Marcel Duchamp ( 1887-1968 )

Marcel Duchamp ( 1887-1968 )

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was a French artist, known for his contributions to the Dada movement and for his influence on other artists that followed him. He was born in Blainville–sur–Crevon, a small town in northern France where his father served as a notary. His mother was artistically inclined and thus Duchamp became interested in sketching and painting when he was a teenager. At the age of seventeen, he moved to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian. As a young artist, he was influenced by Cubism and Futurism, the two new art movements that were developing at the time. The Cubist artists reduced objects (or people) to basic shapes and tried to show different sides of images at once. The Futurists wanted to find ways to depict ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...In some cases he also created art by altering posters found on the street or prints of works by other artists.

During the period of World War I (1914–1918), Duchamp became associated with a group of Parisian artists known as the Dadaists. Dada was an art movement that was characterized by a "spirit of anarchic nihilism." The Dadaists were reacting to the madness of the European culture that had found itself engaged in a bloody, devastating war. In the words of Tomkins, "dada's organized insanity was a direct response to the nightmare of unending, meaningless slaughter in the trenches." Another writer, Sarane Alexandrian, describes Dada as "a detonation of anger which showed itself in insults and buffoonery." The Dadaists also attacked the traditional values of art. As claimed by Hans Richter in his book on the Dada movement, these attacks were meant to mock the pretensions of European culture and the traditional obsession of artists, art critics and art lovers with "all that is holy."

Dada is often referred to as "anti–art" and the Dada movement is often called an "anti–movement." As noted by Alexandrian, the Dadaists seemed to be interested in rejecting everything that existed in art and culture at the time. In Alexandrian's words, "it was an anti–movement which opposed not only all the

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