3 Standard Stoppages

September 1911

Meeting Francis Picabia

They met at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, where both were exhibiting; Duchamp showed a larger version of his “Young Man and Girl in Spring”. “Our friendship began right there,” he said.

1912

Takes the “Nude” back from the Salon des Indépendants

Through Duchamp’s brothers, Albert Gleizes asked him to withdraw the painting or at least rename it (as Duchamp later told it); he quietly refused, but went straight to the show and took the canvas home by taxi. “It was really a turning point in my life,” he recalled, adding that after this he would not be very much interested in groups.

c. 1912

Reads Max Stirner

He read the philosophical tract The Ego and Its Own and regarded it as another turning point in his artistic and intellectual development: in his words, a book that advances no formal theories but keeps saying that the ego is always there in everything.

November 1912 · Education

École des chartes

1913

The Armory Show: the scandal of the “Nude”

At the first major exhibition in New York of the modern trends coming out of Paris, American viewers accustomed to realistic art were scandalised and the Nude stood at the centre of the controversy; it helped secure the sale of all four of Duchamp’s paintings in the show.

1915

Emigration to the United States

When the First World War began, Duchamp, exempted from service because of a heart murmur, felt uncomfortable in Paris, and the sale of all four of his paintings at the Armory Show let him finance the trip: in 1915 he left for New York. To his surprise he found himself a celebrity there and quickly befriended the patron Katherine Dreier and the artist Man Ray.