Duchamp

One of Marcel Duchamp's most famous works is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, not a painting but a transparent construction of wire and painted foil sandwiched between meticulously dirtied plate glass. Duchamp was born in 1887; by the time of his death in the late 1960s he enjoyed a pre-eminent place in the avant-garde art world. The practicing artist Terry Atkinson was only one of those who saw him then as the ultimate revolutionary, anti-establishment artist; but now Atkinson questions that judgment. He uses interviews from the early 1960s featuring Duchamp himself and a review of his whole artistic output to argue that Duchamp did not, in fact, succeed in establishing a viable counter-tradition to Modernism in art - and that Duchamp himself was well aware of the fact.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.