Was Marcel Duchamp’s game-changing art, from oils to signed urinals, really the product of a vast and rigorous intellect? Mark Hudson is not so sure.

I’m watching a flickery, tantalisingly brief video-clip of Marcel Duchamp being interviewed in 1966 for BBC Two’s Late Night Line-Up, by Joan Bakewell. It has the feel of an unlikely encounter: on the one hand, the archetypal dollybird intellectual, who is still very much with us; on the other, the so-called Father of Conceptual Art who had produced his most famous work back in 1917. Yet there he is, two years before his death, hatchet-faced but supremely affable, dragging occasionally on a cigar, explaining himself in disarmingly simple terms and in excellent English.

When the clip cuts out, after just over a minute, what sticks in the mind is a comment he makes just before the screen goes blank: “Artists often do things without knowing why they do them,” he says. “I never ask myself why…” Then he’s gone.

He never asks why? You might be forgiven for thinking that conceptual art would be all about asking why. But then very little about Duchamp – one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of art – is as you’d expect it to be.

If Picasso was considered the defining artist of the age for most of the 20th century, the Spaniard has been relegated over the past couple of decades to the role of a mere precursor to the man who, proverbially, changed the world by signing a urinal and calling it art. Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917 – a china urinal laid on its back and signed R Mutt – has taken on the iconic status once reserved for creations of the order of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. It has become the work that removed art to the cerebral realm from the physical – or the “retinal” as Duchamp liked to call it – enabling Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance Art and just about every other significant development of the past half century. It is the work, in short, that got art where it is today.

A new exhibition at the Barbican, in London, looks at Duchamp’s influence on and interactions with four key post-war American figures: composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham and artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. But what of Duchamp himself? While he’s universally characterised as the arch-conceptualist, does that label do justice to what Duchamp did or who he was?

“I was expecting this very rarefied French intellectual,” says Duchamp’s biographer, Calvin Tomkins, of his first meeting with the artist in New York in 1959. “But he seemed more American than French in his willingness to talk about any subject on any level. A lot of my questions must have seemed ridiculous to him, but he turned everything I said into something amusing. For him the conversation was a game. He turned everything he did into a form of play.”

Born in Normandy in 1887, Duchamp was one of seven children of a well-off and eminently respectable civil servant, four of whom became artists. Though they remained less well-known, his elder brothers Gaston and Raymond – who worked under the names Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon – found a degree of success developing the Post-Impressionist and Cubist ideas they encountered early in their careers; the younger Duchamp, who joined them in Paris in 1904, worked through the major modes of the early 20th century – Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism – in quick succession.

“They aimed for fame,” Duchamp later said of his brothers. “I had no aim. I just wanted to be left alone to do what I liked.” While Duchamp is associated with Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, he never aligned himself with any one group. Arriving in Paris at the height of the early Modernist ferment, Duchamp knew everyone, and formed friendships with Francis Picabia, Man Ray, André Breton and many others. Yet Duchamp’s radiant amiability had about it, in Tomkins’s words, “a touch of opacity” – it kept people at a distance.

Duchamp aspired to a kind of sublime detachment – what he called “the beauty of indifference”. But doesn’t an insistence on indifference so often mask its opposite? In his biography Tomkins suggests that Duchamp’s compulsion to debunk art with a capital A and his lifelong aversion to retinal art – which appeals principally to the eye – may have been inspired by something as banal as his early rejection by the esteemed Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

“He had a number of resentments in relation to his early career,” says Tomkins. “This indifference was something he grew into in reaction to that. For him it was a positive thing, because it meant he could let things go.”

It was a quality that extended into his art. If Duchamp wasn’t interested in “asking why” in the sense of investigating his own motives, he was equally oblivious to history, social issues, the way the world looks and just about everything else art has traditionally been about. “Rather than ask why, his art asks how,” says Duchamp scholar Paul B Franklin. “It’s about intellectual process. He described his art as a game between I and me – between subject and object, the initiator and the receiver.” And this game extends to the relationship between artist and viewer.

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone,” Duchamp maintained. “The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting [it] and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Duchamp’s best known painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, an ingenious, if slightly mechanical amalgam of cubism and Futurism, was one of the causes célèbres of the Armory Show, the exhibition that gave America its first scandalised exposure to Modernism in 1913. Little known in Europe, Duchamp arrived in New York, aged 26, to find himself a celebrity.

America was to feature prominently in his life. He moved several times between Paris and New York before settling in Greenwich Village in 1942, becoming an American citizen in 1955. In America he felt freer, he claimed, less burdened by tradition. No less important was his 40-year relationship with the millionaire collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, who were to acquire 85 per cent of his admittedly tiny output.

Having achieved a degree of success through painting, Duchamp abandoned it. The first of the “readymades” – objects he transformed into art through the simple act of choosing them – a bottle rack, appeared in 1914. The supposedly world-changing Fountain didn’t appear until three years later. It was never officially exhibited, and after being photographed for posterity by the modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, the work was thrown out with the rubbish.

Duchamp’s real preoccupation at this time was the work he considered his magnum opus, the dauntingly opaque The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even – aka The Large Glass, an obtusely symbolic arrangement of variously insect-like and mechanical forms, sandwiched between two monumental sheets of glass. Representing the never-consummated courtship of a Queen Bee-like bride and her platoon of bachelor drones, the work has given rise to a whole forest of interpretations. The artist’s own notes, invoking the transmission of semen-like fluids and gases between different elements in the work, only served further to obscure matters.

One of the most discussed works of the 20th century, which exists none the less in a category all its own, The Large Glass was abandoned by Duchamp in 1923, after eight years of work, as “definitively unfinished”. When it was shattered in transit in 1926, Duchamp patiently repaired it, claiming the skeins of spiderweb cracks only improved the work.

Having said all he had to say and not wanting to repeat himself, Duchamp gave up art in 1923, in favour of playing chess, and for most of the rest of his life wasn’t considered a practising artist. He was, however, assembling one major final installation in his cramped New York studio: Etant Donnés, a peephole into a meticulously realised life-size landscape with a naked woman, which occupied him from 1946 to 1966.

But that wasn’t much to show for 20 years of work. In interviews, Duchamp would sigh when recalling the effort his early paintings had cost him. Could it be that his desire to remove art from the retinal to the cerebral was inspired less by a passionate interest in the phenomenology of the object than by, well, laziness?

“He fully admitted his laziness,” says Franklin. “He enjoyed thinking, smoking, playing chess, talking with friends. He liked working too, but when it suited him, and at his own rhythm.”

And in some respects, Duchamp was hardly a conceptual artist at all. “Certainly he was as concerned with the idea as the result,” says Franklin. “But at the same time he loved working with his hands. He had a 19th-century enjoyment of craftsmanship. When he started making his Boîte-en-Valise (a collection of reproductions and replicas) in 1935, he could have used rapid modern printing techniques, but he insisted on using hand-coloured stencils, simply because he loved the process. It ended up taking six years.”

By the late Fifties, Duchamp was an almost forgotten figure, subsisting very modestly in New York, giving chess lessons and advising art collectors for small remittances, in the company of his second wife Teeny, the last of a string of companionable but detached relationships.

The emergence of a new generation of American artists who acknowledged him as an important forebear – Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns – boosted his reputation, while his first retrospective in 1963 (which took place, significantly, not in Paris, but in Pasadena), created an unstoppable momentum of interest around his name, which built into the “Marcel Duchamp” phenomenon we know today.

Duchamp’s transcendent cool – his fondness for the flip but magnificent gesture (“I’m not an artist, I’m a breather,” he told one French critic), his insistence on maintaining his artistic freedom even at the cost of not producing anything – perfectly suited the mood of the baby boomer era. He became a kind of hip grandfather figure to the international avant garde, a role he maintained even after his death in 1968.

Yet if Duchamp’s influence is still everywhere in contemporary art, you can’t help feeling there are whole dimensions of his work that remain little understood.

“He had the capacity to entrance you with just his presence,” says Tomkins. “But I always felt there was a lot about him that I would never know and nobody else would either. You could say the same about his work. The Large Glass has been endlessly analysed, but there’s something inscrutable at the base of it, that no one’s ever fully got to grips with – and I’m not sure it’s possible to.”

Did Duchamp himself fully understand what he was doing?

“Who knows? He was always one step ahead of the rest of us, that’s for sure.”

By Mark Hudson (13 Feb 2013)

The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns is at Barbican Art Gallery

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013