Marcel Duchamp Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Marcel Duchamp:

Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.

All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much.

Marcel Duchamp

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.

Marcel Duchamp

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

Marcel Duchamp

My stay in Munich was the scene of my complete liberation.

Marcel Duchamp

In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn.

Marcel Duchamp

Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.

Marcel Duchamp

I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.

Marcel Duchamp

I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other.

Marcel Duchamp

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.' Now everyone makes something, and those who make things on a canvas with a frame, they're called artists. Formerly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer. We're all craftsmen, in civilian or military or artistic life.

Marcel Duchamp

From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada.

Marcel Duchamp

I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist,' as compared to 'believer.' And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is.

Marcel Duchamp

In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case.

Marcel Duchamp

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

Marcel Duchamp

I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.

Marcel Duchamp

When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.

Marcel Duchamp

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.

Marcel Duchamp

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

Marcel Duchamp

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Marcel Duchamp

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.

Marcel Duchamp

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Marcel Duchamp

I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.'

Marcel Duchamp

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.

Marcel Duchamp

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

Marcel Duchamp

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.

Marcel Duchamp

One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even.

Marcel Duchamp

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.

Marcel Duchamp

Can works be made which are not 'of art'?

Marcel Duchamp

I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.

Marcel Duchamp

Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.

Marcel Duchamp

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

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Marcel Duchamp

My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique.

Marcel Duchamp

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

Marcel Duchamp

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

Marcel Duchamp

A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality.

Marcel Duchamp

The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory.

Marcel Duchamp