Marcel Duchamp Quotes & Sayings

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible. — Marcel Duchamp

The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it. — Marcel Duchamp

For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past. — Marcel Duchamp

All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis. — Marcel Duchamp

Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art. — Marcel Duchamp

Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom. — Marcel Duchamp

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'? — Marcel Duchamp

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure. — Marcel Duchamp

One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination ... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even. — Marcel Duchamp

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity. — Marcel Duchamp

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess. — Marcel Duchamp

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy. — Marcel Duchamp

Society takes what it wants. The artist himself does not count, because there is no actual existence for the work of art. The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something - like electricity. But the onlooker has the last word, and it is always posterity that makes the masterpiece. The artist should not concern himself with this, because it has nothing to do with him. — Marcel Duchamp

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting. — Marcel Duchamp

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes. — Marcel Duchamp

There is no solution because there is no problem. — Marcel Duchamp

You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste. — Marcel Duchamp

There's no solution, because there's no problem — Marcel Duchamp

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it. — Marcel Duchamp

When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much. — Marcel Duchamp

One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning. — Marcel Duchamp

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products. — Marcel Duchamp

The life of a chess master is much more difficult than that of an artist - much more depressing. An artist knows that someday there'll be recognition and monetary reward, but for the chess master there is little public recognition and absolutely no hope of supporting himself by his endeavors. 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. — Marcel Duchamp

In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible. — Marcel Duchamp

It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines. I am simply working out my own ideas in my own way. — Marcel Duchamp

In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society — Marcel Duchamp

I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not. — Marcel Duchamp

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end. — Marcel Duchamp

I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don't do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years. — Marcel Duchamp

Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage. — Marcel Duchamp

I was poking fun at myself most of all. — Marcel Duchamp

I like living, breathing better than working ... my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria. — Marcel Duchamp

This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life. — Marcel Duchamp

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. — Marcel Duchamp

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz) — Marcel Duchamp

I thought to discourage aesthetics ... I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty. — Marcel Duchamp

There is no solution, for there is no problem. — Marcel Duchamp

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves. — Marcel Duchamp

My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game. — Marcel Duchamp

I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say. — Marcel Duchamp

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions! — Marcel Duchamp

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in. — Marcel Duchamp

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. — Marcel Duchamp

I never finished the 'Large Glass' because, after working on it for eight years, I probably got interested in something else; also, I was tired. It may be that, subconsciously, I never intended to finish it because the word 'finish' implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them. — Marcel Duchamp

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T. — Marcel Duchamp

Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally. — Marcel Duchamp

In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting. — Marcel Duchamp

I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist. — Marcel Duchamp

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. — Marcel Duchamp

In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case. — Marcel Duchamp

I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist,' as compared to 'believer.' And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is. — 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. (On giving up art to play chess) — Marcel Duchamp

The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me. — Marcel Duchamp

The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word. — Marcel Duchamp

One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced, and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start, one doesn't realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn't realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated, and one is far from it! — Marcel Duchamp

When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism. — Marcel Duchamp

Chess is a sport. A violent sport. — Marcel Duchamp

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing. — Marcel Duchamp

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression. — Marcel Duchamp

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. — Marcel Duchamp

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century. — Marcel Duchamp

I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no? — Marcel Duchamp

Marcel, no more painting; go get a job. — Marcel Duchamp

It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it. — Marcel Duchamp

I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it. — Marcel Duchamp

In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn. — Marcel Duchamp

Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it. — Marcel Duchamp

My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique. — Marcel Duchamp

I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal. — Marcel Duchamp

Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what has already been done - even though you may think you're giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself. — Marcel Duchamp

In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase. — Marcel Duchamp

Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that you 'are,' and in order to express it, you have built a little alphabet, and you make your words from it. — Marcel Duchamp

What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs. I don't want any more. If I had a lot, I would have to care for it, worry about it. — Marcel Duchamp

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch. — Marcel Duchamp

My idea was to chose 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 — Marcel Duchamp

Art is all a matter of personality. — Marcel Duchamp

A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality. — Marcel Duchamp

I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance. — Marcel Duchamp

I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind. — Marcel Duchamp

My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere. — Marcel Duchamp

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.' — Marcel Duchamp

I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other. — Marcel Duchamp

All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much. — Marcel Duchamp

The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem — Marcel Duchamp

Destruction is also creation. — Marcel Duchamp

I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work. — Marcel Duchamp

What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap. — Marcel Duchamp

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art. — Marcel Duchamp

Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general. — Marcel Duchamp

Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it. — Marcel Duchamp

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists. — Marcel Duchamp

Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase. — Marcel Duchamp

There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing. — Marcel Duchamp

The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination. — Marcel Duchamp

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws. — Marcel Duchamp

Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about. — Marcel Duchamp

The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it. — Marcel Duchamp

I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do. — Marcel Duchamp

I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished. — Marcel Duchamp

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories. — Marcel Duchamp