AzizArt Aug 2019

AzizArt
August 2019
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Director: Aziz Anzabi
Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi
Translator : Asra Yaghoubi
Research: Zohreh Nazari
Iranian art department:
Mohadese Yaghoubi
1-Marcel Duchamp
21-Fahrelnissa Zeid
http://www.aziz-anzabi.com

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp
28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968
was a French-American painter,
sculptor, chess player, and writer
whose work is associated with
Cubism, Dada, and conceptual
art.He was careful about his use
of the term Dada and was not
directly associated with Dada
groups. Duchamp is commonly
regarded, along with Pablo Picasso
and Henri Matisse, as one of the
three artists who helped to define
the revolutionary developments
in
the plastic arts in the opening
decades of the 20th century,
responsible for significant
developments in painting and
sculpture.Duchamp has had an
immense impact on twentiethcentury
and twenty first-century
art, and he had a seminal
influence on the development of
conceptual art. By World War I, he
had rejected the work of many of
his fellow artists (such as Henri
Matisse) as "retinal" art, intended
only to please the eye. Instead,
Duchamp wanted to use art to
serve the mind.
Early life and education
Marcel Duchamp was born at
Blainville-Crevon in Normandy,
France, and grew up in a family that
enjoyed cultural activities. The art
of painter and engraver Émile
Frédéric Nicolle , his maternal
grandfather, filled the house, and
the family liked to play chess, read
books, paint, and make music
together.
Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp's
seven children, one died as an
infant and four became successful
artists. Marcel Duchamp was the
brother of:
Jacques Villon (1875–1963),
painter, printmaker
Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–
1918), sculptor
Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889–
1963), painter.
As a child, with his two elder
brothers already away from home
at school in Rouen, Duchamp was
closer to his sister Suzanne, who
was a willing accomplice in games
and activities conjured by his fertile
imagination. At eight years old,
Duchamp followed in his brothers'
footsteps
1

when he left home and began
schooling at the Lycée Pierre-
Corneille, in Rouen. Two other
students in his class also became
well-known artists and lasting
friends: Robert Antoine Pinchon
and Pierre Dumont.For the next
eight years, he was locked into an
educational regime which focused
on intellectual development.
Though he was not an outstanding
student, his best subject was
mathematics and he won two
mathematics prizes at the school.
He also won a prize for drawing in
1903, and at his commencement
in 1904 he won a coveted first
prize, validating his recent
decision to become an artist.
He learned academic drawing
from a teacher who unsuccessfully
attempted to "protect"
his students from Impressionism,
Post-Impressionism, and other
avant-garde influences. However,
Duchamp's true artistic mentor at
the time was his brother Jacques
Villon, whose fluid and incisive
style he sought to imitate. At 14,
his first serious art attempts were
drawings and watercolors
depicting his sister Suzanne in
various poses and activities. That
summer he also
painted landscapes in an
Impressionist style using oils.
Early work
Duchamp's early art works align
with Post-Impressionist styles. He
experimented with classical
techniques and subjects. When he
was later asked about what had
influenced him at the time,
Duchamp cited the work of
Symbolist painter Odilon Redon,
whose approach to art was not
outwardly anti-academic, but
quietly individual.
He studied art at the Académie
Julian from 1904 to 1905, but
preferred playing billiards to
attending classes. During this time
Duchamp drew and sold cartoons
which reflected his ribald humor.
Many of the drawings use verbal
puns (sometimes spanning multiple
languages), visual puns, or both.
Such play with words and symbols
engaged his imagination for the
rest of his life.
In 1905, he began his compulsory
military service with the 39th
Infantry Regiment, working for a
printer in Rouen. There he learned
typography and printing

processes—skills he would use in
his later work.
Owing to his eldest brother
Jacques' membership in the
prestigious Académie royale de
peinture et de sculpture
Duchamp's work was exhibited in
the 1908 Salon d'Automne,
and the following year in the
Salon des Indépendants. Fauves
and Paul Cézanne's proto-Cubism
influenced his paintings, although
the critic Guillaume Apollinaire—
who was eventually to become a
friend—criticized what he called
"Duchamp's very ugly nudes"
("les nus très vilains de Duchamp").
Duchamp also became lifelong
friends with exuberant artist
Francis Picabia after meeting him
at the 1911 Salon d'Automne,
and Picabia proceeded to
introduce him to a lifestyle of fast
cars and "high" living.
In 1911, at Jacques' home in
Puteaux, the brothers hosted a
regular discussion group with
Cubist artists including Picabia,
Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger,
Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert
Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris,
and Alexander Archipenko. Poets
and writers also participated. The
group came to be known as the
Puteaux Group, or the Section d'Or.
Uninterested in the Cubists'
seriousness, or in their focus on
visual matters, Duchamp did not
join in discussions of Cubist theory
and gained a reputation of being
shy. However, that same year he
painted in a Cubist style and added
an impression of motion by using
repetitive imagery.
During this period Duchamp's
fascination with transition, change,
movement, and distance became
manifest, and as many artists of the
time, he was intrigued with the
concept of depicting the fourth
dimension in art. His painting Sad
Young Man on a Train embodies
this concern:
First, there's the idea of the
movement of the train, and then
that of the sad young man who is in
a corridor and who is moving
about; thus there are two parallel
movements corresponding to each
other.

Then, there is the distortion of
the young man—I had called this
elementary parallelism. It was a
formal decomposition; that is,
linear elements following each
other like parallels and distorting
the object. The object is
completely stretched out, as if
elastic. The lines follow each other
in parallels, while changing subtly
to form the movement, or the
form of the young man in
question. I also used this
procedure in the Nude
Descending a Staircase.
In his 1911, Portrait of Chess
Players (Portrait de joueurs
d'échecs) there is the Cubist
overlapping frames and multiple
perspectives of his two brothers
playing chess, but to that
Duchamp added elements
conveying the unseen mental
activity of the players.
Works from this time also included
his first "machine" painting, Coffee
Mill (Moulin à café) (1911), which
he gave to his brother Raymond
Duchamp-Villon. The later more
figurative machine painting of
1914, "Chocolate Grinder"
(Broyeuse de chocolat), prefigures
the mechanism incorporated into
the Large Glass on which he began
work in New York the following
year.
Nude Descending a Staircase
Duchamp's first work to provoke
significant controversy was Nude
Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu
descendant un escalier n° 2) (1912).
The painting depicts the
mechanistic motion of a nude, with
superimposed facets, similar to
motion pictures. It shows elements
of both the fragmentation and
synthesis of the Cubists, and the
movement and dynamism of the
Futurists.
He first submitted the piece to
appear at the Cubist Salon des
Indépendants, but Albert Gleizes
asked Duchamp's brothers to have
him voluntarily withdraw the
painting, or to paint over the title
that he had painted on the work
and rename it something else.
Duchamp's brothers did approach
him with Gleizes' request, but
Duchamp quietly refused. However,
there was no jury at the Salon des
Indépendants and Gleizes was in no
position to reject the painting.The
controversy, according to art

historian Peter Brooke, was not
whether the work should be hung
or not, but whether it should be
hung with the Cubist group.
Of the incident Duchamp later
recalled, "I said nothing to my
brothers. But I went immediately
to the show and took my painting
home in a taxi. It was really a
turning point in my life,
I can assure you. I saw that I
would not be very much
interested in groups after that.
"Yet Duchamp did appear in the
illustrations to Du "Cubisme", he
participated in the La Maison
Cubiste (Cubist House), organized
by the designer André Mare for
the Salon d'Automne of 1912 (a
few months after the
Indépendants); he signed the
Section d'Or invitation and
participated in the Section d'Or
exhibition during the fall of 1912.
The impression is, Brooke writes,
"it was precisely because he
wished to remain part of the
group that he withdrew the
painting; and that, far from
being ill treated by the group, he
was given a rather privileged
position, probably through the
patronage of Picabia"
The painting was exhibited for the
first time at Galeries Dalmau,
Exposició d'Art Cubista, Barcelona,
1912; the first exhibition of Cubism
in Spain Duchamp later submitted
the painting to the 1913 "Armory
Show" in New York City. In addition
to displaying works of American
artists, this show was the first
major exhibition of modern trends
coming out of Paris, encompassing
experimental styles of the
European avant-garde, including
Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism.
American show-goers, accustomed
to realistic art, were scandalized,
and the Nude was at the center of
much of the controversy.
Leaving "retinal art" behind
At about this time, Duchamp read
Max Stirner's philosophical tract,
The Ego and Its Own, the study
which he considered another
turning point in his artistic and
intellectual development. He called
it "a remarkable book ... which
advances no formal theories, but
just keeps saying that the ego is
always there in everything."

While in Munich in 1912, he
painted the last of his Cubist-like
paintings. He started The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even image, and began making
plans for The Large Glass –
scribbling short notes to himself,
sometimes with hurried sketches.
It would be more than ten years
before this piece was completed.
Not much else is known about the
two-month stay in Munich except
that the friend he visited was
intent on showing him the sights
and the nightlife, and that he was
influenced by the works of the
sixteenth century German painter
Lucas Cranach the Elder in
Munich's famed Alte Pinakothek,
known for its Old Master paintings.
Duchamp recalled that he took the
short walk to visit this museum
daily. Duchamp scholars have long
recognized in Cranach the
subdued ochre and brown color
range Duchamp later employed.
The same year, Duchamp also
attended a performance of a stage
adaptation of Raymond Roussel's
1910 novel, Impressions d'Afrique,
which featured plots that turned
in on themselves, word play,
surrealistic sets and humanoid
machines. He credited the drama
with having radically changed his
approach to art, and having
inspired him to begin the creation
of his The Bride Stripped Bare By
Her Bachelors, Even, also known as
The Large Glass. Work on The Large
Glass continued into 1913, with his
invention of inventing a repertoire
of forms. He made notes, sketches
and painted studies, and even drew
some of his ideas on the wall of his
apartment.
Toward the end of 1912, he
traveled with Picabia, Apollinaire
and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia
through the Jura mountains, an
adventure that Buffet-Picabia
described as one of their "forays of
demoralization, which were also
forays of witticism and clownery ...
the disintegration of the concept of
art".Duchamp's notes from the trip
avoid logic and sense, and have a
surrealistic, mythical connotation.
Duchamp painted few canvases
after 1912, and in those he did, he
attempted to remove "painterly"
effects, and to use a technical
drawing approach instead.

His broad interests led him to an
exhibition of aviation technology
during this period, after which
Duchamp said to his friend
Constantin Brâncuși, "Painting is
washed up. Who will ever do
anything better than that
propeller? Tell me, can you do
that?".Brâncuși later sculpted bird
forms. U.S. Customs officials
mistook them for aviation parts
and attempted to collect import
duties on them.
In 1913, Duchamp withdrew from
painting circles and began working
as a librarian in the Bibliothèque
Sainte-Geneviève to be able to
earn a living wage while
concentrating on scholarly realms
and working
on his Large Glass. He studied
math and physics – areas where
exciting new discoveries were
taking place. The theoretical
writings of Henri Poincaré
particularly intrigued and inspired
Duchamp. Poincaré postulated
that the laws believed to govern
matter were created solely by the
minds that "understood" them
and that no theory could be
considered "true". "The things
themselves are not what science
can reach..., but only the relations
between things.
Outside of these relations there is
no knowable reality", Poincaré
wrote in 1902.[28] Reflecting the
influence of Poincaré's writings,
Duchamp tolerated any
interpretation of his art by
regarding it as the creation of the
person who formulated it, not as
truth.
Duchamp's own art-science
experiments began during his
tenure at the library. To make one
of his favorite pieces, 3 Standard
Stoppages , he dropped three 1-
meter lengths of thread onto
prepared canvases, one at a time,
from a height of 1 meter. The
threads landed in three random
undulating positions. He varnished
them into place on the blue-black
canvas strips and attached them to
glass. He then cut three wood slats
into the shapes of the curved
strings, and put all the pieces into a
croquet box. Three small leather
signs with the title printed in gold
were glued to the "stoppage"
backgrounds. The piece appears to
literally follow Poincaré's School of
the Thread, part of a book on
classical mechanics.

In his studio he mounted a bicycle
wheel upside down onto a stool,
spinning it occasionally just to
watch it. Although it is often
assumed that the Bicycle Wheel
represents the first of Duchamp's
"Readymades", this particular
installation was never submitted
for any art exhibition, and it was
eventually lost. However, initially,
the wheel was simply placed in the
studio to create atmosphere: "I
enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy
looking at the flames dancing in a
fireplace.
After World War I started
in August 1914, with his brothers
and many friends in military
service and himself exempted
Duchamp felt uncomfortable in
Paris. Meanwhile,
Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2
had scandalized Americans at the
Armory Show, and helped secure
the sale of all four of his paintings
in the exhibition. Thus, being able
to finance the trip, Duchamp
decided to emigrate to the United
States in 1915. To his surprise, he
found he was a celebrity when he
arrived in New York in 1915, where
he quickly befriended art patron
Katherine Dreier and artist Man
Ray. Duchamp's circle included art
patrons Louise and Walter Conrad
Arensberg, actress and artist
Beatrice Wood and Francis Picabia,
as well as other avant-garde
figures. Though he spoke little
English, in the course of supporting
himself by giving French lessons,
and through some library work, he
quickly learned the language.
Duchamp became part of an artist
colony in Ridgefield, New Jersey,
across the Hudson River from New
York City.
For two years the Arensbergs, who
would remain his friends and
patrons for 42 years, were the
landlords of his studio. In lieu of
rent, they agreed that his payment
would be The Large Glass. An art
gallery offered Duchamp $10,000
per year in exchange for all of his
yearly production, but he declined
the offer, preferring to continue his
work on The Large Glass.
Société Anonyme
Duchamp created the Société
Anonyme in 1920, along with
Katherine Dreier and Man Ray. This
was the beginning of his lifelong
involvement in art dealing and
collecting.

The group collected modern art
works, and arranged modern art
exhibitions and lectures
throughout the 1930s.
By this time Walter Pach, one of
the coordinators of the 1913
Armory Show, sought Duchamp's
advice on modern art. Beginning
with Société Anonyme, Dreier also
depended on Duchamp's counsel
in gathering her collection, as did
Arensberg. Later Peggy
Guggenheim, Museum of Modern
Art directors Alfred Barr and James
Johnson Sweeney consulted with
Duchamp on their modern art
collections and shows.
Dada
Dada or Dadaism was an art
movement of the European avantgarde
in the early 20th century. It
began in Zurich, Switzerland in
1916, spreading to Berlin shortly
thereafter.To quote Dona Budd's
The Language of Art Knowledge,
Dada was born out of negative
reaction to the horrors of World
War I. This international movement
was begun by a group of artists and
poets associated with the Cabaret
Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected
reason and logic, prizing nonsense,
irrationality, and intuition.
The origin of the name Dada is
unclear; some believe that it is a
nonsensical word. Others maintain
that it originates from the
Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and
Marcel Janco's frequent use of the
words da, da, meaning yes, yes in
the Romanian language. Another
theory says that the name "Dada"
came during a meeting of the
group when a paper knife stuck into
a French-German dictionary
happened to point to 'dada', a
French word for 'hobbyhorse'.
The movement primarily involved
visual arts, literature, poetry, art
manifestoes, art theory, theatre,
and graphic design, and
concentrated its anti-war politics
through a rejection of the
prevailing standards in art through
anti-art cultural works. In addition
to being anti-war, Dada was also
anti-bourgeois and had political
affinities with the radical left.
Dada activities included public
gatherings, demonstrations, and
publication of art/literary journals;
passionate coverage of art, politics,
and culture were topics often
discussed in a variety of media. Key
figures in the movement,

apart from Duchamp, included:
Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans
Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah
Höch, Johannes Baader, Tristan
Tzara, Francis Picabia, Richard
Huelsenbeck, Georg Grosz, John
Heartfield, Beatrice Wood, Kurt
Schwitters, and Hans Richter,
among others. The movement
influenced later styles, such as the
avant-garde and downtown music
movements, and groups including
surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop
art, and Fluxus.
Dada is the groundwork to
abstract art and sound poetry, a
starting point for performance art,
a prelude to postmodernism, an
influence on pop art, a celebration
of antiart to be later embraced for
anarcho-political uses in the 1960s
and the movement that lay the
foundation for Surrealism.
New York Dada had a less serious
tone than that of European
Dadaism, and was not a
particularly organized venture.
Duchamp's friend Francis Picabia
connected with the Dada group in
Zürich, bringing to New York the
Dadaist ideas of absurdity and
"anti-art". Duchamp and Picabia
first met in September 1911 at the
Salon d'Automne in Paris, where
they were both exhibiting.
Duchamp showed a larger version
of his Young Man and Girl in Spring
1911, a work that had an Edenic
theme and a thinly veiled sexuality
also found in Picabia's
contemporaneous Adam and Eve
1911. According to Duchamp, "our
friendship began right there".A
group met almost nightly at the
Arensberg home, or caroused in
Greenwich Village. Together with
Man Ray, Duchamp contributed his
ideas and humor to the New York
activities, many of which ran
concurrent with the development
of his Readymades and The Large
Glass.
The most prominent example of
Duchamp's association with Dada
was his submission of Fountain, a
urinal, to the Society of
Independent Artists exhibit in 1917.
Artworks in the Independent Artists
shows were not selected by jury,
and all pieces submitted were
displayed. However, the show
committee insisted that Fountain
was not art, and rejected it from
the show. This caused an uproar
among the Dadaists, and led
Duchamp to resign from the board

of the Independent Artists.:181–
186
Along with Henri-Pierre Roché
and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp
published a Dada magazine in
New York, entitled The Blind Man,
which included art, literature,
humor and commentary.
When he returned to Paris after
World War I, Duchamp did not
participate in the Dada group.
Readymades
"Readymades" were found
objects which Duchamp chose
and presented as art. In 1913,
Duchamp installed a
Bicycle Wheel in his studio.
However, the idea of Readymades
did not fully develop until 1915.
The idea was to question the very
notion of Art, and the adoration
of art, which Duchamp found
"unnecessary".
My idea was to choose 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.
Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying
rack signed by Duchamp, is
considered to be the first "pure"
readymade. Prelude to a Broken
Arm (1915), a snow shovel, also
called In Advance of the Broken
Arm, followed soon after. His
Fountain, a urinal signed with the
pseudonym "R. Mutt", shocked the
art world in 1917. Fountain was
selected in 2004 as "the most
influential artwork of the 20th
century" by 500 renowned artists
and historians.
In 1919, Duchamp made a parody
of the Mona Lisa by adorning a
cheap reproduction of the painting
with a mustache and goatee. To this
he added the inscription
L.H.O.O.Q., a phonetic game which,
when read out loud in French
quickly sounds like "Elle a chaud au
cul". This can be translated as "She
has a hot ass," implying that the
woman in the painting is in a state
of sexual excitement and
availability. It may also have been
intended as a Freudian joke,
referring to Leonardo da Vinci's
alleged homosexuality. Duchamp
gave a "loose" translation of
L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down
below" in a late interview with
Arturo Schwarz. According to
Rhonda Roland Shearer,

the apparent Mona Lisa
reproduction is in fact a copy
modeled partly on Duchamp's
own face.Research published by
Shearer also speculates that
Duchamp himself may have
created some of the objects which
he claimed to be "found objects".
The Large Glass
Duchamp worked on his complex
Futurism-inspired piece The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even (The Large Glass) from 1915
to 1923, except for periods in
Buenos Aires and Paris in
1918–1920. He executed the work
on two panes of glass with
materials such as lead foil, fuse
wire, and dust. It combines chance
procedures, plotted perspective
studies, and laborious
craftsmanship. He published notes
for the piece, The Green Box,
intended to complement the
visual experience. They reflect the
creation of unique rules of physics,
and a mythology which describes
the work. He stated that his
"hilarious picture" is intended to
depict the erotic encounter
between a bride and her nine
bachelors.
A performance of the stage
adaptation of Roussel's novel
Impressions d'Afrique, which
Duchamp attended in 1912,
inspired the piece. Notes, sketches
and plans for the work were drawn
on his studio walls as early as 1913.
In order to concentrate on the work
free from material obligations,
Duchamp found work as a librarian
while living in France. After
immigrating to the United States in
1915, he began work on the piece
financed by the support of the
Arensbergs.
The piece is partly constructed as a
retrospective of Duchamp's works,
including a three-dimensional
reproduction of his earlier paintings
Bride (1912), Chocolate Grinder
(1914) and Glider containing a
water mill in neighboring metals
(1913–1915), which has led to
numerous interpretations. The
work was formally declared
"Unfinished" in 1923. Returning
from its first public exhibition in a
shipping crate, the glass suffered a
large crack. Duchamp repaired it,
but left the smaller cracks in the
glass intact, accepting the chance
element as a part of the piece.

Joseph Nechvatal has cast a
considerable light on The Large
Glass by noting the autoerotic
implications of both bachelorhood
and the repetitive, frenetic
machine; he then discerns a larger
constellation of themes by
insinuating that autoeroticsm
— and with the machine as
omnipresent partner and
practitioner — opens out into a
subversive pan-sexuality as
expressed elsewhere in
Duchamp's work and career,
in that a trance-inducing pleasure
becomes the operative principle
as opposed to the dictates of the
traditional male-female coupling;
and he as well documents the
existence of this theme cluster
throughout modernism, starting
with Rodin's controversial
Monument to Balzac, and
culminating in a Duchampian
vision of a techno-universe in
which one and all can find
themselves welcomed.
Until 1969 when the Philadelphia
Museum of Art revealed
Duchamp's Étant donnés tableau,
The Large Glass was thought to
have been his last major work.
Kinetic works
Duchamp's interest in kinetic works
can be discerned as early as the
notes for The Large Glass and the
Bicycle Wheel readymade, and
despite losing interest in "retinal
art," he retained interest in visual
phenomena. In 1920, with help
from Man Ray, Duchamp built a
motorized sculpture, Rotative
plaques verre, optique de précision
("Rotary Glass Plates, Precision
Optics"). The piece, which he did
not consider to be art, involved a
motor to spin pieces of rectangular
glass on which were painted
segments of a circle. When the
apparatus spins, an optical illusion
occurs, where the segments appear
to be closed concentric circles. Man
Ray set up equipment to
photograph the initial experiment,
but when they turned the machine
for the second time, a belt broke,
and caught a piece of the glass,
which after glancing off Man Ray's
head, shattered into bits.
After moving back to Paris in 1923,
at André Breton's urging, with
financing by Jacques Doucet, "

Duchamp built another optical
device based on the first one,
Rotative Demisphère, optique de
précision (Rotary Demisphere,
Precision Optics). This time the
optical element was a globe cut in
half, with black concentric circles
painted on it. When it spins, the
circles appear to move backward
and forward in space. Duchamp
asked that Doucet not exhibit the
apparatus as art.
Rotoreliefs were the next phase
of Duchamp's spinning works. To
make the optical "play toys", he
painted designs on flat cardboard
circles and spun them on a
phonographic turntable. When
spinning, the flat disks appeared
three-dimensional. He had a
printer produce 500 sets of six of
the designs, and set up a booth
at a 1935 Paris inventors' show to
sell them. The venture was a
financial disaster, but some
optical scientists thought they
might be of use in restoring threedimensional
stereoscopic sight to
people who have lost vision in
one eye. In collaboration with
Man Ray and Marc Allégret,
Duchamp filmed early versions of
the Rotoreliefs and they named
the film, Anémic Cinéma (1926).
Later, in Alexander Calder's studio
in 1931, while looking at the
sculptor's kinetic works, Duchamp
suggested that these should be
called "mobiles". Calder agreed to
use this novel term in his upcoming
show. To this day, sculptures of this
type are called "mobiles"
Musical ideas
Between 1912 and 1915, Duchamp
worked with various musical ideas.
At least three pieces have survived:
two compositions and a note for a
musical happening. The two
compositions are based on chance
operations. Erratum Musical,
written for three voices, was
published in 1934. La Mariée mise
à nu par ses célibataires même.
Erratum Musical is unfinished and
was never published or exhibited
during Duchamp's lifetime.
According to the manuscript, the
piece was intended for a
mechanical instrument "in which
the virtuoso intermediary is
suppressed". The manuscript also
contains a description for "An
apparatus automatically recording
fragmented musical periods,"
consisting of a funnel,

several open-end cars and a set of
numbered balls.These pieces
predate John Cage's Music of
Changes (1951),
which is often considered the first
modern piece to be conceived
largely through random
procedures.
In 1968, Duchamp and John Cage
appeared together at a concert
entitled "Reunion", playing a game
of chess and composing Aleatoric
music by triggering a series of
photoelectric cells underneath the
chessboard.
Rrose Sélavy
"Rrose Sélavy", also spelled Rose
Sélavy, was one of Duchamp's
pseudonyms. The name, a pun,
sounds like the French phrase
Eros, c'est la vie, which may be
translated as "Eros, such is life." It
has also been read as arroser la vie
("to make a toast to life"). Sélavy
emerged in 1921 in a series of
photographs by Man Ray showing
Duchamp dressed as a woman.
Through the 1920s Man Ray and
Duchamp collaborated on more
photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later
used the name as the byline on
written material and signed
several creations with it.
Duchamp used the name in the
title of at least one sculpture, Why
Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? (1921).
The sculpture, a type of readymade
called an assemblage,
consists of an oral thermometer, a
couple of dozen small cubes of
marble resembling sugar cubes and
a cuttlefish bone inside a birdcage.
Sélavy also appears on the label of
Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette
(1921), a readymade that is a
perfume bottle in the original box.
Duchamp also signed his film
Anemic Cinema (1926) with the
Sélavy name.
The inspiration for the name Rrose
Sélavy has been thought to be Belle
da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's
librarian at The Morgan Library &
Museum (formerly The Pierpont
Morgan Library) who, following his
death, became the Library's
director, working there for a total of
forty-three years. Empowered by J.
P. Morgan, and then by his son Jack,
Greene built the collection buying
and selling rare manuscripts, books
and art.

Rrose Sélavy, and the other
pseudonyms Duchamp used, may
be read as a comment on the
fallacy of romanticizing the
conscious individuality or
subjectivity of the artist, a theme
that is also a prominent subtext of
the readymades. Duchamp said in
an interview, "You think you're
doing something entirely your
own, and a year later you look at it
and you see actually the roots of
where your art comes from
without your knowing it at all."
From 1922 the name
Rrose Sélavy also started
appearing in a series of
aphorisms, puns, and
spoonerisms by the French
surrealist poet Robert Desnos.
Desnos tried to portray Rrose
Sélavy as a long-lost aristocrat and
rightful queen of France. Aphorism
13 paid homage to Marcel
Duchamp: "Rrose Sélavy connaît
bien le marchand du sel" ‒ in
English: "Rrose Sélavy knows the
merchant of salt well"; in French
the final words sound like Marchamp
Du-cel. Note that the 'salt
seller' aphorism – "mar-chand-dusel"
– is a phonetic rearrangement
of the syllables in the artist's name:
"mar-cel-du-champ." (Duchamp's
compiled notes are entitled, 'Salt
Seller'.) In 1939 a collection of
these aphorisms was published
under the name of Rrose Sélavy,
entitled, Poils et coups de pieds en
tous genres.
Personal life
Throughout his adult life, Duchamp
was a passionate smoker of Habana
cigars.
Duchamp became a United States
citizen in 1955.
In June 1927, Duchamp married
Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor; however,
they divorced six months later. It
was rumored that Duchamp had
chosen a marriage of convenience,
because Sarazin-Lavassor was the
daughter of a wealthy automobile
manufacturer. Early in January
1928, Duchamp said that he could
no longer bear the responsibility
and confinement of marriage, and
they were soon divorced.
Between 1946 and 1951 Maria
Martins was his mistress.
In 1954, he and Alexina "Teeny"
Sattler married. They remained
together until his death.

Fahrelnissa Zeid
7 January 1901 – 5 September
1991 was a Turkish artist best
known for her large-scale abstract
paintings with kaleidoscopic
patterns. Also using drawings,
lithographs, and sculptures, her
work blended elements of Islamic
and Byzantine art with abstraction
and other influences from the
West. Zeid was one of the first
women to go to art school in
Istanbul.She lived in different
cities and became part of the
avant-garde scenes in Istanbul,
pre-war Berlin and post-war Paris.
Her work has been exhibited at
various institutions in Paris, New
York, and London, including the
Institute of Contemporary Art in
1954. In the 1970s, she moved to
Amman, Jordan, where she
established an art school. In 2017,
Tate Modern in London
organized a major retrospective
of the artist and called her "one of
the greatest female artists of the
20th century".Her largest work to
be sold at auction, Towards a Sky
(1953), sold for just under one
million pounds in 2017.
In the 1930s, she married into the
Hashemite royal family of Iraq, and
was the mother of Prince Ra'ad bin
Zeid and the grandmother of Prince
Zeid bin Ra'ad.
Biography
Early life
Fahrelnissa Zeid was born
Fahrünissa Şakir , into an elite
Ottoman family on the island of
Büyükada. Her uncle, Cevat Çobanlı
Pasha served as the Grand vizier of
the Ottoman Empire from 1891 to
1895[citation needed]. Zeid’s father
Şakir Pasha was appointed
ambassador to Greece, where he
met Zeid’s mother Sara İsmet
Hanım.In 1913, Zeid’s father was
fatally shot and her brother, also
named Cevat, was tried and
convicted of his murder.
Zeid began drawing and painting at
a young age. Her earliest known
surviving work is a portrait of her
grandmother, painted when she
was 14. In 1919, Zeid enrolled at
the Academy of Fine Arts for
Women, in Istanbul.
21

In 1920 at the age of nineteen,
Zeid married the novelist İzzet
Melih Devrim.For their
honeymoon, Devrim took Zeid to
Venice where she was exposed to
European painting traditions for the
first time.They had three children
together. Her eldest son, Faruk
(born 1921), died of scarlet fever
in 1924.
Her son Nejad (born 1923) went
on to become a painter, and her
daughter Şirin Devrim (born 1926)
became an actress.
Zeid travelled to Paris in 1928 and
enrolled at the Académie Ranson,
where she studied under the
painter Roger Bissière. Upon her
return to Istanbul in 1929, Zeid
enrolled at the Istanbul Academy
of Fine Arts.
Her brother Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı
was a novelist and her sister Aliye
Berger was a painter.
1930–1944
Zeid divorced Devrim in 1934,
and married Prince Zeid bin
Hussein of Iraq, who was
appointed the first Ambassador
of the Kingdom of Iraq to
Germany in 1935. The couple
moved to Berlin where Zeid hosted
many social events in her role as an
ambassador’s wife. After the
annexation of Austria in March
1938, Prince Zeid and his family
were recalled to Iraq, taking up
residence in Baghdad.
Zeid became depressed in Baghdad
and on the advice of a Viennese
doctor returned to Paris after a
short time. She spent the next
years of her life traveling between
Paris, Budapest, and Istanbul,
attempting to immerse herself in
painting and recover. By 1941, she
was back in Istanbul and focusing
on her painting.
Zeid became involved with the D
Group of Istanbul, an avant-garde
group of painters working in the
newly formed Turkish Republic
under Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk.Although her association
with the group was short-lived,
exhibiting with the D Group from
1944 gave Zeid the confidence to
begin exhibiting on her own. The
artist opened her first personal
exhibition in her home in Maçka,
Istanbul in 1944.

1945–1957
In 1945, Zeid cleared out the
parlor rooms of her apartment in
Istanbul and held her first solo
exhibition.In 1946, after two more
solo exhibitions at İzmir in 1945
and in Istanbul in 1946, Zeid
relocated to London where Prince
Zeid Al-Hussein became the first
Ambassador of the Kingdom of
Iraq to the Court of St James's.
Zeid continued to paint, turning a
room in the Iraqi Embassy into her
studio.
From 1947, Zeid’s practice became
more complex and her work
transitioned from figurative
painting to abstraction. Zeid was
influenced by the abstract styles
coming out of Paris in the
post-war period. She uniquely
fused her Persian, Byzantine,
Cretan, and Oriental roots with
concepts, styles and techniques of
Modernism in her painterly
practice.
She exhibited in London at Saint
George’s Gallery in 1948. Queen
Elizabeth The Queen Mother
attended the opening. Due to her
position in the Iraqi Royal Family,
many high society members
attended her openings and
exhibitions. Art critic Maurice Collis
reviewed her 1948 exhibition and
they subsequently became friends.
The prominent French art critic and
curator Charles Estienne became a
major proponent of Zeid’s work.
Over the next decade, living
between London and Paris, Zeid
made some of her strongest works,
experimenting with monumental
abstract canvases that immerse the
viewer in kaleidoscopic universes
through their heavy use of line and
vibrant colour.Zeid exhibited at
Galerie Dina Vierny in 1953,
showing her most recent abstract
works such as The Octopus of
Triton, and Sargasso Sea. The
exhibition travelled to the Institute
of Contemporary Arts in London in
1954. In the mid-1950s Zeid was at
the height of her career. In this
period, she became friends with a
group of international artists such
as Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Dubuffet
and Serge Poliakoff, who
experimented with gestural
abstraction.

1958–1991
In 1958, Zeid convinced her
husband Prince Zeid al-Hussein
not to return to Baghdad as acting
regent while his great nephew,
King Faisal II, went on vacation as
he usually did. The couple went to
their holiday home on the island
of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples. On
14 July 1958 there was a military
coup in Iraq and the entire royal
family was assassinated.
Prince Zeid and his family
narrowly escaped death,
and they were given only
24-hours to vacate the Iraqi
Embassy in London.The coup
halted Zeid’s career as a painter
and hostess in London.
Zeid and her family moved into
an apartment in London and at
the age of fifty-seven,
Zeid cooked her first meal.The
experience prompted her to begin
painting on chicken bones, later
creating sculptures from the
bones cast in resin, called
paléokrystalos. In her painting,
she began to
move away from abstraction, and
started to paint portraits of her
family and others close to her.
A few years later, her youngest son,
Prince Raad, married and moved to
Amman, Jordan. In 1970, Prince
Zeid Al-Hussein died in Paris and
Zeid moved to join her son in
Amman in 1975. She founded The
Royal National Jordanian Institute
Fahrelnissa Zeid of Fine Arts in
1976, and for the next fifteen years
she taught and mentored a group
of young women until her death in
1991.
Retrospectives
Museum Ludwig held her first
retrospective in the western world
in 1990.In October 2012, a number
of her paintings were sold at
auction by Bonhams for a total of
£2,021,838, setting a world record
for the artist.
In 2017, Tate Modern in London
organized a major retrospective of
the artist.According to an article in
The Guardian, the exhibition aimed
to lift the artist "out of obscurity to
ensure thatshe does not become
yet another female artist forgotten
by history." The central gallery of
the exhibition hosted large-scale,
abstract paintings of Zeid from the
late 1940s and 1950s.

Exhibited in this room, her fivemeter
work titled My Hell (1951)
was shown in the UK in her 1954
exhibition at the ICA London.
The last gallery was devoted to
portraits that Zeid concentrated
on in her last years in Amman,
as well as resin sculptures.All the
works in the exhibition were
loaned from international
collections and Tate Modern
acquired one of the paintings,
Untitled C, "so she can now be
part of our narrative," according
to Tate Modern Director Frances
Morris. Curated by Kerryn
Greenberg, Curator International
Art and Vassilis Oikonomopoulos,
Assistant Curator, Tate Modern,
the exhibition traveled to
Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in late
2017, and will be on view at the
Sursock Museum in Beirut in
spring 2018.Istanbul Modern lent
eight works to the retrospective
exhibition and also organized the
exhibition Fahrelnissa Zeid in spring
2017 with works from its collection,
focusing on Zeid's practice between
the 1940s and 1970s.Istanbul
Modern director Levent Çalıkoğlu
stated, "The belated interest of
Western museums and art
community in Zeid’s works. . . is
restoring the value she deserves."
The biography Fahrelnissa Zeid:
Painter of Inner Worlds, written by
Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, a former
student of Zeid's, was published in
2017 to coincide with the
retrospective exhibition at Tate
Modern.
In 2019 she was commemorated
with a Google Doodle.

http://www.aziz-anzabi.com