Top 100 Marcel Duchamp Quotes
#1. Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.
Marcel Duchamp
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.
Marcel Duchamp
#6. Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.
Marcel Duchamp
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.
Marcel Duchamp
#11. The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp
#12. 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
#13. If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe.
Marcel Duchamp
#14. I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.
Marcel Duchamp
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.
Marcel Duchamp
#18. From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada.
Marcel Duchamp
#20. 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
#21. I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.
Marcel Duchamp
#22. Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.
Marcel Duchamp
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.'
Marcel Duchamp
#27. I wanted to kill art for myself ... ... a new thought for that object.
Marcel Duchamp
#28. I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.
Marcel Duchamp
#29. 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
#30. In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society
Marcel Duchamp
#31. I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Marcel Duchamp
#32. In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn.
Marcel Duchamp
#33. This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life.
Marcel Duchamp
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.
Marcel Duchamp
#37. In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.
Marcel Duchamp
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.
Marcel Duchamp
#42. Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.
Marcel Duchamp
#44. '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
#45. 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
#46. Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
Marcel Duchamp
#47. 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
#48. Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.
Marcel Duchamp
#49. 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
#50. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote in advance of the broken arm .
Marcel Duchamp
#51. Words such as truth, art, veracity, or anything are stupid in themselves.
Marcel Duchamp
#52. 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
#53. I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.
Marcel Duchamp
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.
Marcel Duchamp
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.
Marcel Duchamp
#60. 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
#61. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.
Marcel Duchamp
#70. There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.
Marcel Duchamp
#71. 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
#73. In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.
Marcel Duchamp
#74. Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.
Marcel Duchamp
#75. My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.
Marcel Duchamp
#76. An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.
Marcel Duchamp
#77. When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.
Marcel Duchamp
#78. Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.
Marcel Duchamp
#79. 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
#80. There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening.
Marcel Duchamp
#81. I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
Marcel Duchamp
#83. 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
#84. Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.
Marcel Duchamp
#85. I was highly attracted to chess for forty or forty-five years; then, little by little, my enthusiasm lessened.
Marcel Duchamp
#86. It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.
Marcel Duchamp
#87. Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.
Marcel Duchamp
#88. For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past.
Marcel Duchamp
#89. As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good - I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other.
Marcel Duchamp
#90. No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.
Marcel Duchamp
#91. I would have to think about it for two or three months before I decided to do something which would have meaning. And it would have to be more than just an impression or pleasure. I would need an objective, a meaning. That is the only thing that could help me.
Marcel Duchamp
#92. 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
#93. What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'
Marcel Duchamp
#94. 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
#95. Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.
Marcel Duchamp
#96. My stay in Munich was the scene of my complete liberation.
Marcel Duchamp
#97. Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.
Marcel Duchamp
#98. 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
#99. 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
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