On the 2nd of October 1968, artist Marcel Duchamp died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. His Rouen grave was engraved with the humorously defiant epitaph “Besides, it’s always the others who die!”. In death, as in life, he remained a master of sarcasm and controversy.
A puzzling development in his career occurred in 1920, when Duchamp started adopting a creative alter ego. At first, the Catholic artist was toying with the idea of assuming a Jewish identity, but found changing gender was possibly more fun. A year earlier, he had drawn a moustache and beard onto Mona Lisa’s picture from a postcard, marking a historic fascination in portraiture with androgyny and gender deception.
L.H.O.O.Q. (1919). Derivative work by the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp based on the Mona Lisa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Within Dadaism – the trend that Duchamp adhered to – artists worked increasingly towards challenging deeply-rooted gender roles. For the first…
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