Marcel Dunchamp
Dunchamp is usually associated with his ready-made sculptures, which features one or two everyday objects, a urinal, for example, or a stool topped by a bicycle wheel. The artist's designation of these objects as art proved a highly influential ideology which remains pertinent for many artists working today. However, Dunchamp first achieved notoriety for Nude Descending a staircase, 1912, a painting in which he combined the principles of Cubism and Futurism. With Picabia, Dunchamp was the leader of the New York Dada movement and his invention of Dada's anti-art dictum. In 1915 Dunchamp began creating his major work, The Bride... He declared it "definitively unfinished" in 1923. This was another manifestation of his abandonment of conventional media and his interest in three-dimensional objects suggesting the technology of machines or instruments. These appeared to be scientific gadgets but neither functioned as such served any purpose. The Bride... is elaborate and impressive, concocted of oil, varnish, lead and dust mounted between glass panels. It is an obscure, symbolic work, coded representation of the sexual act as a mechanistic and endlessly frustrating procedure.
Masterpieces:
Fountain
In advance of a broken arm
Nude descending a staircase
The bride stripped bare by her bachelors.
text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.