CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Timothy Rub

vi

INTRODUCTION: DUCHAMP'S LEGACY

Matthew affron

1

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THE ESSENTIAL  DUCHAMP

Matthew affron

A PAINTER'S LIFE 7

"CAN WORKS BE MADE WHICH ARE NOT 'OF ART'?" 35

RROSE SELAVY 71

OUR LADY OF DESIRE 109

KEY TERMS

READYMADE

MIchael R. Taylor 142

PRECISION OPTICS

Alexander kauffman 147

PICTORIAL NOMINALISM

John Vick 151

INFRATHIN

Cecile Debray 155

INTERVIEWS AND TALKS

STATEMENT 

compiled by James Johnson Sweeney (1946) 160

INTERVIEW

with James Johnson Sweeney(1955) 163

THE  CREATIVE ART(1957) 169

APROPOS OF "READYMADES" (1961) 171

NOTES 173

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 182

INDEX OF NAMES AND WORKS 186

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 189

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INTRODUCTION: DUCHAMP'S LEGACY

Matthew Affron

Marcel Duchamp(1887-1968) began building his own legend when he was still a young man. He started to make his name in 1911-12 as a member of the Cubist group in Paris. The succes de scandale of one of his extraordinary Cubist pictures, Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2) (see fig. 20), at the 1913 Armory Show in New York turned him into a quasi-celebrity in the United States. But Duchamp had already lost interest in living the life of a painter, even a famous one, and in 1915 he left Paris to reinvent himself in new York, where he joined a brilliant coterie of artists, writers, and intellectuals that gathered at the apartment of the collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg(see figs. 36-38) and at Alfred Stieglitz's Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, known as 291.