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Duchamp

Love and Death, even

Marcel Duchamp’s stature in the history of art has grown steadily since the 1950s, as several artistic movements have embraced him as their founding father. But although his influence is comparable only to Picasso’s, Duchamp continues to be relatively unknown outside his narrow circle of followers. This book seeks to explain his oeuvre, which has been shrouded with mystery.

Duchamp’s two great preoccupations were the nature of scientific truth and a feeling for love with its natural limit, death. His works all speak of eroticism in a way that pushes the socially acceptable to its outer limits. Juan Antonio Ramirez addresses such questions as the meaning of the artist’s ground-breaking ready-mades and his famous installation Etant donnés; his passionate essay reproduces all of Duchamp’s important works, in addition to numerous previously unpublished visual sources. Duchamp: Love and Death, even is a seminal monograph for understanding this crucial figure of modern art.

Distribution by the University of Chicago Press only to customers in the USA and Canada. Customers elsewhere should visit the UK website of Reaktion Books.


304 pages | © 1998

Art: Art--Biography


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Reviews

"Ramírez . . . takes a narrower yet no less revealing angle, charting Duchamp’s overlapping fascinations with scientific truth, love and death. Ramírez makes a particularly detailed commentary on the erotic imagery in the work and on the related schema between particular works."

Art Monthly

Table of Contents

Also
Preface to the English Edition
1. Devising the Ready-Mades
2. ’Precision Painting...’ (The Mechanisms of Bachelors)
3. ’...And the Beauty of Indifference’ (The Bride Stripped Bare)
4. In the Orbit of Etant Donnés
5. ’Given, in the Darkness...’ (Love and Death)
6. Appendix: Early Duchamp in 9 Representative Works
Select Bibliography (69 Books)
References
Index of Works by Duchamp
Index of Proper Names
Photographic Acknowledgements

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