Network of Stoppages

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.

1912

A stage version of Raymond Roussel

He saw a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel’s novel Impressions of Africa, with plots that turned in on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets and humanoid machines. He credited it with radically changing his approach to art and inspiring the Large Glass.

1912

Two months in Munich

He painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings, started the image of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and began scribbling plans for the Large Glass, which would take more than ten years to complete. He walked to Munich’s Alte Pinakothek every day, where he was struck by the works of Lucas Cranach the Elder, while the friend he visited kept showing him the sights and the nightlife.

november 1912 · Opleiding

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.