Picasso, Duchamp, Hoffman Root of Modern Art

Duchamp will alwys be "modern", thought provoking, funny, challenging, stimulating & sometimes bewildering .... And fancy giving up art for chess!
Now THERE's a contemporary statement for you!

By the way, Lightwizard, have you ever tried to read the Green Book? If so, do tell me what you make of it.

Duchamp was way ahead but I think that Picasso has had the most influence.You could have mentioned Brancusi too-a man that transformed sculpture and ended up martyring himself for the sake of form.

msolga

Are you referring to Duchamp's 'Green Box'?


In art history, there is general agreement that Modern Art started in 19th-century France with the paintings of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, etc.

Just seeing more the European spectrum of art, IMHO Duchamp has had some influence (especially through the Dadaist), while Picasso is more attractive to the general public.

And Rodin changed the world of sculpture WAY before Picasso appeared on the scene.

Hi Walter

Nice to "see" you again!

The Green Book I refer to is a little book with text & plans for The Bride stripped bare by her batchelors even.

I tried to read it many years ago, when researching an essay on the influence of Dada on 20th century art. I really couldn't figure out what to make of it - the instructions, the crossed-out sections, the diagrams.
THEN I read all these scholarly writings by others trying to figure out the same things. At the time I came to the conclusion that Duchamp was having a bit if fun at the expense of "Art", taking the Mickey, so to speak ...

I agree with Hebba. Marcel Duchamp-Rrose Celavy was way ahead of his time: the new "Castle of Purity". We now don't know if some modern art is a product of Duchamp's works or just a product of the age. Picasso's influence, instead, is clearer. I don't know Hoffmann well enough.

I think that Duchamp changed the possibilities of what art could be.His lasting importance & influence is due to the new ways we were prepared to look at art in the 20th century. The notion of conceptual art was a radical & lasting one.

A bit more about Duchamp:

Duchamp is reconstructing, editing, inventing the image. Like in Velázquez, the painter is painted; the creator is created by his images.
Then there is transgression: seeing what must not be seen, knowing what must not be known, inmortalizing things that should not remain, tresspassing the veils of secrecy, of intimity.

That is Duchamp: the mental image is more important than the visual image.

"Revealing the extraordinary as if it were ordinary, there is no more divine punishment" wrote (more or less, I'm translating) Anthony Burguess.

Duchamp was a prime mover in the direction of intellectualizing the visual arts into a kind of contraptual thinking process. Hans Hoffman was an early abstract expressionist painter who dealt with the psychology of color.
Picasso was a humanistic, natural painter (even with the cubist and expressionistic distortions). You'd expect Picasso had the most influence on figurative art of the contemporary period, even the cartoon pop art of Wessleman and Haring. Robert Rauschenber's assemblages are directly influenced by Duchamp but his abstract gestural technique is straight out of Hoffman.
DeKooning's woman series owes a lot to Picasso's "Le Damselles" kind of distortion but his landscapes are more influenced by Hoffman. It's difficutl for me to pick one of the three artists and it's also a temptation to go back to Cezanne and many other artists who had departed from realism and naturalism in defining image by color and form with little reliance on drawing. Picasso was superb at drawing (look at the "Mediterranean Suite" of etchings, early 1940's) and that seemed to influence Jackson Pollock in the energy and articulation of his textural lines. Early Pollock can be looked at as a dead giveaway in that respect. There's still the influence of a kind of cubism but stretching toward formless patterns.

Out of the three, liberating art from the strictness of just depicting a scene or subject, Duchamp made all artists approach their subject out of introspection and at the same time a detached intellectualism. Really remarkable when one thinks about it. So my choice is Duchamp -- pop art, op art, minimal art, conceptual art are all rooted in his art and way of thinking. This certainly doesn't discount all the evocactive explorations into pure color and form of the abstract expressionists, the figurative painters or anything in the new pluralism -- I believe they all have been influenced by the way Duchamp thought about creating a visual image.

I would make my vote for Duchamp as leader in the synthesis of artistic tradition.

Well put, Lightwizard.

Duchamp gets my vote as the artist who has had the widest influence on our era.....The reverberations of his art are the most prevalent in the contemporary art scene.....

The realist tradition of Courbet seemed to be neglected until artists like Philip Pearlstein came into prominence.......important, but secular..........I hope that art history will eventually accord them (and their craftmanship) a more stellar status in the 21 century than they currently enjoy ......

Welcome shepaints!

I guess I should have tried to add a poll once again since it kinda screwed up in the editing. But it is easy to see Duchamp as being the winner here.

Thanks for the welcome Light! (((((()))))))

Just back from the Art Gallery of Ontario where they featured painters
of the Mediterannean such as Matisse, Cezanne, Gaughin etc.......Not a
Duchamp in sight!

Actually, it would be funny to see Duchamp in "Gauguin to Matisse - French Masterpieces from Russia's Hermitage Museum", wouldn't it? :wink:

BTW, quite a lot of information and more than a couple of paintings of Duchamp can be seen here

Marcel Duchamp - online

shepaints - the one modern painter obviously influenced by those artists is David Hockney. We are on a rebound from the Duchamp intellectualizing of art toward pictoral representations of purely emotional responses to what we see and feel in our experiences.

..That's good news Light......I havent followed David
Hockney's career for the past decade or so.....but caught an amazing show
of his at Cranbrooke, Michigan many years ago......

Walter......I wouldn't have minded seeing a sparkling oil of the south f France painted by Duchamp and entitled....."C'est n'est pas
la Mediterranie........" (or something similar!!)

I never knew Gauguin was such a wonderful painter until
seeing his works "in the flesh"....so as to speak........

LW,you think that Hockney is OBVIOUSLY influenced by the artists you named?I saw an exhibition of his recently and couldn´t really see it.

His newer works has departed from the earlier work which has the boistrous color range of Matisse, that flat modeling of Gaughan and the fanciful depiction of reality of Chagall. These aren't the only artists who have influenced Hockney and reading his own autobiographical works, he gives the nod to many artists of the past. Only the abstractionists seem completely original but they do derive their colorways and compostion from the art of the past -- certainly far less obvious as there are virtually no stylistic clues. In this age of pluralism, styles overlap and make it difficult to be original. There's still a lot of work being created that has a disctinctive look of originality as the artist has been able to put their own indelible stamp onto a visual image. The viewer really isn't suppose to see the influences of any art in the past and it is often so subtle and well handled by the artist, we are caught up in their imagery as being entirely original. In that way, I listen to the music of Philip Glass without ever thinking of Bach. The point here is that Hockney isn't influenced by Duchamp as much as other art of the past. Maybe Picasso is a better candidate out of the three but I can't see much influence there. It does make Hockney one of the more unique visual artists of the past three decades.