From the Archive: Marcel Duchamp

Pierre Cabanne: Do you believe in God?

Marcel Duchamp: Why talk about such utopia? I don’t mean that I’m neither atheist nor believe, I don’t even want to talk about it. I don’t talk to you about the life of bees on Sunday, do I? It’s the same thing.

Cabanne: Looking back on your whole life, what satisfies you the most?

Duchamp: First, having been lucky. I understood, at a certain moment, that it wasn’t necessary to encumber one’s life with too much weight, with too many things to do, with what is called a wife, children, a country house, an automobile. And I understood this, fortunately, rather early. This allowed me to live for a long time as a bachelor.

These quotes are from an interview with the subversive French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1966. This bewildering and hilarious dialogue was published in The American Scholar in the Spring of 1971. Little known fact: Duchamp eventually abandoned art to dedicate the remainder of his life to playing the game of chess.

If you have access to JSTOR, you can check out the self-portrait Duchamp painted in these interviews here.

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