Thursday, January 24, 2013

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 and died in 1968.  He was a french artist that was involved in the avant-garde movement and helped to shape western art.  He is famous for such works like "the fountain" and "nude descending a staircase".  He spent a fair amount of time working with paint, but then began to move away from painting and more towards drawing and didn't do much painting work after 1912.  He tried to avoid what he called "painterly" tendencies in his later work.  As he moved away from "retinal" art, he began to work on "The large glass" and other kinetic forms of art.  He then gave up art to spend the rest of his live devoted towards the mastery of chess.  He has been referenced in many other pieces of art today, as well as numerous times in the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes"