I didn’t abandon everything at a moment’s notice – on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the ‘Large Glass’ unfinished. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man – Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can’t help it. Even if they don’t believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
It’s a product of two poles – there’s the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
I came to feel an artist might use anything – a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol – t say what he wanted to say. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up – or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I’ve never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There’s still magic in the idea, so I’d rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre – one lived, one painted, one was a painter – all that doesn’t mean anything, fundamentally. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap. Marcel Duchamp Read Quote
