Étant donnés

Uncommon card · No. 194183

Étant donnés (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, French: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage) is a 1966 assemblage by Marcel Duchamp. It was his last major artwork, surprising viewers and critics who had widely believed he had given up art; he was previously pursuing competitive chess which he had been playing for almost 25 years. The artwork is a tableau, visible only through a pair of peepholes—one for each eye—in a wooden door, of a nude woman lying on her back on a hill with her face hidden, legs spread, holding a gas lamp in the air in one hand against a landscape backdrop. Duchamp worked in secrecy on the artwork from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio. It is composed of an old wooden door, nails, bricks, brass, aluminium sheet, steel binder clips, velvet, leaves, twigs, a female form made of parchment, hair, glass, plastic clothespins, oil paint, linoleum, an assortment of lights, a landscape composed of hand-painted and photographed elements...

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