St. Petersburg State University of Culture

Art History Department

World Culture Faculty

Summary

The Influence of Marcel Duchamp's Ideas on the Development

of Art in the 20th Century

By Baranova Polina

St. Petersburg

2017

Сontents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………….4

The Influence of Marcel Duchamp's Ideas on the Development of Art in the 20th Century……………………………………………………………………………..5

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….9

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………10

Abstract: The summary deals with the study of Marcel Duchamp’s creative experiment in the field of the ready-made and of painting. In the context of the history of art analyzes the influence of his ideas on the work of surrealists, of artists of pop-art and conceptualism.

Keywords: ready-made, artists, influence, development, artistic experiment, study, interpretation, painting, M. Duchamp.

Introduction

At present, modern art pays dearly for popularization. Various simple formulas appear which aim at making new tendencies intelligible. These are then followed not only by the public in general but also by the artists themselves. As a result, the artist gets tied down by the new tendencies which ought to open up new horizons. Therefore, very soon, these simple formulas become tedious and are replaced by others – at the same time, all the artists who depended on them find themselves stalled. At time even the history of modern art has to be retroactively re-evaluated. The success of conceptualism made Marcel Duchamp, until then neglected, one of the most significant personalities of our times.

The book under discussion is named «The world of Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968».¹ In it, the Duchamp is represented as an extraordinarily complex figure. There is Duchamp the spontaneous painter and Duchamp the speculative intellectual. There is the Duchamp who constructs object with the precision of an engineer, and the Duchamp who reduces the creative act to the selection of banal objects. And all of these aspects exist within the same person, both consecutively and concurrently. The usual approach by critics is to select some facets of Duchamp’s personality and ignore others.

The study of M. Duchamp's creativity will make it possible to clarify the main issues related to the analysis, interpretation and aesthetic evaluation of contemporary art objects.

The influence of m. Duchamp on the development of art in the

20Th century

The discovery that Marcel Duchamp was one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century has been a recent development in modern art history. Not many critics would have assigned him such a leading role before 1950, and some of our esthetic guardians are out raged by the immense reputation given to him in recent years. Like everything else about Duchamp, this reputation is firmly rooted in paradox.

Like most young artists, he began by painting the subjects closest to him – his family and friends. That he had a good grasp of conventional techniques can be seen in the his captivating watercolor portraits. He has entered here into his own unique realm and produced an utterly new from of painting.

Duchamp found the cubists singularly lacking in humor, at least where their art was concerned. He took no part in their endless discussions of cubist theory, which bored him stiff, and gained a reputation for shyness as a result. In a single painting that contained elements of both cubism and futurism, he had not only caught up with his own ear but had gone ahead of it. He however, lacked the temperament for competitive modernism. Characteristically, though, Duchamp did not choose to pursue this highly original course any further. Duchamp did very little painting after 1912, creating the first of his 'readymades' in 1913.The commercialization of art, which he saw beginning right after the First World War, almost certainly influenced his own withdrawal from painting in 1923.