Inside, Outside – The World of the Artist (Marcel Duchamp)

Established in 1994, THE COURSE offers innovative and exciting lectures in Art History, Literature, Music and Opera.

In INSIDE, OUTSIDE, The World of the Art, Nicole Mezey will look at how creativity reflects the personal and professional experience of the artist. This series focuses on a different artist each week, looking first at the life behind their creations – the mental asylum in which Richard Dadd produced some of his greatest works, the pressure of eight children on the output of Frans Hals – before moving on to explore their work and the way it reflects that experience.

Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968), Endgame

“Take one cubic centimetre of tobacco smoke and paint the exterior and the interior surfaces a waterproof colour.”

One of seven children, four of whom became distinguished artists, Marcel Duchamp apparently abandoned art altogether in his thirties, to devote himself to chess. Nonetheless, this semi-reclusive outsider continued to exchange ideas with controversial artistic figures and lived to see acclaim by the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s and recognition as, possibly, the most influential artist of the 20th century.