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Title: Duchamp : A Biography by Calvin Tomkins ISBN: 0-8050-5789-7 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 15 March, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent biography
Comment: The fantastic New Yorker art critic turns his eye towards one of his favorite artists. This book balances both a traditional historical biography of Duchamp along with a critique and examination of his art. A good read of an artist with an interesting (and pleasantly surprisingly un-tortured) life.
Rating: 5
Summary: BRILLIANT!
Comment: I wholeheartedly recommend this wonderful book to everyone who knows how to read English. Marcel Duchamp was perhaps the premier iconclast of the twentieth century, and the runners up might be Buckminster Fuller & Le Corbusier. The book is NOT a boring monograph; it is a lot of fun to read. Tompkins is a Duchamp enthusiast but manages to wade through the mythology and bull to present the reader with the rosetta stone of Duchamp's life and art. Whether you took a twentieth century art survey in college and only know Duchamp as the guy who wrote R. Mutt on an upside-down urinal or you have read any number of books about the artist you should read this book! Tompkins sucks the reader right into the mind of Duchamp on the first page with a discussion and analysis of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, one the the greatest and most misunderstood and unappreciated works of the last century. I was an Art History major in college and hence suffered through so many authoritative, pretentious, dry, bland, misinformed, prejudiced and yawn-inducing books that it was such a pleasure to stumble onto Tompkin's Duchamp, which is a reader's book, totally apt since Duchamp was a man's man, a genius, not a theorizing weasal. This book is important because it inspires everyone to question everything you take for granted, and enjoy puns and jokes and the lighter side of life, and that art is there for everyone, not for patrons and the elite, for you and me, and that the contrary notion is absurd.
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful, though-provoking biography
Comment: DUCHAMP: A BIOGRAPHY is a wonderful biography of the artist whom, Tompkins argues persuasively, is the most influential of our almost-completed century. That the art work must be a mental act (a 'cosa mentale,' Leonardo da Vinci had argued many years before); that to be truly creative we need to work AGAINST our esthetic expectations; that art should aspire to be 'non-retinal': these are only some of Duchamp's major perceptions included in this book. What is particularly enjoyable is the way in which Tompkins meshes DuChamps' remarkable life -- one of the most sexually attractive of men, a chess player at the highest levels, an extraordinarily charming and easy person (yet a man who, not matter how much he tried to avoid the repetitive patterns involved in 'art,' was always the consummate artist)with the works of art and 'readymades' which emerged in and from that life. Duchamp's life makes for wonderful reading. What I most recommend about the book is that it stimulates one's own thinking, challenging so much of our conventional beliefs -- in art, in convention, in the concepts of both accomplishment and genius.
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Title: Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell ISBN: 0306803038 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: May, 1988 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art by Calvin Tomkins ISBN: 0140043136 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1976 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (A Da Capo Paperback) by Marcel Duchamp, Michel Sanouillet, Elmer Peterson ISBN: 0306803410 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: May, 1989 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (2 Volumes in 1) by Arturo Schwarz ISBN: 0929445066 Publisher: Delano Greenidge Editions Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $65.00 |
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Title: Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings (California Studies in the History of Art ; 35) by Kristine Stiles, Peter Howard Selz ISBN: 0520202538 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: May, 1996 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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