Six decades since its 1959 publication, Marcel Duchamp by Robert Lebel et al. is back in print, and it's a must-have for anyone who wants better to comprehend an artist who made a career of doing the semi-incomprehensible. The book--Duchamp's first monograph and catalogue raisonné--swarms with photographs and reproductions of his work and is faithful to the French Dadaist's original design. Marcel Duchamp is an art book, a time capsule and a portrait of the artist by four contributors, including the artist himself.
Duchamp (1887-1968) made his first big splash in 1912 with his titillatingly titled but eroticism-free painting Nude Descending a Staircase, which, Marcel Duchamp reports, one flummoxed critic described as conjuring "an explosion in a shingle factory." That same triumphant year, Duchamp quit painting and turned to ready-mades; writes Lebel, "He would spruce up the Mona Lisa with a beard and moustache or recommend, as a 'reciprocal ready-made,' the use of a Rembrandt 'as an ironing-board.' "
Marcel Duchamp highlights the artist's love of wordplay, perhaps most famously employed in his pseudonym Rrose Sélavy (pronounced "C'est la vie"). This humor coexisted with Duchamp's easy-to-miss seriousness. In his exultant essay about their friendship, writer H.P. Roché offers, "When he submitted a porcelain urinal to the New York Independents, he was saying: 'Beauty is around you wherever you choose to discover it.' " The New York Independents thought the urinal, which Duchamp titled Fountain, was saying something else: after the 1917 show opened, he was forced to withdraw it. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer