With an introduction by Robert Motherwell and an appreciation by Jasper Johns "Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneer artists, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art. . . "In the 1920s Duchamp gave up, quit painting. He allowed, perhaps encouraged, the attendant mythology. One thought of his decision, his willing this stopping. Yet on one occasion, he said it was not like that. He spoke of breaking a leg. 'You don't mean to do it,' he said. "The Large Glass. A greenhouse for his intuition. Erotic machinery, the Bride, held in a see-through cage-'a Hilarious Picture.' Its cross references of sight and thought, the changing focus of the eyes and mind, give fresh sense to the time and space we occupy, negate any concern with art as transportation. No end is in view in this fragment of a new perspective. 'In the end you lose interest, so I didn't feel the necessity to finish it.' "He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, 'a new thought for that object.' "The art community feels Duchamp's presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here."--Jasper Johns, from Marcel Duchamp: An Appreciation

“Girst elegantly unravels the skeins of Duchamp’s thinking. . . . An essential compendium for puzzling out an essential artist.” —Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation Among the most influential artists of the last hundred years, Marcel Duchamp holds great allure for many contemporary artists worldwide and is largely considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern art. Despite this popularity, books on Duchamp are often hyper-theoretical, rarely presenting the artist in an accessible way. This new book explores the artist’s life and work through short, alphabetical dictionary entries that introduce his legacy in a clear and engaging way. From alchemy and anatomy to Warhol and windows, The Duchamp Dictionary offers a pithy and readable text that draws on in-depth scholarship and the very latest research. Thomas Girst includes close to 200 entries on the most interesting and important artworks, relationships, people, and ideas in Duchamp’s life—from The Bicycle Wheel and Fountain to Walter and Louise Arensberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Katherine Dreier, and Arturo Schwarz. Delightful, newly commissioned illustrations introduce each letter of the alphabet and accompany select entries, capturing the irreverent spirit of the artist himself.

Octavio Paz conveying “his awareness of Duchamp as a great cautionary figure in our culture, warning us with jest and quiet scandals of the menacing encroachment of criticism, science and even art.” —New York Times Book Review

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition The Essential Duchamp, Tokyo National Museum, October 2-December 9, 2018; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, December 22, 2018-April 7, 2019; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, April-August 2019"--Colophon.

Kant after Duchamp brings together eight essays around a central thesis with many implications for the history of avant-gardes. Although Duchamp's readymades broke with all previously known styles, de Duve observes that he made the logic of modernist art practice the subject matter of his work, a shift in aesthetic judgment that replaced the classical "this is beautiful" with "this is art." De Duve employs this shift (replacing the word "beauty" by the word "art") in a rereading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that reveals the hidden links between the radical experiments of Duchamp and the Dadaists and mainstream pictorial modernism.Part I of the book revolves around Duchamp's famous/infamous Fountain. Part II explores his passage from painting to the readymades, from art in particular to art in general. Part III looks at the aesthetic and ethical consequences of the replacement of "beauty" with "art" in Kant's Third Critique. Finally, part IV attempts to reconstruct an "archaeology" of modernism that paves the way for a renewed understanding of our postmodern condition.The essays : Art Was a Proper Name. Given the Richard Mutt Case. The Readymade and the Tube of Paint. The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas. Kant after Duchamp. Do Whatever. Archaeology of Pure Modernism. Archaeology of Practical Modernism.

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

In 1964, Calvin Tomkins spent a number of afternoons interviewing Marcel Duchamp in his apartment in New York City. It reveals him to be a man and an artist whose playful principles toward living freed him to make art that was as unpredictable, complex, and surprising as life itself

A New York Times Notable Book of 1996 Booklist Editor's Choice, 1996 The celebrated, full-scale life of the century's most influential artist. One of the giants of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp changed the course of modern art. Visual arts, music, dance, performance--nothing was ever the same again because he had shifted art's focus from the retinal to the mental. Duchamp sidestepped the banal and sentimental to find the relationship between symbol and object and to unearth the concepts underlying art itself. The author's intimacy with the subject and glorious prose style, wit, and deep sense of irony--"the only antidote to despair"--make him the perfect writer to bring this stunning life story to intelligent readers everywhere.