Suzanne Duchamp, Dada’s mom

Born in 1889 in an artistic family in northern France, Suzanne Duchamp was exposed to the avant-garde of the early 20th century, including Cubism and Dada. But she also developed her highly personal painting practice. A new exhibition has made Duchamp often attracted to her brothers Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon. “Suzanne Duchamp: A Retrospective” recently headed to Schirn kunsthalle in Frankfurt in the sight of Kunsthaus Zurich, continuing the excellent trend of monographs, showing dedicated to underrepresented female artists.

Duchamp’s Dada works will be the main attraction for most visitors. The ridiculous movement began in Zurich, but quickly spread to a Europe caused by the terrorist attacks of World War I, where rationality and order no longer seemed to apply. Duchamp participated in the Paris iteration, and her contribution leaned towards the freedom the movement brought to the artists. Dada’s artists took the accusations away from the prejudice of fine arts and accepted collages, photography, corsage and other techniques that borrowed from materials for everyday life. For Duchamp, these materials are especially soft: gold paint, silver tin foil, brass bell gears and glass beads provide her mechanical drawings with original decorative qualities. Two isolated separate radiation (1916–20) Use the hard edge form of the gilded mesh as a field to draw the relationship between geometric shapes. The two shapes of the title present three dimensions with beads and plastic beads, both connected and isolated by circulating threads, creating a pushing effect that is subtly alleviated by thin, shaking purple lines floating on the right.

To emerge a new committee in the exhibition’s catalogue, painter Amy Sillman draws inspiration from this form of dynamics to produce his own digital drawings, combining gesture shapes with text overlays to emphasize how Duchamp’s abstract markings production is bound to the depths of human emotions, love, joy and glory. This sentiment was far from obvious during the postwar period of Duchamp’s work, and in other work she asked sharp questions about the place of human beings in the industrial world, including the title ” My thought factory (1920) and Happy seminar (1920). Duchamp makes full use of the empty space of the page, engraved with modernist architectural forms, comparable to the nominal text allusions of thought and feeling. Although these may be considered ironic, pointing to the loss of self in the face of modern industry, Duchamp specifically calls her Dada period when she turned to “subjective” painting, suggesting that she found a way to insert herself into this emerging art language.

Despite Dada’s emphasis on mixed media, painting’s special sway over Duchamp, an endless pattern of representation. We see it most clearly Marcel’s unfortunate ready-made (1920). When Duchamp married his companion Jean Crotti, her brother Marcel gave the newlyweds a “ready-made” gift. He provided instructions for purchasing a geometry textbook and hanging it on the balcony with a rope to get the wind through its pages of the rifle. Although the wind eventually destroyed the work, the photo survived and Duchamp turned the photo into an oil painting. A piece of ice-blue paper leaned against the rigid metal strips of the balcony. The painted part of the string reminds the viewer of the instability of the original gesture and is longer lasting than the object itself. What does painting ready-made art mean? Is this a work of art intentionally opposed to painting manual labor? If nothing else, it shows that Duchamp is reluctant to live in the shadow of his elder brother, re-imposed his own work.

Many Duchamp’s Dada works include Two isolated separate radiation, Arouse loneliness. Although artist friends and collaborators, including Crotti and Francis Picabia, were all lively and lively, in 1922 she returned to a more lonely representative painting practice. With a straightforward, twisted perspective and scale-playing style, she recaptured her art world with musicians, brides, wanderers, children, and even the lush gardens of Eden, where Eve stage centers on the stage, Adam poses behind her. These paintings are performed with bold colors and simple strokes, permanently making Dada entertaining without its distortion and frequent cold effects. Criticism – including Dadaists’ irony of the old guard – can only take you so far. Duchamp’s later work shows that once you have something done, you need to make something for yourself. The show ends with a sketch on the sketch, with a motto engraved on Duchamp: “Work and…Smile!”