Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp made irreverent, wildly inventive art that blazed new trails for the 20th-century avant-garde. He briefly worked in a Cubist mode and helped spur movements including Dada and Conceptualism.

Though his practice spanned drawing, painting, and installation, Duchamp is perhaps most famous for his “readymade” sculptures: pieces composed of prefabricated objects such as a urinal, a shovel, or a bicycle wheel affixed to a wooden stool, which the artist situated in the middle of the exhibition space. Duchamp saw the readymade as an opportunity to free art from traditional confines of taste and beauty.

He studied at Académie Julian before becoming involved in the avant-garde circles of New York and Paris. Duchamp also played tournament chess and, in the last decades of his life, worked in secret on a final installation, Étant donnés (1946–66).

His pieces have sold for up to eight figures on the secondary market and belong in the collections of countless institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.