Marcel Duchamp was a French-American artist whose radical ideas overturned conventional notions of what art could be and made him one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century art. Born near Blainville, France, into an artistic family, he began as a painter associated with Cubism.
His 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, with its fractured depiction of motion, caused a sensation — and a scandal — at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, making him notorious in America. But Duchamp soon abandoned conventional painting altogether. He pioneered the "readymade," taking ordinary manufactured objects and declaring them works of art simply by selecting and presenting them. The most infamous was Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal signed with a pseudonym and submitted to an exhibition — a provocation that questioned the very definition of art.
Associated with the Dada movement and a forerunner of Surrealism, Duchamp valued the idea behind a work over its craft or beauty, an approach that anticipated conceptual art by half a century.
He spent years on his enigmatic glass construction The Large Glass and, secretly, on a final tableau revealed only after his death. For much of his later life he claimed to have given up art for chess, at which he was an accomplished competitor. His questioning, anti-aesthetic spirit shaped much of the art that followed. He died in 1968.