Art · 20th century
1887–1968 · French-American
Dada — the readymade and the roots of conceptual art
Marcel Duchamp abandoned painting because he was interested in ideas rather than what he called retinal art, and instead nominated mass-produced objects as works of art. These readymades — a bottle rack, a snow shovel, a urinal — detonated the assumption that art must be handmade, and made him the ancestor of conceptual art, Pop and almost everything that followed.
A figure dissolved into overlapping brown planes coming downstairs, the scandal of the 1913 Armory Show (1912)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Rejected by the Cubists of the Salon des Indépendants; one critic called it an explosion in a shingle factory
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A porcelain urinal laid on its back, signed 'R. Mutt 1917' and rejected by the exhibition its own submitter helped organise (1917)
Replicas in Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and elsewhere; the original is lost
Fountain — known chiefly from Alfred Stieglitz's photograph; voted the most influential modern artwork in a 2004 poll of art professionals
Image: Marcel Duchamp / Alfred Stieglitz · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
A bicycle wheel mounted upside down on a kitchen stool, the first of the artist's 'assisted' nominations (1913)
Museum of Modern Art, New York (1951 replica)
He said he liked to watch it turn the way one likes watching a fire
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A cheap postcard of a famous portrait given a moustache and goatee, with a five-letter title that is a rude French pun when read aloud (1919)
Various collections (Centre Pompidou, Philadelphia and others)
L.H.O.O.Q. — 'elle a chaud au cul'; the defaced image is the Mona Lisa
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Two panes of glass holding a bride above nine bachelors, left definitively unfinished after eight years and cracked in transit (1923)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Large Glass; the artist declared the accidental cracks part of the work
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A pair of old wooden doors with two peepholes, through which a naked figure lies in a landscape holding a gas lamp (1966)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Made in secret over twenty years and revealed only after his death
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A snow shovel hung from the ceiling, the first object the artist called a readymade (1915)
Yale University Art Gallery (and replicas)
Bought in a New York hardware shop; the term 'readymade' first appears in a 1916 letter to his sister
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia