MARCEL DUCHAMP
Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp and Arnold Fawcus [Designers]
Robert Lebel: MARCEL DUCHAMP. New York City and London: Grove Press and the Trianon Press, 1959. First edition thus [First published in French under the title "Sur Marcel Duchamp" in a limited edition of 137 copies]. Translation by George Heard Hamilton. A very good hard cover book in a good dust jacket with shelf wear including rough fore edges: the dust jacket's front cover is detached and the top and bottom of the spine is missing approx. 2-inch chips. One of the tipped-in color plates has a crease on the bottom left-hand side ["Nu descendant un Escalier," No. 2, 1912]. Otherwise, interior unmarked and clean. Out-of-print. Design and layout by Marcel Duchamp and Arnold Fawcus.
9.5 x 13 hard cover book with 192 pages and 179 monochrome and 6 color gravures, and a frontispiece printed by the collotype and stencil process, involving 21 applications by hand. Color and monochrome plates printed under Duchamp's supervision.
- Bonds and Breaks: First Attempts - Cubism - The Nude Descending a Staircase
- 1912: Around the World of Painting in Eight Months
- 1913: Triumph at the Armory Show and rejection of "Retinal" Art
- 1914-18: The Readymade - The War - the Unintentional Conquest of New York
- Final Farewell to Painting - Dada - the Rotatives - Rrose Sélavy
- Gambling - Chess - Freedom of Behavior
- Through the Large Glass
- The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp
- Souvenirs of Marcel Duchamp by H. P. Roché
- Lighthouse of the Bride by André Breton
- Whiskers and Kicks of All Kinds by Robert Lebel
- Catalogue and Bibliography by Robert Lebel
- Also includes List of Photographs, List of Plates, Acknowledgments, and an Index
From the website for The Art Story: Few artists can boast having changed the course of art history in the way that Marcel Duchamp did. Having assimilated the lessons of Cubism and Futurism, whose joint influence may be felt in his early paintings, he spearheaded the American Dada movement together with his friends and collaborators Picabia and Man Ray. By challenging the very notion of what is art, his first readymades sent shock waves across the art world that can still be felt today. Duchamp's ongoing preoccupation with the mechanisms of desire and human sexuality as well as his fondness for wordplay aligns his work with that of Surrealists, although he steadfastly refused to be affiliated with any specific artistic movement per se. In his insistence that art should be driven by ideas above all, Duchamp is generally considered to be the father of Conceptual art. His refusal to follow a conventional artistic path, matched only by a horror of repetition which accounts for the relatively small number of works Duchamp produced in the span of his short career, ultimately led to his withdrawal from the art world. In later years, Duchamp famously spent his time playing chess, even as he labored away in secret at his last enigmatic masterpiece, which was only unveiled after his death in 1968.