Duchamp: Domestic Patterns, Covers, and Threads [Anglais] [Broché]

"[Davis] makes a convincing argument about just how and where Duchamp came to [his] new aesthetic." --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Marcel Duchamp's 1912 Munich trip provided the evidence for the interest he had in his use of string, thread and cloth throughout his career. The artistic patterns that emerged in his work connect him with earlier artistic traditions. Davis gives us an unusual view of Duchamp's interests and offers a continuity within which we may perceive his work. An early drawing referencing a sewing machine provides the key to much of Duchamp's creative habits.

The book provides that rare experience of an ah-ha revelation about a world-famous artist you thought you knew all about. Surely no other artist has gripped the public’s imagination with his outrageous works that at first elicited the remark, "But is it art?" "Yes!" confirmed the critical world.

The Author lays out how a traditional artist working with paint and canvas was so intensely influenced by the manufactured goods he observed at a 1912 Munich Trade Show that he abandoned making painted images and from thereon focused on creating works from already manufactured items. From this came his break-through style which came to be known as "Readymades." The artist introduced a new aesthetic; shocking the art world at first, but now revered as great art.

Author is senior professor in the art history department at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. His undergraduate degree is from Brown University (1959). His Master's degree is from Indiana University (1964).

(pp. 20/21) "Duchamp is not forgotten easily, and the legacy he left is still not understood by those who look uncomprehendingly either at The Large Glass, or the Étant Donnés. What I want to do now, however, is to look at the way these two works evolved, using a number of his pieces to demonstrate that there are significant patterns to his choices which have eluded many who have examined his work. Some artists have sought to use Duchamp as a rationalization for a departure point for new work, while writers/critics have often found in it a way of explaining why the art of the twentieth century has become the basis for assuming that "Anything goes!" My concerns here, however, are with seeking to reveal patterns different from those superimposed upon his work by current deconstructionist or linguistic analysis; theirs has little to do with the content of Duchamp’s work, and perhaps those views have to do more with an inability to access his patterns—the results become a contemporary version of what constitutes the "emperor’s new clothes" and seem less substantive even, than the transparency of The Large Glass."