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The Great Gatsby
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Marcel Duchamp Quotes

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.

– Marcel Duchamp

In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn.

– Marcel Duchamp

I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.

– Marcel Duchamp

I would have to think about it for two or three months before I decided to do something which would have meaning. And it would have to be more than just an impression or pleasure. I would need an objective, a meaning. That is the only thing that could help me.

– Marcel Duchamp

In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man – Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can’t help it. Even if they don’t believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.

– Marcel Duchamp

Words such as truth, art, veracity, or anything are stupid in themselves.

– Marcel Duchamp

I never finished the ‘Large Glass’ because, after working on it for eight years, I probably got interested in something else; also, I was tired. It may be that, subconsciously, I never intended to finish it because the word ‘finish’ implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them.

– Marcel Duchamp

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.

– Marcel Duchamp

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.

– Marcel Duchamp

I am against the word ‘anti’ because it’s a little bit like ‘atheist,’ as compared to ‘believer.’ And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is.

– Marcel Duchamp

Tradition is the great misleader because it’s too easy to follow what has already been done – even though you may think you’re giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself.

– Marcel Duchamp

When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a ‘ready-made’ or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn’t have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.

– Marcel Duchamp

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

– Marcel Duchamp

For me, the ‘Three Stoppages’ was a first gesture liberating me from the past.

– Marcel Duchamp

Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.

– Marcel Duchamp

One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced, and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start, one doesn’t realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn’t realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated, and one is far from it!

– Marcel Duchamp

One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn’t want to go to the office every morning.

– Marcel Duchamp

All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn’t often been done, or at least hadn’t been talked about very much.

– Marcel Duchamp

Art is all a matter of personality.

– Marcel Duchamp

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved – bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

– Marcel Duchamp

Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.

– Marcel Duchamp

Art doesn’t interest me. Only artists interest me.

– Marcel Duchamp

Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.

– Marcel Duchamp

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

– Marcel Duchamp

I really had no program or any established plan. I didn’t even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not.

– Marcel Duchamp

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

– Marcel Duchamp

In the ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending an equally real staircase.

– Marcel Duchamp

Can works be made which are not ‘of art’?

– Marcel Duchamp

In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up – or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.

– Marcel Duchamp

Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral… our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.

– Marcel Duchamp

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