Marcel Duchamp's "Large Glass"

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was one of four siblings who became artists in the period of intellectual and artistic ferment that saw out the last decades of the old century and extended beyond World War I. Duchamp's early interest was in painting and Cubism and much of his most influential work was related to Dada practice. But Duchamp was ultimately the most independent of artists--eventually becoming independent of art itself. Much of his influence derived from gestures or positions related to the nature of art, and a great deal of his fame rests on works consisting of ordinary objects altered or 'readymade.' But Duchamp's masterpiece is usually held to be the glass, metal, and paint construction entitled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), frequently known simply as Large Glass.

This single piece, left unfinished according to Duchamp, was the subject of numerous drawings, sketches, published notes, and etchings, and occupied a significant portion of the artist's active career. It is a Dada piece in terms of its emphasis on machine imagery, chance, jokes and puns, mysterious allusions, and eroticism, as well as its notional relationship to science and mathematics. All these elements display Duchamp's connections with the so-called New York Dada movement. But the Large Glass was a work conceived apart from important Dada considerations--such as spontaneity and the rejection of reason--and it contained the germ of some of Duchamp's future ideas.

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rich group was witnessing "the violent collapse of an entire political and cultural order, while [the New Yorkers were] in possession of the security and the means with which to imagine a new order--or a happy state of disorder" and taunted the world but made no real effort to change it. Duchamp himself said that he had approved of Dada because he thought it a hopeful sign, but he could not consider himself a true Dada artist because, "I wished to show man the limited place of his reason, but Dada wanted to substitute unreason." Ultimately the "intentionally irrational Dada gesture" was a far cry from what Duchamp hoped to accomplish in his cherished Large Glass project. Painting had proved too limited and Dada gestures were too irrational for Duchamp's project. He believed that "art should exercise the intellect rather than simply indulge the eye" and he found the means to develop this idea in his revolutionary work the Large Glass. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is oil paint and lead wire on glass and measures 225.5 x 175.6 cm, or 109 1/4 x 69 1/8 inches. Duchamp began planning the Large Glass in 1912 and took sketches and notes with him to New York in 1915. He then worked on the piece at intervals

Category: Arts - M