Five Essential Books About Marcel Duchamp

Recently revised and expanded, this insightful 2021 survey examines Duchamp’s achievements chronologically, from his early interpretations of Cubism to latter-day replicas of signature works. Even as they distill Duchamp’s trajectory to its key gambits, coauthors Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins don’t shy away from strong arguments; the legendary Fountain, they contend, performs a critique of nationalist chauvinism in its (literal) inversion of American plumbing. The authors take seriously Duchamp’s formative contributions to Conceptual art, gender performance, and art history while resisting the hagiographic tendency to cast him as a sui generis genius. The light they shed on Duchamp’s artistic and intellectual origins illuminates even his later, fateful challenges to aesthetic conventions writ large. 

Calvin Tomkins first met Duchamp as a writer for Newsweek in 1959 and covered him in his later station as a profiler for The New Yorker. His lavishly illustrated 1966 Time-Life volume The World of Marcel Duchamp engaged the wider contexts of Dadaist anti-art and Surrealist painting. This later biography hews more closely to its subject, tracing Duchamp’s activities between Paris and New York up to his death one night in Neuilly in 1968, at the age of 81. A chapter tackles Duchamp’s most controversial offering: the Étant donnés installation at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Tomkins describes the work’s stylized violence against the female body simply as a sexual “encounter”—a critical lapse (which subsequent scholars have since duly redressed) in an otherwise entertaining book.

Duchamp’s legendary play with gender roles—he created a drag persona named Rrose Sélavy, a play on “Eros, c’est la vie”—has proven as foundational to modernism as Picasso’s mythical masculinity. Spurred by artistic practices inspired by Duchamp’s work, Amelia Jones examines how the artist’s counternarratives—in their defiance of a purely “optical,” formalist aesthetic—dovetailed with the phenomenon of postmodernism. More than that, she situates Duchamp’s recalibrations of the mind as a touchstone for feminist reflections on the body. Very much of its mid-’90s moment (to wit, the hyphenated title), Jones’s volume remains incisive in its examination of Duchamp’s work and its varied afterlifes.  

Francis M. Naumann has contributed an impressive range of works to Duchamp studies over the years. Coedited with Hector Obalk, this anthology covering 1912 to 1968 offers glimpses into Duchamp’s practice by turns workaday and intimate. Nearly 300 letters, postcards, and telegrams shed light on Duchamp’s international travel, his exhibition preparation, and even the purchase of commodities that would become his “readymades.” (“Now,” he writes to his sister Suzanne in 1916, “if you have been up to my place, you will have seen, in the studio, a bicycle wheel and a bottle rack…”) In tracing goings and doings behind the scenes, the volume provides a vital counterpart to Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson’s landmark edited volume of Duchamp’s collected writings.

One of the earliest scholarly Duchamp monographs in English, David Joselit’s still-incisive 1998 volume insists upon Duchamp’s practice as irreducible in its multiplicity—entailing not just a succession of avant-garde engagements (Fauvism and Cubism, Dada and Surrealism) but a transvaluation of what it meant to be an artist at all. Four chapters explore the continuities that thread through seemingly disparate projects: from the ceremonious renunciation of “retinal” aesthetics to the disavowal of artistic practice altogether; from painting to playing chess. One of the book’s most helpful interventions argues for how Duchamp’s strategies of play and displacement differed from Surrealist fixations on the unconscious. The book elucidates Duchamp’s indissoluble roles as a fashioner of images, an administrator of objects, and an abidingly provocative “brain worker.”