Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to an exhibition in 1917 and changed what art was allowed to be. He began as a painter, and Nude Descending a Staircase caused a sensation at the New York Armory Show in 1913 - a critic called it an explosion in a shingle factory - which made him famous in America before he had moved there. He then more or less stopped painting, on the grounds that it was retinal, addressed to the eye rather than the mind. The readymades followed: a bicycle wheel on a stool, a snow shovel, a bottle rack, ordinary objects selected rather than made. Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt, was submitted to the Society of Independent Artists, whose rules said it would exhibit anything submitted with the fee; the board hid it, and Duchamp, who was on the board, resigned. The original was lost and the seventeen authorised replicas are in major museums. He spent eight years on The Large Glass, left it unfinished, and declared it definitively incomplete after it cracked in transit. Then he announced he had given up art for chess, played for France in four Olympiads, and wrote a book on endgames - while secretly working for twenty years on Etant donnes, a tableau visible only through two peepholes, revealed after his death in 1968. Conceptual art, pop art and most of what followed take him as the origin point, which he found funny. He became an American citizen in 1955. The 1917 submission may have been made with or by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a claim argued from a letter of his own and still disputed. Etant donnes was assembled in secret in his studio and installed at Philadelphia to instructions he left behind.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history