Marcel Duchamp

1887
Born July 28 in Blainville, France, the forth of six children.

1902
Makes his first paintings at age fifteen.

1904
Upon the completion of his high school education joins his two older brothers, Jasques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, in Paris. He studies painting at the Académie Julian for one year and rapidly passes through the main contemporary trends in painting – Postimpressionism, the influence of Paul Cézanne, Fauvism, and Cubism. He sees no virtue in making a habit of any one style.

1905
Finishes at the Académie Julian and spends a year in the army working in a print shop in order to avoid the general conscription laws then pending. When he returns to Paris, he finds work as an illustrator and cartoonist for popular satirical journals.

1909
Begins exhibiting paintings in the Salon d'Autumne and the Salon des Indépendants. His works show the influence of Paul Cézanne and the fauves. At the Sunday gatherings he attends in Puteaux, a Parisian suburb where his brothers have their house and studio, he participates in discussions about philosophy, music, literature, photography, and non-Euclidean geometry. In art, members of what is to become known as the Puteaux group, embrace cubism, which finds its most doctrinaire proponents in Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.

1911
Duchamp's paintings show a trace of Cubism. He meets Francis Picabia, who probably introduces Duchamp to writings of Max Stirner. After a trip from Paris to Rouen he completes the self-portrait Sad Young Man on a Train.

1912
Creates Nude Descending a Staircase which shows no nude but only a descending machine, a nonobjective and virtually cinematic effect that is entirely new in painting. Submits it to Society of Independent Artists in Paris, where Gleizes and Metzinger request it to be removed, claiming that its kinetism is not cubist.

1913
Nude Descending a Staircase is selected for the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York, known as the Armory Show, where it becomes a sensation. The success is so tremendous that Duchamp stops painting at the age of 25. Within the next two years, he adopts a consciously scientific attitude to art-making, compiling notes for a project that will become The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass. For it, he repudiates entirely what he calls retinal art and adopts the geometrical methods of industrial design, experimenting with methods of measurement and mechanical drawing. The Large Glass becomes like the blueprint of a machine, albeit a symbolic one, that embodies his ideas of man, woman, and love. The topic of sexual relationships as mechanical processes that he had begun to investigate in 1912 in paintings like La Mairée, here reaches a new and radical synthesis. Like the Nude, The Large Glass is to become unique among works of modern painting. Until 1923, Duchamp works almost exclusively on the preliminary studies and the actual painting of the picture itself. During this period, he develops the idea of the so-called readymade by proposing a Bicycle Wheel as art, which is simply an ordinary bicycle wheel: An industrially produced object becomes a work of art through the choice or assistance of the artist.

1914
When World War I breaks out, Duchamp, who is exempt from military service due to a minor heart defect, lives and works in almost complete isolation as a librarian.

1915
He leaves Paris for the New York, where he is welcomed by reporters and intellectuals as a famous man and soon meets future patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg, as well as a large circle of artists and poets who would give shape to New York Dada. The Arensbergs establish a studio for him in the Lincoln Arcade building. He soon becomes the center of a circle that gathered at the Arensberg's apartment in the evenings, where he is often to be found playing chess with Arensberg or Francis Picabia. He gets many offers from art galleries eager to handle his works but refuses them all, not wanting to start a full-time career as a painter. To support himself, he gives French lessons. He helps Arensberg buying back many of his works, including the Nude. Makes New York his home until 1923, where his activities influence the conception of artistic practice elaborated as New York Dada. In particular, he provides key theorizations of strategies like the use of mechanical drawing, the deployment of found objects, and the assumption of alternate identities. Construction of The Large Glass begins. Painted on glass and including industrially produced wires, it represents a mechanical diagram of sexual intercourse, the functioning of which is elaborately, though enigmatically, explained by Duchamp in his notes related to the project. Makes his first New York readymade: a snow shovel bought at a hardware store to which he adds the inscription: In Advance of the Broken Arm [after] Marcel Duchamp.

1916
He moves to 33 West 67th Street, in the same building as the Arensbergs. They pay his rent in exchange for The Large Glass. He meets Katherine S. Dreier, a director and benefactor of Society of Independent Artists. He writes to his sister Suzanne asking her to complete Bottlerack which he had purchased as a "sculpture already made" and left in his apartment in Paris, thereby demonstrating that the construction of a "ready-made" can take place at a distance. Fountain, the most notorious example of his readymades, is submitted to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, an organization that Duchamp founded, under the pseudonym R. Mutt. Despite the stated program of the group to exhibit anything submitted by artists who had paid the fee, Fountain was rejected, resulting in a scandal that was only heightened when it was revealed who had authored the work. Duchamp discusses idea of the readymade publicly for the first time in an interview for the Evening World.

1917
Duchamp's ready-mades anticipate the Dada movement by a few years. Picabia introduces the Dada movement to New York City in the magazine 291.

1918
Leaves The Large Glass, still unfinished, to Walter Arensberg. Leaves New York with Yvonne Chastel for nine-month stay in Buenos Aires.

1919
Moves from Buenos Aires to Paris where he establishes contact with the Dada group there and creates L.H.O.O.Q., a photograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and a goatee added. The act expresses the Dadaists' scorn for the art of the past.

1920
Returns to New York, founds the Société Anonyme, Inc., in New York with Man Ray and Katherine Dreier. He creates his female alter ego Rose (later Rrose) Sélavy, first as a conceptual, then one year later as a visual entity. For the next twenty years, he signs his work with this pseudonym. As a persona, Rrose Sélavy is consistently identified with commercial methods of signifying authorship such as the copyright and the trademark. Fresh Widow, the first work copyrighted by Rrose Sélavy, is built by a carpenter for Duchamp and is a reproduction of a set of French doors. By replacing the window panes with black patent leather and titling the work "fresh widow" (a pun on "French window"), Duchamp alludes to the casualties of World War I.

1921
Creates works that are to become emblematic of Dada's sensibilities, including L.H.O.O.Q and 50 cc Air de Paris. He also contributes to the formation of Dada identity when he and Man Ray collaborate on the only issue of New York Dada. Including a mock statement of authorization sent by Tristan Tzara from Paris, the issue is the only official Dada publication to appear in the United States.

1923
Stops working on The Large Glass. Moves back to Paris where he remains until 1942, except three brief visits to the US. He begins a romantic relationship with Mary Reynolds. As the years pass, art activity interests him less and less, but cinema becomes more relevant to him. After years of sketching out ideas for theoretical machines, he begins building three-dimensional, functional machines such as Rotary Demisphere (1925) which experiments with the visual tricks produced by forms in motion. His first works in this medium are devoted to optics and inspire him to create a short film, Anemic Cinema (1926). With these and other products, he acts as a kind of amateur engineer; the modesty of his results is a way by which he can ridicule the ambitions of industry. He devotes an increasing amount of time to playing chess, even participating in international tournaments.

1926
Sails to New York to organize a Constantin Brancusi exhibition at Brummer Gallery. The Large Glass is shown publicly for the first time in the International Exhibition of Modern Art, sponsored by the Société Anonyme, Brooklyn Museum, New York.

1927
Marries Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of an automotive manufacturer. The couple divorces in January 1928.

1932
He continues participating in chess tournaments in the United States and Europe and publishes a guide to endgame situations cowritten with the German chess master Vitaly Halberstadt.