12 full-page colour plates by André Raffray, translated by Antony Melville.
This little introduction to the life and works of Marcel Duchamp was originally published to accompany the first Duchamp retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1977. Modelled on a children’s book it contains 12 dead-pan colour depictions of events in Duchamp’s life with an equally tongue-in-cheek, and entirely accurate, biography. The book was much admired at the time (Andy Warhol being an enthusiast, among others), and this was its first and only appearance in English.
Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont are renowned Duchamp scholars, authors of Marcel Duchamp: Ephemerides (UK: Thames & Hudson), so this brief biography is as accurate as such expertise can make it.
