Meanwhile, in the life of Marcel Duchamp
The whole life1920
Founds the Société Anonyme
With Katherine Dreier and Man Ray he created the Société Anonyme as an experimental exhibition context that predates the Museum of Modern Art and was the first modern art collection in the US. In the same year, 1920, he returned from Paris to the United States.
1921
Rrose Sélavy is born
In 1921, in a series of Man Ray’s photographs, Duchamp appeared dressed as a woman under the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy, a pun on “Éros, c’est la vie” (“Eros, such is life”); later he used the name as a byline and signed several works with it.
1923
Back in Paris, and into chess
Back in Paris in 1923 he was in essence no longer a practising artist: his main interest became chess, which he studied for the rest of his life to the exclusion of most other activities.
1931
Coins the word “mobile”
In Alexander Calder’s studio, looking at the sculptor’s kinetic works, he suggested calling them “mobiles”; Calder agreed to use the new term in his coming show, and sculptures of this kind have been called that ever since.
1938
“Generator-Arbiter” of the International Surrealist Exhibition
At the exhibition in Paris organised by Breton and Paul Éluard he was named “Générateur-arbitre” and showed the installation Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended from the Ceiling over a Stove — literally 1,200 stuffed coal bags hanging from the ceiling of the Room of Superstition.
