Unknown
Marcel Duchamp who was originally a painter-his first piece that gained a large amount of fame being the painting “Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2” (1912). After 1912 though, Duchamp’s work in paintings decreased greatly and found his true passion; readymades.
His well known piece from his collection of readymades would have to be “Fountain”, a urinal flipped upside down which Duchamp had submitted to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York.
Unsurprisingly a huge controversy arose out of this, many criticizing Duchamp’s work as an assault to the conventional understanding of the nature and status of art.
Duchamp’s work will always have divided views, considering the majority of his work being ignored by the public until the avant-garde movement of the 1960’s where groups such as the Surrealists deemed his work as important. Although in the Surrealists’ eyes he was important, critics and “official” art circles still say nothing but a failure of an artist.
Although Duchamp viewed himself as an artist and anti-artist at the same time and with that, he is considered to be one of the leading artists of the twentieth century.
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