Marcel Duchamp

Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau

Made in New York, New York, United States, North and Central America

Date:

1946-1966

Medium:
Mixed media assemblage: (exterior) wooden door, iron nails, bricks, and stucco; (interior) bricks, velvet, wood, parchment over an armature of lead, steel, brass, synthetic putties and adhesives, aluminum sheet, welded steel-wire screen, and wood; Peg-Board, hair, oil paint, plastic, steel binder clips, plastic clothespins, twigs, leaves, glass, plywood, brass piano hinge, nails, screws, cotton, collotype prints, acrylic varnish, chalk, graphite, paper, cardboard, tape, pen ink, electric light fixtures, gas lamp (Bec Auer type), foam rubber, cork, electric motor, cookie tin, and linoleum

Dimensions:
7 feet 11 1/2 inches × 70 inches × 49 inches (242.6 × 177.8 × 124.5 cm)

2° le gaz d'éclairage

Étant donnés is Marcel Duchamp's last major artwork, which surprised the art world because it believed he had given up art for competitive chess which he had been playing for almost 25 years, following a prolific art career. He had been making work with the Surrealists when he made The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. This work is a tableau, visible only through a pair of peepholes in a wooden door, of a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden, legs spread, holding a gas lamp in the air in one hand against a landscape backdrop.