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Drawn from several sources, this catalogue includes works by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray that address the enduring friendship and shared interests of these two artists. The works included explore five decades of the shared milieus and aesthetics of these artist-peers, both of whom so significantly altered the making and understanding of art in the twentieth century. Loosely grouped around thematic concerns, it includes works that exemplify the artists' fascination with the game of chess, the study of optics, and the influence of such diverse sources as African sculpture, as well as the photographic recording of their mutual friends, including portraits of artists, poets, and literary figures pivotal to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Ingeniously designed, this small volume is both a documentary of the artists' friendship, and a study of art in the early 1920s.Essay by Chrissie Iles.

Introduction by Sean Kelly.

Hardcover, 6.25 x 8.25 in./128 pgs / 32 color. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Marcel Duchamp/Man Ray:50 years of Alchemy
My son loved this book. The delivery was quick & the book exactly as described. A pleasure to purchase. ... Read more

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Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life.
At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous "readymades," of which the urinal "Fountain" and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By recovering their history, Seigel shows that their playful and rebellious surface veiled the meanings that linked them to Duchamp's pictures (especially the famous "Large Glass," here illuminated by a comprehensive new reading) and to his experiments with language. The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle.
Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience.
A mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell for the sake of its valuable lessons, Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about the nature and meaning of art. Seigel demands that we think again about these questions, and about the answers that Duchamp's heirs and followers have tried to give to them. ... Read more

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Following Marcel Duchamp's death in 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art stunned the art world by unveiling a project on which he had been working secretly for twenty years, long after he had supposedly given up art for chess. Installed by the museum curators with the assistance of Duchamp's widow Teeny and stepson Paul Matisse, Étant donnés (known in English as Given, or, literally, "being given") consists of a small room with a locked wooden door; through a peephole can be seen a landscape of trees, with a naked female figure at the front, her arm outstretched, holding a lamp.

In this illustrated study, Julian Haladyn argues that Duchamp's intention in this final piece was similar to Raymond Roussel's in How I Wrote Certain of My Books: not, as many have maintained, to provide a neat summation of his career, but the opposite—to open his artwork (which he had made sure was fully represented in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection) to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. Duchamp's engagement with his legacy (by orchestrating first the purchase of his work and then the donation of those purchases to the museum) is a significant historical development in the critical relationship between artists and the institution of art—a relationship that would later be further explored by such artists as Andrea Fraser and Michael Asher. Additionally, Haladyn sees that the staging of Étant donnés—especially the way that Duchamp forces viewers to become aware of the act of looking and their bodily presence in the gallery space—foreshadowed strategies used by Minimalism as well as installation, spectatorship, and institutional critique.

One Work series
Distributed for Afterall Books ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Etant Donnes The Book Reviewed
Having written my BA undergraduate dissertation on Etant Donnes many years ago (before the work had been written about at all by any other art historian) I found myself in agreement with a great deal of what Haladyn has to say about the work. Largely the point is to see Duchamp's achievment as a whole vision of his work and how he lived his life with it. This book offers some aspects of this issue and problem, and it does not duck the "tradition" of not coming to a nice conclusion about any of these.

I would recommend Duchamp to everyone interested in Art, Language, Poetry, Philosophy and Writing in and "beyond" Art History. This book sits well with other good works on Duchamp who is still way ahead of anyone else working in the visual arts today.

Goodness knows what the character of Art History is at present in universities and schools of art and design in the UK or elsewhere, but reading books anyway is becoming almost an unheard of thing to do. Using the internet is what students normally do and that is an enormously vast problem with education today. Reading a work like this should entice more young and older people to enjoy reading books over a more extended period (not that this is a large or difficult work in any way but it is infomative and informs on the poetic) and see the irony explicit in Duchamp's work and the writers he liked and inspired him. ... Read more

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