Henri-Robert-Marcel
Short description	Painting, Sculpture, Film
Date of birth	1887-7-28
Place of birth	Blainville-Crevon, France
Date of death	1968-10-2
Place of death	Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

http://wn.com/Marcel_Duchamp

http://it.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

http://cs.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

http://id.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

http://es.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

http://ru.wn.com/Дюшан, Марсель

http://nl.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

http://pl.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

http://fr.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

http://de.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

http://pt.wn.com/Marcel Duchamp

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

For the character, see Johnny Cage.

File:John Cage Laugh.png

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.^[5]^[6]

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.^[7]^[8] The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).^[9]

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.^{[clarification needed]} The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".^[10]

Life [link]

1912–31: Early years [link]

Cage was born in Los Angeles. His father John Milton Cage, Sr. (1886–1964) was an inventor, and his mother Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1885–1969) worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times.^[11] The family's roots were deeply American: in a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned "[George] Washington in the surveying of Virginia".^[12] Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy",^[13] while his father is perhaps best characterized by his inventions: sometimes idealistic, such as a diesel-fueled submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles, the senior Cage being uninterested in an undetectable submarine,^[11] others revolutionary and against the scientific norms, such as the "electrostatic field theory" of the universe.^{[n 1]} John Milton Sr. taught his son that "if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." In 1944–45 Cage wrote two small character pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad. The latter is a short lively piece that ends abruptly, while "Crete" is a slightly longer, mostly melodic contrapuntal work.^[14]

Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He received first piano lessons when he was in the fourth grade at school, but although he liked music, he expressed more interest in sight reading than in developing virtuoso piano technique, and apparently was not thinking of composition.^[15] By 1928 Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. That year he graduated from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian^[16] and enrolled at Pomona College, Claremont. In 1930 he dropped out, having come to believe that "college was of no use to a writer"^[17] after an incident described in the 1991 autobiographical statement:

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.^[13]

Cage persuaded his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college studies.^[18] He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris.^[19] Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, but decided he was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it.^[17] He then took up painting, poetry and music. It was in Europe that he first heard the music of contemporary composers (such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith) and finally got to know the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he had not experienced before.

After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass – he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent.^[20] Cage started travelling, visited various places in France, Germany and Spain, as well as Capri and, most importantly, Majorca, where he started composing.^[21] His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulae, but Cage was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left.^[22] Cage's association with theatre also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment."^[23]

1931–36: Apprenticeship [link]

Cage returned to the United States in 1931.^[22] He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know various important figures of the Southern California art world, such as pianist Richard Buhlig (who became his first teacher^[24]) and arts patron Galka Scheyer.^[17] By 1933 Cage decided to concentrate on music rather than painting. "The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings", Cage later explained.^[17] In 1933 he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell; the reply was a "rather vague letter",^[25] in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.^[26] Cowell mentioned, that before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg pupil.^[27]

Following Cowell's advice, Cage travelled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School.^[24] He supported himself financially by taking up a job washing walls at a Brooklyn YWCA.^[28] Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am.^[28]^[29] Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg.^{[n 2]} He could not afford Schoenberg's price, and when he mentioned it, the older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge.^[30]

Cage studied with Schoenberg in California: first at USC and then at UCLA, as well as privately.^[24] The older composer became one of the biggest influences on Cage, who "literally worshipped him",^[31] particularly as an example of how to live one's life being a composer.^[29] The vow Cage gave, to dedicate his life to music, was apparently still important some 40 years later, when Cage "had no need for it [i.e. writing music]", he continued composing partly because of the promise he gave.^[32] Schoenberg's methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in the 1958 lecture Indeterminacy:

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."^[33]

Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told the assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: "[...] When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music."^[31] Although Schoenberg never complimented Cage on his compositions during these two years, in a later interview he said that none of his American pupils were interesting, except Cage: "Of course he's not a composer, but he's an inventor—of genius."^[31]

At some point in 1934–35, during his studies with Schoenberg, Cage was working at his mother's arts and crafts shop, where he met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. She was an Alaskan-born daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding, sculpture and collage. Although Cage was involved in a relationship with Don Sample when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately. Cage and Kashevaroff were married in the desert at Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935.^[34]

1937–49: Modern dance and Eastern influences [link]

The newly married couple first lived with Cage's parents in Pacific Palisades, then moved to Hollywood.^[35] During 1936–38 Cage changed numerous jobs, including one that started his lifelong association with modern dance: dance accompanist at UCLA. He produced music for choreographies and at one point taught a course on "Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression" at UCLA, with his aunt Phoebe.^[36] It was during that time that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and so on. This was inspired by Oskar Fischinger, who told Cage that "everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound." Although Cage did not share the idea of spirits, these words inspired him to begin exploring the sounds produced by hitting various non-musical objects.^[36]^[37]

In 1938, with help from a fellow Cowell student Lou Harrison, Cage became a faculty member at Mills College, teaching the same program as at UCLA, and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl. Several famous dance groups were present, and Cage's interest in modern dance grew further.^[36] After several months he left and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he found work as composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird at the Cornish College of the Arts. The Cornish School years proved to be a particularly important period in Cage's life. Aside from teaching and working as accompanist, Cage organized a percussion ensemble that toured the West Coast and brought the composer his first fame. His reputation was enhanced further with the invention of the prepared piano—a piano which has had its sound altered by objects placed on, beneath or between the strings—in 1940. This concept was originally intended for a performance staged in a room too small to include a full percussion ensemble. It was also at the Cornish School that Cage met a number of people who became lifelong friends, such as painter Mark Tobey and dancer Merce Cunningham. The latter was to become Cage's lifelong partner and collaborator.

Cage left Seattle in the summer of 1941 after the painter László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design. The composer accepted partly because he hoped to find opportunities in Chicago, that were not available in Seattle, to organize a center for experimental music. These opportunities did not materialize. Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design and worked as accompanist and composer at the University of Chicago. At one point, his reputation as percussion composer landed him a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting System to compose a soundtrack for a radio play by Kenneth Patchen. The result, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was received well, and Cage deduced that more important commissions would follow. Hoping to find these, he left Chicago for New York City in the spring of 1942.

	Excerpt from The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942) noicon Performed in 1958 by Arline Carmen (voice) and John Cage (closed piano). This is one of the rare recordings of Cage performing his own instrumental music.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

In New York, the Cages first stayed with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. Through them, Cage met numerous important artists such as Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, and many others. Guggenheim was very supportive: the Cages could stay with her and Ernst for any length of time, and she offered to organize a concert of Cage's music at the opening of her gallery, which included paying for transportation of Cage's percussion instruments from Chicago. After she learned that Cage secured another concert, at the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim withdrew all support, and, even after the ultimately successful MoMA concert, Cage was left homeless, unemployed and penniless. The commissions he hoped for did not happen. He and Xenia spent the summer of 1942 with dancer Jean Erdman and her husband. Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing a substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who moved to New York City several years earlier. Cage and Cunningham eventually became romantically involved, and Cage's marriage, already breaking up during the early 1940s, ended in divorce in 1945. Cunningham remained Cage's partner for the rest of his life. Cage also countered the lack of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano: the resulting piece, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio.^[38]

Like his personal life, Cage's artistic life went through a crisis in mid-1940s. The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with the idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946 Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy.^[39] Cage also attended, in late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki's lectures on Zen Buddhism,^[40] and read the works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.^[24] The first fruits of these studies were works inspired by Indian concepts: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, String Quartet in Four Parts, and others. Cage accepted the goal of music as explained to him by Sarabhai: "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences".^[41]

Early in 1946, his former teacher Richard Buhlig arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan, who had escaped from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941.^[42] They became close, lifelong friends, and Cage later dedicated part of his Music for Piano (Cage) and his monumental piano cycle Etudes Australes to her.

1950s: Discovering chance [link]

Sonatas and Interludes were received well by the public. After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall, New York, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. More important was Cage's chance encounter with Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a New York Philharmonic Orchestra concert, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern's Symphony, op. 21, followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern's piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason.^[43] The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor and Cage's pupil Christian Wolff came to be referred to as "the New York school."^[44]^[45]

In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching^[46]—a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. This version of the I Ching was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff's father, Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books in 1950. The I Ching is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the I Ching; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation":^[47]^[48] his lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will:

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound [...] I don't need sound to talk to me.^[49]

Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51),^[50] the I Ching opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of the new approach were Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano. The latter work was written for David Tudor,^[51] whom Cage met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage's death.^{[n 3]} Tudor premiered most of Cage's works until the early 1960s, when he stopped performing on the piano and concentrated on electronic music. The I Ching became Cage's standard tool for composition: he used it in practically every work composed after 1951.

Despite the fame Sonatas and Interludes earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment, at 326 Monroe Street (which he occupied since around 1946) his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that, while working on Music of Changes, he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death.^[52] Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures, performances, etc. In 1952–53 he completed another mammoth project—the Williams Mix, a piece of tape music, which Earle Brown helped to put together.^[53] Also in 1952, Cage wrote down the piece that became his most well-known and most controversial creation: 4′33″. The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952 at Woodstock, New York) caused an uproar in the audience.^[54] The reaction to 4′33″ was just a part of the larger picture: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage's reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to promote Cage's work in Europe, was opposed to Cage's use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, i.e. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.^[55]

From 1953 onwards, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things. In Summer 1954 he moved out from New York and settled in a cooperative community in Stony Point, New York. The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and during 1956–58 he also worked as an art director of a typography.^[56] Among the works completed during the last years of the decade were Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation, and Variations I (1958).

1960s: Fame [link]

Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University and collaborated with members of its Music Department from the 1950s until his death in 1992. At the University, the philosopher, poet, and professor of classics Norman O. Brown befriended Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both.^{[citation needed]} In 1960 the composer was appointed a Fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wesleyan,^[57] where he started teaching classes in experimental music. In October 1961, Wesleyan University Press published Silence, a collection of Cage's lectures and writings on a wide variety of subjects, including the famous Lecture on Nothing that was composed using a complex time length scheme, much like some of Cage's music. Silence was Cage's first book.^{[n 4]} He went on to publish five more. Silence remained his most widely read and influential book.^[24] In the early 1960s Cage began his lifelong association with C.F. Peters Corporation. Walter Hinrichsen, the president of the corporation, offered Cage an exclusive contract and instigated the publication of a catalogue of Cage's works, which appeared in 1962.^[56]

Edition Peters soon published a large number of scores by Cage, and this, together with the publication of Silence, led to much higher prominence for the composer than ever before—one of the positive consequences of this was that in 1965 Betty Freeman set up an annual grant for living expenses for Cage, to be issued from 1965 to his death.^[58] But by mid-1960s Cage was receiving so many commissions and requests for appearances, that he was not able to fulfill them. This was accompanied by a busy touring schedule; Subsequently Cage's compositional output from that decade was scant.^[24] After the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), a work based on star charts, which was fully notated, Cage gradually shifted to, in his own words, "music (not composition)." The score of 0′00″, completed in 1962, originally comprised a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action", and in the first performance the disciplined action was Cage writing that sentence. The score of Variations III (1962) abounds in instructions to the performers, but makes no references to music, musical instruments or sounds.

Many of the Variations and other 1960s pieces were in fact "happenings", an art form established by Cage and his students in late 1950s. Cage's "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students had little or no background in music. Most were artists. They included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, and Dick Higgins, as well as many others Cage invited unofficially. Famous pieces that resulted from the classes include George Brecht's Time Table Music and Al Hansen's Alice Denham in 48 Seconds.^[59] As set forth by Cage, happenings were theatrical events that abandon the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration. Instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and real life. The term "happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who defined it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud's seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the happenings of this period can be viewed as a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October 1960, Mary Bauermeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his Etude for Piano cut off Cage's tie and then washed his co-performer’s hair with shampoo.^{[citation needed]}

In 1967, Cage's A Year from Monday was first published by Wesleyan University Press. Cage's parents died during the decade: his father in 1964,^[60] and his mother in 1969. Cage had their ashes scattered in Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, and asked for the same to be done to him after his death.^[61]

1969–87: New departures [link]

John Cage (right) with David Tudor at Shiraz Arts Festival 1971

Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power of technology to promote social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with fifty-two tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with forty motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there.^{[citation needed]}

Also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: Cheap Imitation for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's Socrate, and, as both listeners and Cage himself noted, openly sympathetic to its source. Although Cage's affection for Satie's music was well-known, it was highly unusual for him to compose a personal work, one in which the composer is present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obviously, Cheap Imitation lies outside of what may seem necessary in my work in general, and that's disturbing. I'm the first to be disturbed by it."^[62] Cage's fondness for the piece resulted in a recording—a rare occurrence, since Cage disliked making recordings of his music—made in 1976. Overall, Cheap Imitation marked a major change in Cage's music: he turned again to writing fully notated works for traditional instruments, and tried out several new approaches, such as improvisation, which he previously discouraged, but was able to use in works from the 1970s, such as Child of Tree (1975).

	Opening bars of Cheap Imitation (1969) noicon Performed by the composer in 1976, shortly before he had to retire from performing.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Cheap Imitation became the last work Cage performed in public himself. Arthritis had troubled Cage since 1960, and by early 1970s his hands were painfully swollen and rendered him unable to perform.^[63] Nevertheless, he still played Cheap Imitation during the 1970s,^[64] before finally having to give up performing. Preparing manuscripts also became difficult: before, published versions of pieces were done in Cage's calligraphic script; now, manuscripts for publication had to be completed by assistants. Matters were complicated further by David Tudor's departure from performing, which happened in early 1970s. Tudor decided to concentrate on composition instead, and so Cage, for the first time in two decades, had to start relying on commissions from other performers, and their respective abilities. Such performers included Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, Margaret Leng Tan, and many others. Aside from music, Cage continued writing books of prose and poetry (mesostics). M was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1973. In January 1978 Cage was invited by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press to engage in printmaking, and Cage would go on to produce series of prints every year until his death; these, together with some late watercolors, constitute the largest portion of his extant visual art. In 1979 Cage's Empty Words was first published by Wesleyan University Press.

1987–92: Final years and death [link]

Music [link]

Early works, rhythmic structure, and new approaches to harmony [link]

Cage's first completed pieces are currently lost. According to the composer, the earliest works were very short pieces for piano, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking in "sensual appeal and expressive power."^[70] Cage then started producing pieces by improvising and writing down the results, until Richard Buhlig stressed to him the importance of structure. Most works from the early 1930s, such as Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Composition for 3 Voices (1934), are highly chromatic and betray Cage's interest in counterpoint. Around the same time, the composer also developed a type of a tone row technique with 25-note rows.^[71] After studies with Schoenberg, who never taught dodecaphony to his students, Cage developed another tone row technique, in which the row was split into short motives, which would then be repeated and transposed according to a set of rules. This approach was first used in Two Pieces for Piano (c. 1935), and then, with modifications, in larger works such as Metamorphosis and Five Songs (both 1938).

Rhythmic proportions in Sonata III of Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano

Soon after Cage started writing percussion music and music for modern dance, he started using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground. In Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) there are four large sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars, and each section is divided into four subsections, the first three of which were all 5 bars long. First Construction (in Metal) (1939) expands on the concept: there are five sections of 4, 3, 2, 3, and 4 units respectively. Each unit contains 16 bars, and is divided the same way: 4 bars, 3 bars, 2 bars, etc. Finally, the musical content of the piece is based on sixteen motives.^[72] Such "nested proportions", as Cage called them, became a regular feature of his music throughout the 1940s. The technique was elevated to great complexity in later pieces such as Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–48), in which many proportions used non-integer numbers (1¼, ¾, 1¼, ¾, 1½, and 1½ for Sonata I, for example),^[73] or A Flower, a song for voice and closed piano, in which two sets of proportions are used simultaneously.^[74]

In late 1940s, Cage started developing further methods of breaking away with traditional harmony. For instance, in String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) Cage first composed a number of gamuts: chords with fixed instrumentation. The piece progresses from one gamut to another. In each instance the gamut was selected only based on whether it contains the note necessary for the melody, and so the rest of the notes do not form any directional harmony.^[24] Concerto for prepared piano (1950–51) used a system of charts of durations, dynamics, melodies, etc., from which Cage would choose using simple geometric patterns.^[24] The last movement of the concerto was a step towards using chance procedures, which Cage adopted soon afterwards.^[75]

Chance [link]

I Ching divination involves obtaining a hexagram by random generation (such as tossing coins), then reading the chapter associated with that hexagram.

Chart system was also used (along with nested proportions) for the large piano work Music of Changes (1951), only here material would be selected from the charts by using the I Ching. All of Cage's music since 1951 was composed using chance procedures, most commonly using the I Ching. For example, works from Music for Piano were based on paper imperfections: the imperfections themselves provided pitches, and the I Ching was used to determine the methods of sound production, or the rhythms, etc.^[76] A whole series of works was created by applying chance operations, i.e. the I Ching, to star charts: Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), and a series of etudes: Etudes Australes (1974–75), Freeman Etudes (1977–90), and Etudes Boreales (1978).^[77] Cage's etudes are all extremely difficult to perform, a characteristic dictated by Cage's social and political views: the difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible"^[78]—this being Cage's answer to the notion that solving the world's political and social problems is impossible.^[79] Cage described himself as an anarchist, and was influenced by Henry David Thoreau.^{[n 5]}

Another series of works applied chance procedures to pre-existing music by other composers: Cheap Imitation (1969; based on Erik Satie), Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978; based on Belcher), and Hymns and Variations (1979). In these works, Cage would borrow the rhythmic structure of the originals and fill it with pitches determined through chance procedures, or just replace some of the originals' pitches.^[80] Yet another series of works, the so-called Number Pieces, all completed during the last five years of the composer's life, make use of time brackets: the score consists of short fragments with indications of when to start and to end them (e.g. from anywhere between 1′15″ and 1′45″, and to anywhere from 2′00″ to 2′30″).^[81]

Cage's method of using the I Ching was far from simple randomization. The procedures varied from composition to composition, and were usually complex. For example, in the case of Cheap Imitation, the exact questions asked to the I Ching were these:

Which of the seven modes, if we take as modes the seven scales beginning on white notes and remaining on white notes, which of those am I using?
Which of the twelve possible chromatic transpositions am I using?
For this phrase for which this transposition of this mode will apply, which note am I using of the seven to imitate the note that Satie wrote?^[82]

In another example of late music by Cage, Etudes Australes, the compositional procedure involved placing a transparent strip on the star chart, identifying the pitches from the chart, transferring them to paper, then asking the I Ching which of these pitches were to remain single, and which should become parts of aggregates (chords), and the aggregates were selected from a table of some 550 possible aggregates, compiled beforehand.^[77]^[83]

Finally, some of Cage's works, particularly those completed during the 1960s, feature instructions to the performer, rather than fully notated music. The score of Variations I (1958) presents the performer with six transparent squares, one with points of various sizes, five with five intersecting lines. The performer combines the squares and uses lines and points as a coordinate system, in which the lines are axes of various characteristics of the sounds, such as lowest frequency, simplest overtone structure, etc.^[84] Some of Cage's graphic scores (e.g. Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Fontana Mix (both 1958)) present the performer with similar difficulties. Still other works from the same period consist just of text instructions. The score of 0'00" (1962; also known as 4'33" No. 2) consists of a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.^[85]

Musicircus (1967) simply invites the performers to assemble and play together. The first Musicircus featured multiple performers and groups in a large space who were all to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatric feel. Many Musicircuses have subsequently been held, and continue to occur even after Cage's death. The English National Opera became the first opera company to hold a Cage Musicircus on 3 March 2012 at the London Colliseum.^[86]. The ENO's Musicircus featured artists including Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and composer Michael Finnissy alongside ENO Music Director Edward Gardner, the ENO Community Choir, ENO Opera Works singers, and a collective of professional and amateur talents performing in the bars and front of house at London's Coliseum Opera House.^[87]

This concept of circus was to remain important to Cage throughout his life and featured strongly in such pieces as Roaratorio, an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), a many-tiered rendering in sound of both his text Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake, and traditional musical and field recordings made around Ireland. The piece was based on James Joyce's famous novel, Finnegans Wake, which was one of Cage's favorite books, and one from which he derived texts for several more of his works.

Improvisation [link]

Since chance procedures were used by Cage to eliminate the composer's and the performer's likes and dislikes from music, Cage disliked the concept of improvisation, which is inevitably linked to the performer's preferences. In a number of works beginning in the 1970s, he found ways to incorporate improvisation. In Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) the performers are asked to use certain species of plants as instruments, for example the cactus. The structure of the pieces is determined through the chance of their choices, as is the musical output; the performers had no knowledge of the instruments. In Inlets (1977) the performers play large water-filled conch shells – by carefully tipping the shell several times, it is possible to achieve a bubble forming inside, which produced sound. Yet, as it is impossible to predict when this would happen, the performers had to continue tipping the shells – as a result the performance was dictated by pure chance.^[88]

Visual art, writings, and other activities [link]

File:Cage-variations-iii-14-small.jpg

Variations III, No. 14, a 1992 print by Cage from a series of 57.

Although Cage started painting in his youth, he gave it up in order to concentrate on music instead. His first mature visual project, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, dates from 1969. The work comprises two lithographs and a group of what Cage called plexigrams: silk screen printing on plexiglas panels. The panels and the lithographs all consist of bits and pieces of words in different typefaces, all governed by chance operations.^[89]

From 1978 to his death Cage worked at Crown Point Press, producing series of prints every year. The earliest project completed there was the etching Score Without Parts (1978), created from fully notated instructions, and based on various combinations of drawings by Henry David Thoreau. This was followed, the same year, by Seven Day Diary, which Cage drew with his eyes closed, but which conformed to a strict structure developed using chance operations. Finally, Thoreau's drawings informed the last works produced in 1978, Signals.^[90]

Between 1979 and 1982 Cage produced a number of large series of prints: Changes and Disappearances (1979–80), On the Surface (1980–82), and Déreau (1982). These were the last works in which he used engraving.^[91] In 1983 he started using various unconventional materials such as cotton batting, foam, etc., and then used stones and fire (Eninka, Variations, Ryoanji, etc.) to create his visual works.^[92] In 1988–1990 he produced watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop. The only film Cage produced was one of the Number Pieces, One¹¹, commissioned by composer and film director Henning Lohner who worked with Cage to produce and direct the 90-minute monochrome film. It was completed only weeks before his death in 1992. One¹¹ consists entirely of images of chance-determined play of electric light. It premiered in Cologne, Germany, on September 19, 1992, accompanied by the live performance of the orchestra piece 103.

Throughout his adult life, Cage was also active as lecturer and writer. Some of his lectures were included in several books he published, the first of which was Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). Silence included not only simple lectures, but also texts executed in experimental layouts, and works such as Lecture on Nothing (1959), which were composed in rhythmic structures. Subsequent books also featured different types of content, from lectures on music to poetry—Cage's mesostics.

Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist: he co-founded the New York Mycological Society with four friends,^[56] and his mycology collection is presently housed by the Special Collections department of the McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reception and influence [link]

Cage's pre-chance works, particularly pieces from the late 1940s such as Sonatas and Interludes, earned critical acclaim: the Sonatas were performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949. Cage's adoption of chance operations in 1951 cost him a number of friendships and led to numerous criticisms from fellow composers. Adherents of serialism such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen dismissed indeterminate music; Boulez, who was once on friendly terms with Cage, criticized him for "adoption of a philosophy tinged with Orientalism that masks a basic weakness in compositional technique."^[93] Prominent critics of serialism, such as the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, were similarly hostile towards Cage: for Xenakis, the adoption of chance in music was "an abuse of language and [...] an abrogation of a composer's function."^[94]

An article by teacher and critic Michael Steinberg, Tradition and Responsibility, criticized avant-garde music in general:

The rise of music that is totally without social commitment also increases the separation between composer and public, and represents still another form of departure from tradition. The cynicism with which this particular departure seems to have been made is perfectly symbolized in John Cage's account of a public lecture he had given: "Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen." While Mr. Cage's famous silent piece [i.e. 4′33″], or his Landscapes for a dozen radio receivers may be of little interest as music, they are of enormous importance historically as representing the complete abdication of the artist's power.^[95]

Cage's aesthetic position was criticized by, among others, prominent writer and critic Douglas Kahn. In his 1999 book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Kahn acknowledged the influence Cage had on culture, but noted that "one of the central effects of Cage's battery of silencing techniques was a silencing of the social."^[96]

While much of Cage's work remains controversial,^{[citation needed]} his influence on countless composers, artists, and writers is notable.^{[citation needed]} After Cage introduced chance,^{[clarification needed]} Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis remained critical, yet all adopted chance procedures in some of their works (although in a much more restricted manner); and Stockhausen's piano writing in his later Klavierstücke was influenced by Cage's Music of Changes and David Tudor.^[97] Other composers who adopted chance procedures in their works included Witold Lutosławski, Mauricio Kagel, and many others.^{[citation needed]} Music in which some of the composition and/or performance is left to chance was labelled aleatoric music—a term popularized by Pierre Boulez.^{[citation needed]} Helmut Lachenmann's work was influenced by Cage's work with extended techniques.^[98]

Cage's rhythmic structure experiments and his interest in sound influenced a number of composers, starting at first with his close American associates Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff (and other American composers, such as La Monte Young), and then spreading to Europe.^{[citation needed]} For example, almost all composers of the English experimental school acknowledge his influence^{[citation needed]}: Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White,^[99] Gavin Bryars, who studied under Cage briefly,^[100] and Howard Skempton. ^[101] The Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu has also cited Cage's influence.^[102]

Cage's influence was also acknowledged by rock acts such as Sonic Youth (who performed some of the Number Pieces^[103]) and Stereolab (who named a song after Cage^[104]), composer and rock and jazz guitarist Frank Zappa,^[105] and various noise music artists and bands: indeed, one writer traced the origin of noise music to 4′33″.^[106] The development of electronic music was also influenced by Cage: in the mid-1970s Brian Eno's label Obscure Records released works by Cage.^[107] Prepared piano, which Cage popularized, is featured heavily on Aphex Twin's 2001 album Drukqs.^[108] Cage's work as musicologist helped popularize Erik Satie's music,^[109]^[110] and his friendship with Abstract expressionist artists such as Robert Rauschenberg helped introduce his ideas into visual art. Cage's ideas also found their way into sound design: for example, Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom cited Cage's work as a major influence.^[111]

Archives [link]

The archive of the John Cage Trust is held at Bard College in upstate New York.[1].

The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection held by the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts contains most of the composer's musical manuscripts, including sketches, worksheets, realizations, and unfinished works.
The John Cage Papers are held in Special Collections and Archives department of Wesleyan University's Olin Library in Middletown, Connecticut. They contain manuscripts, interviews, fan mail, and ephemera. Other material, including clippings, gallery and exhibition catalogs, a collection of Cage's books and serials, posters, objects, exhibition and literary announcement postcards, and brochures from conferences and other organizations
The John Cage Collection at Northwestern University in Illinois contains the composer's correspondence, ephemera, and the Notations collection.

Footnotes [link]

^ Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 1–2. Cage mentions a working model of the universe that his father had built, and that the scientists who saw it could not explain how it worked and refused to believe it.
^ Different sources give different details of their first meeting. Pritchett, in Grove, implies that Cage met Schoenberg in New York City: "Cage followed Schoenberg to Los Angeles in 1934". In a 1976 interview quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 5, Cage mentions that he "went to see him [Schoenberg] in Los Angeles."
^ Recent research has shown that Cage may have met Tudor almost a decade earlier, in 1942, through Jean Erdman: Gann, Kyle (2008). "Cleaning Up a Life". an ARTSJOURNAL weblog. http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2008/09/cleaning_up_a_life.html. Retrieved August 4, 2009.
^ Technically, it was his second, for Cage previously collaborated with Kathleen Hoover on a biographical volume on Virgil Thomson, which was published in 1959.
^ Cage self-identified as an anarchist in a 1985 interview: "I'm an anarchist. I don't know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don't like government! And I don't like institutions! And I don't have any confidence in even good institutions." John Cage at Seventy: An Interview by Stephen Montague. American Music, Summer 1985. Ubu.com. Accessed May 24, 2007.

Notes [link]

^ Pritchett, Grove: "He has had a greater impact on music in the 20th century than any other American composer."
^ ^a ^b "John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted With Sound, Dies". New York Times. August 13, 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0905.html. Retrieved July 21, 2007. "John Cage, the prolific and influential composer whose Minimalist works have long been a driving force in the world of music, dance and art, died yesterday at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 79 years old and lived in Manhattan."
^ Leonard, George J. (1995). Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage. University of Chicago Press. p. 120 ("...when Harvard University Press called him, in a 1990 book advertisement, "without a doubt the most influential composer of the last half-century," amazingly, that was too modest."). ISBN 978-0-226-47253-9.
^ Greene, David Mason (2007). Greene's Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers. Reproducing Piano Roll Fnd.. p. 1407 ("[...] John Cage is probably the most influential ... of all American composers to date."). ISBN 978-0-385-14278-6.
^ Perloff, Junkerman, 1994, 93.
^ Bernstein, Hatch, 2001, 43–45.
^ Kostelanetz 2003, 69–70
^ Reviews cited in Fetterman 1996, 69
^ Nicholls 2002, 80: "Most critics agree that Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) is the finest composition of Cage's early period."
^ Cage 1973, 12.
^ ^a ^b Nicholls 2002, 4.
^ Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 1. For details on Cage's ancestry, see, for example, Nicholls 2002, 4–6.
^ ^a ^b Cage, John (1991). "An Autobiographical Statement". Southwest Review. http://www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.html. Retrieved March 14, 2007.
^ Recording and notes: John Cage – Complete Piano Music Vol.7: Pieces 1933–1950. Steffen Schleiermacher (piano). MDG 613 0789-2.
^ Kostelanetz 2003, 2.
^ Nicholls 2002, 21.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Kostelanetz 2003, 4.
^ Nicholls 2002, 8.
^ Perloff, Junkerman, 1994, 79.
^ Perloff, Junkerman 1994, 80.
^ Nicholls 2002, 22.
^ ^a ^b Perloff, Junkerman, 1994, 81.
^ Cage quoted in Perloff, Junkerman, 1994, 81.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Pritchett, Grove.
^ Cage quoted in Nicholls 2002, 24.
^ Kostelanetz 2003, 61.
^ Nicholls 2002, 24.
^ ^a ^b Kostelanetz 2003, 7.
^ ^a ^b Pritchett 2003, 9.
^ This conversation was recounted many times by Cage himself: see Silence, p. 261; A Year from Monday, p. 44; interviews quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, pp. 5, 105; etc.
^ ^a ^b ^c Kostelanetz 2003, 6.
^ Cage interview quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 105.
^ Cage 1973, 260.
^ For details on Cage's first meeting with Xenia, see Kostelanetz 2003, 7–8; for details on Cage's homosexual relationship with Don Sample, an American he met in Europe, as well as details on the Cage-Kashevaroff marriage, see Perloff, Junkerman 1994, 81, 86.
^ Perloff, Junkerman, 86
^ ^a ^b ^c Revill 1993, 55.
^ Kostelanetz 2003, 43.
^ Reinhardt, Lauriejean. John Cage's "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs", 7. Available online.
^ Cage 1973, 127.
^ Revill 1993, 108.
^ Cage 1973, 158.
^ Bredow 2012.
^ Revill 1993, 101.
^ Pritchett 1993, 105.
^ Nicholls 2002, 101.
^ Kostelanetz 2003, 68.
^ Pritchett 1993, 97.
^ Revill 1993, 91.
^ John Cage, in an interview with Miroslav Sebestik, 1991. From: Listen, documentary by Miroslav Sebestik. ARTE France Développement, 2003.
^ Pritchett 1993, 71.
^ Pritchett 1993, 78.
^ Revill 1993, 142.
^ Revill 1993, 143–149.
^ Revill 1993, 166.
^ Revill 1993, 174
^ ^a ^b ^c Emmerik, Paul van (2009). "A John Cage Compendium". Paul van Emmerik. http://www.xs4all.nl/~cagecomp/. Retrieved August 6, 2009.
^ "Guide to the Center for Advanced Studies Records, 1958 – 1969". Wesleyan University. http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/schome/FAs/ce1000-137.html. Retrieved September 4, 2010.
^ "The Many Views of Betty Freeman: Betty Freeman's Commissions". NewMusicBox. 2000. http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=846. Retrieved August 8, 2009.
^ Alex Ross (December 4, 1992). "S.E.M. Evokes John Cage as Teacher". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/24/arts/review-music-sem-evokes-john-cage-as-teacher.html. Retrieved October 6, 2010.
^ Revill 1993, 208.
^ ^a ^b Revill 1993, 228.
^ Pritchett, James. 2004. "John Cage: Imitations/Transformations". In James Pritchett, Writings on John Cage (and others). (Online resource, accessed June 5, 2008)
^ Revill 1993, 247.
^ Fetterman 1996, 191.
^ Haskins 2004.
^ Revill 1993, 295.
^ Kostelanetz, Richard. 2000. John Cage: Writer: Selected Texts, xvii. Cooper Square Press, 2nd edition. ISBN 978-0-8154-1034-8
^ "John Cage (1912–1992) – Find A Grave Memorial". January 1, 2000. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=1461. Retrieved August 3, 2009.
^ "Dance great Cunningham dies at 90". BBC News. July 28, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8171036.stm. Retrieved September 3, 2009.
^ Pritchett 1993, 6.
^ Pritchett 1993, 7.
^ Nicholls 2002, 71–74.
^ Pritchett 1993, 29–33.
^ Notes in the score: A Flower. Edition Peters 6711. Copyright 1960 by Henmar Press.
^ Pritchett, James. 1988. "From Choice to Chance: John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano." Perspectives of New Music 26, no. 1 (Fall): 50–81.
^ Pritchett 1993, 94.
^ ^a ^b Nicholls 2002, 139.
^ Perloff, Junkerman 1994, 140.
^ Pritchett, James. 1994a. "John Cage: Freeman Etudes", CD liner notes to: John Cage, Freeman Etudes (Books 1 and 2) (Irvine Arditti, violin), Mode 32. (Accessed August 14, 2008)
^ Pritchett 1993, 197.
^ Pritchett 1993, 200.
^ Kostelanetz 2003, 84.
^ Kostelanetz 2003, 92.
^ Pritchett 1993, 136.
^ Pritchett 1993, 144–146.
^ http://classical-iconoclast.blogspot.com/2012/01/eno-presents-john-cage-musicircus.html
^ http://www.eno.org/see-whats-on/productions/production-page.php?&itemid=2007
^ Kostelanetz 2004, 92–96.
^ Nicholls 2002, 112–113.
^ Nicholls 2002, 113–115.
^ Nicholls 2002, 115–118.
^ Nicholls 2002, 118–122.
^ Boulez, Pierre. 1964. Alea. Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn – Winter, 1964), 42–53
^ Bois, Mario, and Xenakis, Iannis. 1980. The Man and his Music: A Conversation with the Composer and a Description of his Works, 12. Greenwood Press Reprint.
^ Steinberg, Michael. 1962. Tradition and Responsibility. Perspectives of New Music 1, 1962, 154–159.
^ Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, 165. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
^ Maconie, Robin. 1976. The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, with a foreword by Karlheinz Stockhausen, 141–144. London and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315429-3
^ Ryan, David. 1999. Interview with Helmut Lachenmann, p. 21. Tempo, New Ser., No. 210. (Oct., 1999), pp. 20–24.
^ Michael Parsons. 1976. Systems in Art and Music. The Musical Times, Vol. 17, No. 1604. (Oct., 1976), 815–818.
^ "Gavin Bryars biography etc". Gavin Bryars' Official Web-site. http://www.gavinbryars.com/Pages/bio_fr.html. Retrieved September 12, 2009.
^ Potter, Keith. "Skempton, Howard", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed March 12 2006), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
^ Burt, Peter. 2001. The Music of Toru Takemitsu, 94. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-78220-1.
^ Lopez, Antonio (December 1999 / January 2000). "Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore: On punk music, staying fresh, amd the strange bridge between art and rock". Thirsty Ear Magazine. http://www.thirstyearfestival.com/interviews/sonic.html. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
^ Morris, Chris (August 17, 1997). "Hold The Ketchup On That Stereolab". Yahoo! Music. http://www.music.yahoo.ca/read/interview/12052849. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
^ Lowe, Kelly Fisher (2006). The Words and Music of Frank Zappa. Praeger Publishers. p. 57. ISBN 0-275-98779-5.
^ Paul Hegarty, Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music, pp. 86–98 in Life in the Wires (2004) eds. Arthur Kroker & Marilouise Kroker, NWP Ctheory Books, Victoria, Canada
^ Jack, Adrian (1975). ""I Want to be a Magnet for Tapes" (interview with Brian Eno)". Time Out. http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/timeo75a.html. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
^ Worby, Robert (October 23, 2002). "Richard Aphex, John Cage and the Prepared Piano". Warp Records. http://warp.net/records/aphex-twin/richard-aphex-john-cage-and-the-prepared-piano. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
^ Orledge, Robert (1990). Satie the Composer. Cambridge University Press. p. 259. ISBN 978-0-521-35037-2.
^ Shlomowitz, Matthew. 1999. Cage's Place In the Reception of Satie. Part of the PhD at the University of California at San Diego, USA. Available online.
^ LoBrutto, Vincent (1994). Sound-on-Film: Interviews With Creators of Film Sound. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 241–42. ISBN 978-0-275-94443-8.

References [link]

Bernstein, David W., and Hatch, Christopher, eds. 2001. Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-04407-6
Boulez, Pierre, and Cage, John. 1995. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Edited by Robert Samuels and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, translated by Robert Samuels. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-48558-4
Bredow, Moritz von. 2012. "Rebellische Pianistin. Das Leben der Grete Sultan zwischen Berlin und New York." (Biography). Schott Music, Mainz, Germany. ISBN 978-3-7957-0800-9
Brown, Kathan. 2001. John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind. Crown Point Press. ISBN 1-891300-16-4, ISBN 978-1-891300-16-5
Cage, John. 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press Paperback (first edition 1961). ISBN 0-8195-6028-6
Eldred, Michael 1995/2006 Heidegger's Hölderlin and John Cage www.arte-fact.org
Eldred, Michael 2010 The Quivering of Propriation: A Parallel Way to Music, Section II.3 New Music is the Other Music (Cage) www.arte-fact.org
Fetterman, William. 1996. John Cage's Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances. Routledge. ISBN 3-7186-5643-4
Haskins, Rob. 2004. "An Anarchic Society of Sounds": The Number Pieces of John Cage. PhD dissertation, Musicology, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.
Kostelanetz, Richard. 2003. Conversing with John Cage, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-93792-2
Nicholls, David (ed.). 2002. The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-78968-0
Nicholls, David. 2007. John Cage. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-03215-2
Patterson, David W. (ed.). John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-8153-2995-4
Perloff, Marjorie, and Junkerman, Charles. 1994. John Cage: Composed in America. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-226-66057-5
Pritchett, James. 1993. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56544-8
Pritchett, James, and Kuhn, Laura. "John Cage", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed December 15 2006), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
Revill, David. 1993. The Roaring Silence: John Cage – a Life. Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1-55970-220-6, ISBN 978-1-55970-220-1
Taruskin, Richard. 2005. Oxford History of Western Music, The. Vol. 5. Oxford: Oxford UP, Inc. Indeterminacy pp. 55–101.

External links [link]

	Book: John Cage
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Cage

General information and catalogues [link]

Official Website
John Cage Database, includes a complete catalogue of Cage's music with details on individual compositions, as well as a discography, a bibliography and a list of forthcoming performances of Cage's work.
A John Cage Compendium, website by Cage scholar Paul van Emmerik, in collaboration with performer Herbert Henck and András Wilheim. Includes exhaustive catalogues and bibliography, chronology of Cage's life, etc.
Larry Solomon's John Cage Pages, a complete catalogue of Cage's music and a filmography, as well as other materials.
James Pritchett: Writings, articles on Cage's music in HTML and PDF form by Cage scholar James Pritchett.
Edition Peters: John Cage Biography and Works, Cage's principal publisher since 1961.
Guide to the John Cage Mycology Collection
Silence/Stories: related texts and poems by, among others, Lowell Cross, AP Crumlish, Karlheinz Essl, Raymond Federman, August Highland, George Koehler, Richard Kostelanetz, Ian S. Macdonald, Beat Streuli, Dan Waber, Sigi Waters and John Whiting
A Project by John Cage called ORGAN2/ASLSP is the longest concert ever created.
Works by or about John Cage in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
(French) A biography of John Cage, from IRCAM's website.
Artist Biography and a list of video works by and about John Cage at Electronic Arts Intermix eai.org.

Link collections [link]

John Cage Online

Specific topics [link]

Kasper, Ulrike. "Sounds Visions, The Work of Jacques Pourcher, Perspectives on John Cage", essay on the exhibition "John Cage and Jacques Pourcher, Works on Paper", Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA.
The Music of Chance, article from the UK Guardian newspaper, quotes from various people who knew Cage.
ORGAN²/ASLSP: As Slow as Possible – John-Cage-Orgelprojekt Halberstadt, Web site about a current ongoing performance of As Slow As Possible, which began in 2001 and is scheduled to have a duration of 639 years
'Silence and Change / Five Hanau Silence': Articles and documents on a project of John Cage, Claus Sterneck and Wolfgang Sterneck in benefit of a squated culture center in Hanau (Germany) in 1991, (English / German).

Listening [link]

Media [link]

John Cage at UbuWeb: historical, sound, film.
John Cage's etchings at the Crown Point Press website
Art of the States: John Cage, six works by the composer
Indeterminacy, Cage's short stories taken from various publications and accessed in random order.
FontanaMixer: computer program by Karlheinz Essl which generates a realtime version of John Cage's "Fontana Mix" (1958)
Other Minds Archive: John Cage interviewed by Jonathan Cott, streaming audio
Other Minds Archive: John Cage and David Tudor Concert at The San Francisco Museum of Art (January 16, 1965), streaming audio
27, 2002 Suite for Toy Piano (1948) performed by Margaret Leng Tan at the Other Minds Music Festival in 1999 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.
1982 performance of Speech for 5 radios and reel (1955) on YouTube
Water Walk on YouTube from Cage's appearance on the game show I've Got a Secret in January 1960.
The Anarchy of Silence. John Cage and Experimental Art (2009) a lecture by Julia E. Robinson on occasion of Cage's exhibition at the MACBA, Barcelona
Notes towards a re-reading of the “Roaratorio” the work of John Cage and his special relationship to radio at Ràdio Web MACBA
The Rest isn't Silence... it doesn't exist! Analytical material and recordings going back to the first rehearsal and performance of Imaginary Landscape No 4 in 1951.

v t e John Cage

Major compositions	Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) Music of Changes (1951) Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) 4′33″ (1952) Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958) Variations (1958–67) Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62) Cheap Imitation (1969) HPSCHD (1969) Song Books (1970) Etudes Australes (1974–75) Freeman Etudes (1977–90) Roaratorio (1979) Ryoanji (1983) Europeras (1987–91) Number Pieces (1987–92)

Collaborators and influences	Norman O. Brown Daniel Charles Ananda Coomaraswamy Merce Cunningham Marcel Duchamp Jasper Johns Charles Olson Robert Rauschenberg Demetrio Stratos D. T. Suzuki David Tudor Edgard Varèse

Books	Silence (1961) A Year from Monday (1968) M (1973) Pour les oiseaux (1976) Empty Words (1979) X (1983) Anarchy (1988)

Related articles	Indeterminacy in music List of compositions Works for prepared piano

Persondata
Name	Cage, John
Alternative names	Cage, John Milton, Jr.
Short description	Composer, philosopher, printmaker, writer
Date of birth	September 5, 1912
Place of birth	Los Angeles, United States
Date of death	August 12, 1992
Place of death	New York City, United States

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

Applied mathematics

Related Topics

Duchamp, Marcel Filmography

Famous quotes by Marcel Duchamp:

"I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art -- and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."

"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."

"Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another."

"I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products"

"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."

"I don't believe in art. I believe in artists."

Make changes yourself !

Contents

[edit] The Large Glass

[edit] Etant donnés

Related pages:

Contents

Related pages: