Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

During Marcel Duchamp’s first major retrospective, a chess game was on display at the Pasadena Museum, his “Fountain” (1917) was pasted onto a bed board, and his “ready-made” sculpture placed bicycle wheels on an outside wooden shelf in the window of the Midi Abbey. This seems to suggest that Duchamp’s productivity at the L’Oréal studio du Midi was lower than that of other masters. Indeed, it is true that Duchamp produced fewer works of art in his lifetime, as he stopped painting after 1926, stating: “I am not only interested in visual products, but also in creative ideas; I want to be interested not only in visual products, but also in thoughts.”