The Duchamp Defense

At a very early age Marcel Duchamp became interested in chess. It was, he told his biographer Arturo Schwarz, his two brothers-Jacques Villon and Duchamp-Villon--to whom he owed this initiation at age thirteen, the same moment as his introduction to painting. We know an etching by Villon, dated 1904, which represents the young Marcel playing a game of chess with his sister Suzanne. A few years later, in 1910, the first large oil that Duchamp painted was a portrait of his two brothers seated across from one another at a chessboard set up on the family tea table in the garden of the house at Puteaux. If, in the Duchamp household, chess seems to have been a family affair, in the same way that art or painting was, Marcel, the youngest of the three brothers, was nonetheless the only one to take openly the name of their father, to enter his very field (champ) in order to use it as a signature (Duchamp). But it is not this aspect-which if overplayed would make a mockery of psychoanalysis--that we will focus on. Of the 1910 Chess Players Duchamp himself said that one could easily discern the influence of Cezanne. Now it is with regard to this father (Matisse: Cezanne is the master of all of us ... a sort of Good Father of painting), whose works he saw for the first time this same year at Vollard's, that Duchamp will have to establish his independence as a painter.' In 1911, Duchamp produced no fewer than six drawings or sketches and two paintings on this very subject. But in looking at these canvases or

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• Listening through the Works of Duchamp

  Open Access•Carolina Alfradique Leite•Revista Brasileira de Estudos da…•2025

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  Open Access•Carolina Alfradique Leite•Revista Brasileira de Estudos da…•2025

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