Marcel Duchamp was a French and American painter, chess player, sculptor, and writer who worked with conceptual art, Cubism, and Dadaism. He is mostly famous for the influence he had on the art of the twentieth century and especially Pop Art represented by Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, etc. Duchamp to Pop is the Norton Simon Museum’s exhibition aimed to show the impact of Marcel Duchamp over Pop Art and its artists. The purpose of this paper is to analyze one of Duchamp’s works, Boîte-en-valise, and discover the way it influenced on the Pop Art movement.
Boîte-en-valise is a cardboard box that contains 68 replicas and reproductions of Duchamp’s works. Duchamp had worked on the Boîte-en-valise for five years from 1935 to 1940. After German occupation of Paris on 1940, he smuggled all of the materials to New York, where created portable museum and edited his work. Boîte-en-valise is a selection of small-scale reproductions, which are represented both in photographic and readymade forms. It includes such famous Duchamp’s works as Traveler’s Folding, Air de Paris, Fountain, and The Large Glass. Boîte-en-valise is considered to be “one of the most important and influential works of 20th-century art” (“Conceptual Art 101: Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise”). It is not only a summation of his art but also duplicates made by the artist himself, a result of his conceptual practice. Boîte-en-valise contains the whole variety of Duchamp’s artistic achievements and statements from the early attempts in Cubism to the outstanding themes that led to the beginnings of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Pop Art. In the Norton Simon Museum, it is represented by Series D of 1961, Edition of 30.
Talking about art, Duchamp said, “You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition” (“Marcel Duchamp”). He liked the idea that everybody perceived art according to his or her emotions and life experience and the art could have many meanings. Together with his friend Francis Picabia, Duchamp brought to the United States of America Dadaism movement that later transformed to Neo-Dada and became a basis of Pop Art and other new art movements of the twentieth century. On the most famous Duchamp’s Dada works is Fountain that also is a part of Boîte-en-valise. Fountain became a major landmark of the twentieth-century art. It forced its viewers thinking about the message the artist wanted to send and, as the result, to feel Fountain through the lens of their inner world.
One of the key features of Duchamp’s art was a refusal to accept the art standards, repeat, and develop a recognizable art style. He desired to shock his viewers and his vision paved the road for such modern art movements of the twentieth century as Pop Art. Duchamp liked the Pop Art because “it waived distortion and abstraction and brought ‘finished things’ into the picture” (Ruhrberg et al., 131). In 1964, he said, “Pop Art is a return to “conceptual” painting . . . If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas” (Girst, 1). Boîte-en-valise includes reproduction of Duchamp’s major works that had an impact on the developing of the Pop Art culture of the twentieth century.
Duchamp, Marcel. Boîte-en-valise. 1961. The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.
Works Cited
“Conceptual Art 101: Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise.” Honolulu Museum of Art. Honolulu Museum of Art, n. d. Web. Accessed 6 Apr 2016.
Girst, Thomas. “(Ab)Using Marcel Duchamp: The Concept of the Readymade in Post-War and Contemporary American Art.” Tout-Fait 2.5 (Apr 2003): 1-2. Web. Accessed 6 Apr 2016.
“Marcel Duchamp.” The Art Story. The Art Story, n. d. Web. Accessed 6 Apr 2016.
Ruhrberg, K. et al. Art of the 20th century, part I. Madrid: Taschen, 2000. Print.
