Jean Arp / Hans Arp (September 16, 1886 – June 7, 1966) was a German-French sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper.

Arp was born in Strasbourg. The son of an Alsatian mother and a non-Alsatian German father, he was born during the brief period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen in German) after it had been returned to Germany by France. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law determined that his name become Jean.

In 1904, after leaving the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg, he went to Paris where he published his poetry for the first time. From 1905 to 1907, Arp studied at the Kunstschule, Weimar, Germany and in 1908 went back to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. In 1915, he moved to Switzerland, to take advantage of Swiss neutrality. Arp later told the story of how, when he was notified to report to the German embassy, he avoided being drafted into the army: he took the paperwork he had been given and, in the first blank, wrote the date. He then wrote the date in every other space as well, then drew a line beneath them and carefully added them up. He then took off all his clothes and went to hand in his paperwork. He was told to go home.

Arp was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916. In 1920, as Hans Arp, along with Max Ernst, and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, he set up the Cologne Dada group. However, in 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the surrealist group at the Galerie Pierre in Paris.

In 1926, Arp moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon. In 1931, he broke with the Surrealism movement to found Abstraction-Création, working with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création and the periodical, Transition.

Throughout the 1930s and until the end of his life, he wrote and published essays and poetry. In 1942, he fled from his home in Meudon to escape German occupation and lived in Zürich until the war ended.

Arp visited New York City in 1949 for a solo exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery. In 1950, he was invited to execute a relief for the Harvard University Graduate Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts would also be commissioned to do a mural at the UNESCO building in Paris. In 1954, Arp won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale.

In 1958, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by an exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France, in 1962.

The Musée d'art moderne et contemporain of Strasbourg houses many of his paintings and sculptures.

Arp's first wife, the artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, died in Zürich in 1943, and he subsequently married the collector Marguerite Hagenbach. Arp died in 1966, in Basel, Switzerland.

(When Arp spoke in German he referred to himself as "Hans", and when he spoke in French he referred to himself as "Jean". Many people believe that he was born Hans and later changed his name to Jean, but this is not the case.)

George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, Germany but changed his name in 1916 out of a romantic enthusiasm for America[1] that originated in his early reading of the books of James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and Karl May, and which he retained for the rest of his life.[2] (His artist friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld changed his name to John Heartfield at the same time.)

In 1914 Grosz volunteered for military service; like many other artists, he embraced the first world war as "the war to end all wars", but he was quickly disillusioned and was given a discharge after hospitalization in 1915. In January 1917 he was drafted for service, but in May he was discharged as permanently unfit.[3]

Grosz was arrested during the Spartakus uprising in January 1919, but escaped using fake identification documents; he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the same year. In 1921 Grosz was accused of insulting the army, which resulted in a 300 German Mark fine and the destruction of the collection Gott mit uns ("God with us"), a satire on German society. Grosz left the KPD in 1922 after having spent five months in Russia and meeting Lenin and Trotsky, because of his antagonism to any form of dictatorial authority.

In his drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, Grosz did much to create the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Corpulent businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great subjects. His draftsmanship was excellent although the works he is best known for adopt a deliberately crude form of caricature. His oeuvre includes a few absurdist works, such as "Remember Uncle August the Happy Inventor" which has buttons sewn on it (see it here), and also includes erotica.

Bitterly anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany in 1932 and was invited to teach at the Art Students League of New York in 1933, where he would teach intermittently until 1955. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1938. Although a softening of his style had been apparent since the late 1920s, Grosz's work turned toward a sentimental romanticism in America, a change generally seen as a decline.

He continued to exhibit regularly. He painted Cain, or Hitler in Hell (1944), showing the dead attacking Hitler in Hell, and in 1946 he published his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. In the 1950s he opened a private art school at his home and also worked as Artist in Residence at the Des Moines Art Center. Grosz was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1954. Even though he had American citizenship, he resolved to return to Berlin in 1959 where he died on July 6 of that year from the effects of falling down a flight of stairs after a night of drinking.

In 1960, Grosz was the subject of the Oscar-nominated short film George Grosz' Interregnum.

Raoul Hausmann (July 12, 1886–February 1, 1971) was an Austrian sculptor and writer. He was one of the key figures of Dada.

He was born in Vienna but moved to Berlin and became a co-founder of the Berlin Dada movement in 1917. He was one of the Berlin dadaists who created photographic collages out of cut-up photographs in the summer of 1918. Hausmann, along with German Dadaists George Grosz, Helmut Hertzfelde aka John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch, pushed the idea of the photographic collage and the use of mass-printed source material by inventing photomontage.

A photomontage results when a photographic collage—made by arranging and glueing photographs or other found illustrative material onto a surface—is photographed so that the final image is converted back into a photographic print. Both processes involve selection, placement and sometimes embellishment, which sets them apart from the photographic record, no matter how much this "record" is distorted by the photographic apparatus or by subsequent techniques of developing.

Although he painted Tatlin at Home in 1920 as part of the Berlin Dada movement, Hausmann gave up painting in 1923 to concentrate on experimental photographic procedures. In The Art Critic ([1]) the orange brick background is probably from one of Hausmann's phonetic poem posters intended to be stuck on walls all over Berlin. The figure over giant head and pen is stamped "Portrait constructed of George Grosz 1920", and is probably a magazine photograph of Hausmann's colleague, Grosz.

Hausmann was one of the most influential artists of his era

John Heartfield (June 19, 1891–April 26, 1968) is the anglicized name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld. He chose to call himself Heartfield in 1916, to criticize the rabid nationalism and anti-British sentiment prevalent in Germany during World War I.

In 1918 Heartfield began at the Berlin Dada scene, and the Communist Party of Germany. He was dismissed from the Reichswehr film service on account of his support for the strike that followed the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. With George Grosz, he founded Die Pleite, a satirical magazine. After meeting Bertolt Brecht, who was to have a profound influence on his art, Heartfield developed photomontage into a form of political and artistic representation. He worked for two communist publications - the daily Die Rote Fahne, and the weekly [[Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung]] (AIZ).

In 1933, after the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Heartfield relocated to Czechoslovakia, where he continued his photomontage work for the AIZ (which was published in exile); in 1938, fearing a German takeover of his host country, he left for England. He settled in East Germany and Berlin after World War II, in 1954, and worked closely with theater directors such as Benno Besson and Wolfgang Langhoff at Berliner Ensemble and Deutsches Theater.

In 2005, Tate Britain held an exhibition of his photomontage pieces.

His photomontages satirising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis often subverted Nazi symbols such as the swastika in order to undermine their propaganda message.

One of his more famous pieces, made in 1935, is entitled Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle! ("Hurray, The Butter is Finished!") It was published on the frontpage of the AIZ in 1935. A parody of the aesthetics of propaganda, the photomontage shows a family at a kitchen table, where a nearby portrait of Hitler hangs and the wallpaper is emblazoned with swastikas. The family — mother, father, old woman, young man, baby, and dog — are attempting to eat pieces of metal, such as chains, bicycle handlebars, and rifles. Below, the title is written in large letters, in addition to a quote by Hermann Goering during food shortages.

Translated, the quote reads: "Iron has always made a nation strong, butter and lard have only made the people fat". This image also served as the inspiration behind the song "Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)" by Siouxsie & the Banshees; the song was re-recorded in German and released as a single with Heartfield's work as the cover art.

Also, his piece The Hand has 5 Fingers inspired alternative metal band System of a Down self-titled album cover. The text in the original poster is: "5 fingers make a hand! With these 5 grab the enemy!". This slogan inspired part of the text contained on the back of System of a Down (album): "The hand has five fingers, capable and powerful, with the ability to destroy as well as create". Later, it is written in bold letters: Open your eyes, open your mouths, close your hands and make a fist.

Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock a.k.a. Samuel Rosenstock) (April 16, 1896 – December 25, 1963) was a Romanian poet and essayist. He was one of the founders of the Dada movement, known best for his manifestos. He was a collaborater with Marcel Janco. It is speculated that the word "Dada" comes from the Romanian "Yes, yes" and is thus originated from Tzara and Janco's contributions. It is more commonly believed Tzara picked a random word out of a French dictionary and got "Dada", a child's word for a hobby horse.

Tzara was born in Moineşti, Bacău, Romania to a family of Romanian-speaking Jewish ancestry. Tzara wrote the first Dada texts, La Première Aventure céleste de Monsieur Antipyrine (The First Heavenly Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine) (1916), Vingt-cinq poèmes (Twenty-Five Poems) (1918) [1], and the movement's manifestos, Sept manifestes Dada (Seven Dada Manifestos) (1924).

In Paris he engaged in tumultuous activities with Dadaists André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon to shock the public and to disintegrate the structures of language.

In late 1929, weary of nihilism and destruction, he joined his friends in the activities of Surrealism. He devoted much of his time to the reconciliation of Surrealism and Marxism and joined the French Communist Party in 1937. He was active in the French Resistance movement during World War II. He left the Communist Party in 1956, in protest against the Soviet quelling of the Hungarian Revolution.

His political commitments brought him closer to his fellow human beings, and he gradually matured into a lyrical poet. His poems revealed the anguish of his soul, caught between revolt and wonderment at the daily tragedy of the human condition. His mature works started with L'Homme approximatif (The Approximate Man) (1931), and continued with Parler seul (Speaking Alone) (1950), and La Face intérieure (The Inner Face) (1953). In these, the anarchically scrambled words of Dada were replaced with a difficult but humanized language. He died in Paris and was interred there in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Johannes Baader (June 22, 1875 – January 15, 1955), originally trained as an architect, was a writer and artist associated with Dada in Berlin.

He was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and died in Schloss Adeldorf, Lower Bavaria.

The son of a metalworker for the royal buildings in Stuttgart, Johannes Baader studied at the state trade school there from 1892 to 1895 and then at the technical college. In 1903 he began working as a mortuary architect in Dresden. By 1905 he was in Berlin, where he met Raoul Hausmann, beginning a friendship that would eventually be at the centre of Berlin Dada. In 1906 he conceived his utopian interdenominational World Temple, drawing on various forms, including Greek and Indian archetypes. Described in sketches and writings, the world temple in its grandest form was to be 1500 metres high and unify all of humanity in its building.

In 1914, Baader published a treatise on Monism entitled Vierzehn Briefe Christi (Fourteen Letters of Christ) and during the next several years contributed to the journals Die freie Straße (The Free Street) and Der Dada. In 1917 he was certified legally insane, a designation he used as a license for outrageous public performances parodying public and mythic identities. Also in 1917 he ran for the Reichstag in Saarbrücken and, with Hausmann, founded Christus GmbH (Christ Ltd), offering membership to pacifists, who, upon being certified with the identity of Christ, were to be exempted from the draft. In 1918, Baader wrote his quasi-religious tract Die acht Weltsätze (Eight World Theses), and in 1919 he declared his own "resurrection" as the Oberdada, President of the Earth.

He expounded on his cosmic identity in texts and collages (for example, Dada Milchstrasse (Dada Milky Way, 1919). His Das grosse Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama (The great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama), an assemblage envisioned as a model for Dada architecture, was shown in Berlin at the 1920 Erste internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair). He also produced sketches of visionary architecture, which, like those of Hausmann and Jefim Golyscheff, sometimes involved proto-Constructivist girderlike structures. In the 1920s he continued to produce collages and to practice as an architect.

Johannes Theodor Baargeld, pseudonym of Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand Grünwald (October 9, 1892 - August 16 or 17, 1927), was a German painter and poet who, together with Max Ernst, founded the Cologne Dada group.

He was born in Stettin, Germany, which is now Szczecin, Poland.

Baargeld was the editor of the periodical The Fan (Der Ventilator)which Ernst and Hans Arp started in 1919, and he collaborated on many other Dadaist publications such as Bulletin D and Dada W/3.

He gave up painting in 1921 and died in an avalanche while climbing Aiguille de Bionnassay in the French Alps.

Hugo Ball (February 22, 1886 – September 14, 1927) was a German author and poet.

Hugo Ball was born in Pirmasens, Germany and was raised in a Catholic family. He studied sociology and philosophy at the universities of Munich and Heidelberg (1906–1907). In 1910, he moved to Berlin in order to become an actor and collaborated with Max Reinhardt. He was one of the leading Dada artists. He created the Dada Manifesto in 1916, making a political statement about his views on the terrible state of society and acknowledging his dislike for philosophies in the past claiming to possess the ultimate Truth. The same year as the Manifesto, in 1916, Ball wrote his poem "Karawane," which is a German poem consisting of nonsensical words. The meaning however resides in its meaninglessness, reflecting the chief principle behind Dadaism. Some of his other best known works include the poem collection 7 schizophrene Sonette, the drama Die Nase des Michelangelo, a memoir of the Zürich period Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, and a biography of Hermann Hesse, entitled Hermann Hesse. Sein Leben und sein Werk (1927).

As co-founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, he led the Dada movement in Zürich, and is one of the people credited with naming the movement "Dada", by allegedly choosing the word at random from a dictionary. He was married to Emmy Hennings, another member of Dada.

His involvement with the Dada movement lasted approximately two years. He then worked for a short period as a journalist, for Freie Zeitung in Bern. Eventually he retired to the canton of Ticino where he lived a religious and relatively poor life. He died in Sant'Abbondio, Switzerland.

His poem "Gadji beri bimba" was later adapted to the song entitled "I Zimbra" on the 1979 Talking Heads album Fear of Music; he received a writing credit for the song on the track listing.

Francis-Marie Martinez Picabia (January 28, 1879 - November 30, 1953) was a well-known painter and poet born of a French mother and a Spanish-Cuban father who was an attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris, France.

Born in Paris, he studied at École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Decoratifs. In the beginning of his career, from 1903 to 1908, he was influenced by the impressionist painting of Alfred Sisley. From 1909, he came under the influence of the cubists and the Golden Section (Section d'Or).

Around 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group, which met at the studio of Jacques Villon in the village of Puteaux. There he became friends with artist Marcel Duchamp. Some of the group's members were, Apollinaire, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Leger and Jean Metzinger.

From 1913 to 1915 Picabia traveled to New York City several times and took active part in the avant-garde movements, introducing modern art to America. These years can be characterized as Picabia's proto-Dada period, consisting mainly of his portraits mécaniques.

Later, in 1916, while in Barcelona he started his well-known Dada periodical 391, in which he published his first mechanical drawings. He continued the periodical with the help of Duchamp in America.

Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zürich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. (See Cannibale, 1921.) Again he changed his style in 1925, when he returned to figurative painting.

During the 1930s, he became a close friend of Gertrude Stein. In the early 1940s he moved to the south of France, where his work took a surprising turn - he produced a series of paintings based on the nude and glamour photos in French "Girlie" magazines, in a garish style which appears to subvert traditional, academic nude painting.

Before the end of World War II, he returned to Paris where he resumed abstract painting and writing poetry.

He had love affairs with dancers whom he painted. "I see again in my memory my dear udnie" for example, is a painting and an ode to a dancer he was involved with.

A large amount of his work involves the mechanical representation of people.

A large retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris in the spring of 1949.

Picabia loved fast automobiles and is said to have owned as many as one hundred and fifty of them.

Francis Picabia died in Paris in 1953 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

In recent years, a Picabia painting has sold for as much as $1.6 million.

Man Ray (August 27, 1890–November 18, 1976) was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer.

While appreciation for Man Ray’s work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was slow in coming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since.

In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, citing his groundbreaking photography as well as "his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance art and conceptual art" and saying "Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its 'pursuit of pleasure and liberty,'" — Man Ray’s stated guiding principles — "unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would."

From the time he began attracting attention as an artist until his death more than 60 years later, Man Ray allowed little of his early life or family background to be known to the public, even refusing to acknowledge that he had ever had any name other than Man Ray.

He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky, in the South Side of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1890, the eldest child of recent Russian-Jewish immigrants. The family would eventually include another son and two daughters, the youngest born shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1897. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray, a name selected by Man Ray's brother, in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-Semitism prevalent at that time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man at this time, and gradually began to use Man Ray as his combined single name.

Man Ray’s father was a garment factory worker who also ran a small tailoring business out of the family home, enlisting his children from an early age. Man Ray’s mother enjoyed making the family’s clothes from her own designs and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric. Despite Man Ray’s desire to disassociate himself from his family background, this experience left an enduring mark on his art. Tailor's dummies, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to clothing and sewing appear at every stage of his work and in almost every medium. Art historians have also noted similarity in his collage and painting techniques to those used in making clothing.

Man Ray showed a lot of evidence of being artistically and mechanically inclined from childhood. His education at Boys' High School from 1904 to 1908 provided him with a solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. At the same time, he educated himself with frequent visits to the local art museums, where he studied the works of the Old Masters. After graduation from high school, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist instead. However much this decision disappointed his parents' aspirations to upward mobility and assimilation, they nevertheless rearranged the family's modest living quarters so that Man Ray could use a room as his studio. He stayed for the next four years, working steadily toward his goal of becoming professional painter, while earning money as a commercial artist and technical illustrator at several Manhattan companies.

From the surviving examples of his work from this period, it appears he attempted mostly paintings and drawings in 19th century styles. He was already an avid admirer of avant-garde art of the time, such as European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery and works by Ashcan School, but, with a few exceptions, was not yet able to translate these new trends into his own work. The art classes he sporadically attended — including stints and National Academy of Design and the Art Students League — were of little apparent benefit to him, until he enrolled in the Ferrer School in the autumn of 1912, thus beginning a period of intense and rapid artistic development.

Living in New York City and influenced by what he saw at the 1913 Armory Show and in galleries showing contemporary works from Europe his early paintings display facets of cubism. Upon befriending Marcel Duchamp who was interested in showing movement in static paintings, Man Ray's works begin to depict movement of the figures. For example in the repetitive positions of the skirts of the dancer in The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Shadows (1916).

In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled Self-Portrait, was exhibited the following year. He produced his first significant photographs in 1918.

Man Ray involved himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement, and abandoned traditional painting, started making objects, and developed unique mechanical and photographic methods of making images. For the 1918 version of Rope Dancer he combined a spray-gun technique with a pen drawing. Again, like Duchamp, he made "readymades" - objects selected by the artist, sometimes modified and presented as art. His Gift readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is an unseen object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Another work from this period, Aerograph (1919), is one he did with airbrush on glass.

In 1920 Ray helped Duchamp make his first machine and one of the earliest examples of kinetic art, the Rotary Glass Plates which was composed of glass plates turned by a motor. That same year Man Ray, Katherine Dreier and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection which in effect was the first museum of modern art in the U.S.

Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish the one issue of New York Dada in 1920, but he soon declared, "Dada cannot live in New York", and he moved to Paris in 1921.

It was in New York in 1913 that Man Ray met his first wife, Adon Lacroix. They married in 1914, separated in 1919, and were formally divorced in 1937.

In July 1921, he went to live and work in Paris, France, and soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), an artists' model and celebrated character in Paris' bohemian circles. Kiki was Man Ray's companion for most of the 1920s. She became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images and starred in his experimental films. In 1929 he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller.

For the next 20 years in Montparnasse, Man Ray made his mark on the art of photography. Great artists of the day such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and Antonin Artaud posed for his camera.

With Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso; Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Gallerie Pierre in Paris in 1925.

In 1934, Surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered tea cup, posed for Man Ray in what became a well-known series of photographs depicting Oppenheim nude, standing next to a printing press.

Together with Lee Miller — his photography assistant and lover — Man Ray reinvented the photographic technique of solarization. He also created a technique using photograms he called rayographs.

Man Ray also directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur, such as Le Retour à la Raison (2 mins, 1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); L'Étoile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and Les Mystéres du Château du Dé (20 mins, 1929).

Later in life, Man Ray returned to the United States, having been forced to leave Paris due to the dislocations of the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles, California from 1940 until 1951. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, Man Ray met Juliet Browner, a trained dancer and experienced artists' model. They began living together almost immediately, and married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. However, he called Montparnasse home and he returned there.

In 1963 he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait, which was republished in 1999 (ISBN 0821224743).

He died in Paris on the November 18, 1976, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads: unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner Man Ray died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.

Marcel Duchamp (pronounced [maʀsɛl dyʃɑ̃]) (July 28, 1887 – October 2, 1968) was a French artist (he became an American citizen in 1955) whose work and ideas had considerable influence on the development of post-World War II Western art, and whose advice to modern art collectors helped shape the tastes of the Western art world.

While he is most often associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements, his participation in Surrealism was largely behind the scenes, and after being involved in New York Dada, he barely participated in Paris Dada.

Thousands of books and articles attempt to interpret Duchamp's artwork and philosophy, but in interviews and his writing, Duchamp only added to the mystery. The interpretations interested him as creations of their own, and as reflections of the interpreter.

A playful man, Duchamp prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much with words, but with actions such as dubbing a urinal "art" and naming it Fountain, and by "giving up" art to play chess. He produced relatively few artworks as he quickly moved through the avant-garde rhythms of his time.

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the Haute-Normandie Region of France, and grew up in a family that respected and encouraged cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Emile Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, and the family played chess, read books, painted and made music together.

Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp's seven children, one died as an infant and four became successful artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of:

* Jacques Villon (1875-1963), painter, printmaker
* Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918), sculptor
* Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889-1963), painter

As a child, with his two older brothers already away from home at school in Rouen, Duchamp was closest to his sister Suzanne who was a willing accomplice in the games and activities conjured from his fertile imagination. At 10 years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers' footsteps when he left home and began schooling at Lycée Corneille in Rouen. For the next 7 years he was locked into an educational regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not an outstanding student, his best subject was mathematics, and he won two mathematics prizes at the school. He also won a prize for drawing in 1903, and at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize validating his recent decision to become an artist.

He took drawing classes and learned academic drawing from a teacher, who unsuccessfully attempted to protect his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamp's artist mentor was his brother Jacques Villon whose fluid and incisive style he sought to imitate. At 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting Suzanne Duchamp in various poses and activities. That summer he also painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils.

Duchamp's early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles. He experimented with classical techniques and subjects, as well as Cubism and Fauvism. When he was later asked about what influenced him at the time, Duchamp cited the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whose approach to art was not outwardly anti-academic, but quietly individual.

He studied art at Académie Julian (1904 to 1905), but preferred playing billiards to attending classes. During this time Duchamp drew and sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use visual and/or verbal puns. Such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life.

In 1905 he began his compulsory military service working for a printer in Rouen. There he learned typography and printing processes – skills he would use in his later work.

Due to his brother Jacques Villon's membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamp's work hung in the 1908 Salon d'Automne. The following year his work displayed in the Salon des Indépendants. Of Duchamp's pieces in show, critic Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, "... Duchamp's very ugly nudes...", though the two were to become friends. He also became life-long friends with exuberant artist Francis Picabia after meeting him at the 1911 Salon d' Automne, and Picabia proceeded to introduce him the life of fast cars and 'high' living.

In 1911 at his eldest brother Jacques Villon's home in Puteaux the Duchamp brothers hosted regular discussion group with other artists and writers including Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Roger de la Frenaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, and Alesander Archipenko. The group came to be known as the Puteaux Group, and the artists' work dubbed Orphic cubism. Disinterested in the Cubists' seriousness and their focus on visual matters, he did not join Cubist theory conversations, and gained a reputation of being shy. However, that same year he painted in a Cubist style and added his impression of movement by repeating imagery.

During this period Duchamp's fascination with transition, change, movement and distance began to manifest, and like many artists of the time he was intrigued with the concept of the 4th dimension and depicting it.

Works from this period included his first "machine" painting, Coffee Mill (Moulin à café) (1911), which he gave to his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The Coffee Mill shows similarity to the "grinder" mechanism of the Large Glass he was to paint years later.

In his 1911 Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'echecs) there is the Cubist overlapping frames and multiple perspectives of his two brothers playing chess, but to that Duchamp added elements conveying the unseen mental activity of the players. (Notably, "échec" is French for "failure".)

About this time Duchamp read Max Stirner's philosophical tract, The Ego and Its Own, the study of which he considered another turning point in his artistic and intellectual development. He called it "...a remarkable book ... which advances no formal theories, but just keeps saying that the ego is always there in everything."

Duchamp also credited the stage adaption of Raymond Roussel's 1910 novel, Impressions d'Afrique which featured plots that turned in on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets and humanoid machines with radically changing his approach to art, and inspiring him to begin his creation of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).

While in Germany in 1912 he painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings and a "bride stripped bare by her bachelors" image, and began making plans for the Large Glass — scribbling short notes to himself, sometimes with hurried sketches, but it would be over 10 years before the piece was completed. Little else is known about the two-month stay in Germany except that the friend he visited was intent to show him the sights and the night life.

Later that year he travelled with Picabia, Apollinaire and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia through the Jura mountains, an adventure that Buffet-Picabia described as one of their "forays of demoralization, which were also forays of witticism and clownery ... the disintegration of the concept of art." Duchamp's notes from the trip avoid logic and sense with a sort of surrealistic mythical flavor.

Duchamp painted few canvases after 1912, and in those he did, he attempted to remove "painterly" effects, and instead used a technical drawing approach.

His broad interests took him to an exhibition of aviation technology during this period, and about it Duchamp said to his friend Constantin Brancusi, "Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propellor? Tell me, can you do that?" Ironically, Brancusi later sculpted bird forms that U.S. Customs officials mistook for aviation parts and for which they attempted to collect import duties.

During this decade Duchamp began working as a librarian in the Bibliotèque Sainte-Geneviève where he earned a living wage and withdrew from painting circles into scholarly realms. He studied math and physics – areas where exciting new discoveries were taking place. The theoretical writings of Henri Poincaré particularly intrigued and inspired Duchamp. Poincaré postulated that the laws believed to govern matter were created solely by the minds that "understood" them and no theory could be considered "true." "The things themselves are not what science can reach..., but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality," Poincaré wrote in 1902.

Duchamp's own art-science experiments began during his tenure at the library. To make one of his favorite pieces, 3 Standard Stoppages (3 stoppages étalon), one at a time from a height of 1 meter, he dropped three 1-meter lengths of thread onto a prepared canvases. They landed in three random undulating positions. He varnished them into place on the blue-black canvas strips and attached them to glass. Then he cut three wood slats into the shapes of the curved strings, and put all the pieces into a croquet box. Three small leather signs with the title printed in gold were glued to each of the "stoppage" backgrounds. The piece appears to literally follow Poincaré's School of the Thread, part of a book on classical mechanics.

Work on The Large Glass continued into 1913 with his invention of inventing a repertoire of forms with notes, sketches and painted studies, and even drawing some of his ideas on the wall of his apartment.

In his studio he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. Later he denied that its creation was purposeful, though it has come to be known as the first of his readymades. "I enjoyed looking at it," he said. "Just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace."

Meanwhile, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 was scandalizing Americans at the Armory Show, and the sale of all four of his paintings in the show financed his trip to America in 1915.

After World War I was declared in 1914, with his brothers and many friends in military service and himself exempted, Paris felt uncomfortable to Duchamp. He decided to emigrate to the then neutral United States, and to his surprise he found he was a celebrity when he arrived in New York in 1915 where he quickly befriended art patron Katherine Dreier and artist Man Ray. Duchamp's circle also included art patrons Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, actress and artist Beatrice Wood and his friend Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures, and though he spoke little English in the course of supporting himself by giving French lessons and some library work, he quickly learned the language.

For two years the Arensbergs who remained his friends and patrons for 42 years were the landlords to his studio with payment to be The Large Glass. He turned down an offer of $10,000 per year for all of his yearly production made by an art gallery preferring to work on The Large Glass.

For Duchamp creating Société Anonyme in 1920, along with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, was the beginning of his life-long involvement is art dealing and collecting. The group collected modern art works, and arranged modern art exhibitions and lectures into the 1930s.

By this time Walter Pach, one of the coordinators of the 1913 Armory Show, sought Duchamp's advice on modern art, and beginning with Société Anonyme Dreier depended on his counsel in gathering her collection, as did Arensberg. Later Peggy Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art directors Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney consulted with Duchamp on their modern art collections and shows.

New York Dada had a less serious tone than that of Europe, and wasn't a particularly organized venture. Duchamp's friend Picabia connected with the Dada group in Zûrich, bringing to New York the Dada ideas of absurdity and anti-art. Together with Man Ray and many from the group that met almost nightly at the Arensberg home or caroused in Greenwich Village, Duchamp contributed his ideas about art and his humor to the New York activities, much of which ran concurrent with the development of readymades and The Large Glass.

Duchamp and Dada are most often connected by his submission of Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. The Independent Artists shows were unjuried and all pieces that were submitted were displayed. However, the show committee said that Fountain was not art and rejected it from the show causing an uproar amongst the Dadaists and led Duchamp to resign from the board of the Independent Artists.[2]

Along with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp published New York's Dada's magazine, The Blind Man which included art, literature, humor and commentary

Max Ernst (April 2, 1891 – April 1, 1976) was a German Dadaist and surrealist artist.

Max Ernst was born in Brühl, Germany, near Cologne. In 1909, he enrolled in the University at Bonn to study philosophy but soon abandoned the courses. He began painting that year.

In 1918 he married the art historian Luise Straus — a stormy relationship that would not last. (She died in Auschwitz in 1944 [1].) In 1919 Ernst visited Paul Klee and created paintings, block prints and collages, and experimented with mixed media. During World War I he served in the German army and after the war, filled with new ideas, Ernst, Jean Arp and social activist Alfred Grünwald, formed the Cologne, Germany Dada group, but two years later, in 1922, he returned to the artistic community at Montparnasse in Paris.

Constantly experimenting, in 1925 he invented a graphic art technique called frottage, which uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images. The next year he collaborated with Joan Miró on designs for Sergei Diaghilev. With Miró's help, Ernst pioneered grattage in which he troweled pigment from his canvases.

Ernst drew a great deal of controversy with his 1926 painting The Virgin Chastises the infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter.[2]

In Montparnasse he was a central figure in the birth of Breton's desire to ostracize Ernst's friend Éluard from the surrealist group.

In 1927 he married Marie-Berthe Aurenche. It is said that "his relationship with her may have inspired the erotic subject matter of this painting and others of this year." [3]

Ernst began to sculpt in 1934, and spent time with Alberto Giacometti.

In 1938, the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim acquired a number of Max Ernst's works which she displayed in her new museum in London.

Ernst developed a fascination with birds that was prevalent in his work. His alter ego in paintings, which he called Loplop, was a bird. He suggested this alter-ego was an extension of himself stemming from an early confusion of birds and humans. He said his sister was born soon after his bird died. Loplop often appeared in collages of other artists' work, such as Loplop presents André Breton.

Following the onset of World War II, Ernst was detained as an enemy alien in France but with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry in Marseille, he managed to escape the country with Peggy Guggenheim. He left behind his lover, Leonora Carrington, and she suffered a major mental breakdown. Ernst and Guggenheim arrived in the United States in 1941 and were married the following year. Along with other artists and friends (Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall) who had fled from the war and lived in New York City, Ernst helped inspire the development of Abstract expressionism.

His marriage to Guggenheim did not last, and in Beverly Hills, California in October of 1946, in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner, he married Dorothea Tanning.

The couple first made their home in Sedona, Arizona, and in 1948 Ernst wrote the treatise Beyond Painting. As a result of the publicity, he began to achieve financial success.

In 1953 he and Tanning moved to a small town in the south of France where he continued to work. He City, and the Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais in Paris published a complete catalogue of his works.

Ernst died on April 1, 1976, in Paris, France and was interred there in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.