Marcel Duchamp: Works, Writings, Interviews

By his own testimony, Marcel Duchamp considered painting a "means of expression, not an end in itself. One means of expression among others, and not a complete end for life at all." His legendary "Large Glass," for example, can be seen as simply the culmination or sum of numerous experiments conducted over an eight-year period. For this reason, every aspect of his oeuvre--painting, installation, writing, interviews--is of potentially equivalent interest, and any Duchamp primer needs to present his more ephemeral contributions, in aphorisms, diagrams and conversation, alongside his visual experiments. Works, Writings, Interviews does this job splendidly, exploring the artist's many-faceted activities, analyzing his work as an entirety and gathering his key interviews and writings.