Apolinère Enameled - Marcel Duchamp
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Description
A satirical modification of a commercial advertisement, this Dada work by Marcel Duchamp plays with language, perspective, and the concept of authorship.
Apolinère Enameled is a work of art created by Marcel Duchamp between 1916 and 1917. It is a modified commercial advertisement for Sapolin Enamel, a brand of paint. Duchamp altered the original lithograph by adding a young girl painting a bed frame, which appears to exist in a three-dimensional space that defies standard perspective. The work functions as a critique of traditional artistic authorship and the nature of the art object.
The title is a pun on the name of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a friend of the artist. By changing the spelling and adding the word 'Enameled', Duchamp engages in a linguistic game that characterises much of his output during this period. The visual composition includes a domestic interior, complete with a dresser and curtains, which provides a mundane setting for the surreal intervention of the painted bed. The girl, holding a brush and a tin of paint, occupies the centre of the frame, yet her scale relative to the furniture creates a sense of spatial ambiguity.
This piece belongs to the Dada movement, which rejected the logic and aesthetic standards of the time. By taking a mass-produced advertisement and applying his own interventions, Duchamp questioned the boundary between commercial design and fine art. The work is not a painting in the traditional sense, but rather an appropriation of existing imagery. It invites the viewer to consider the role of the artist as an editor or selector of objects rather than a creator of original forms. The inclusion of the text at the bottom, which mimics the style of a product label, further blurs the line between a functional advertisement and a conceptual art piece. It remains a significant example of how Duchamp used humour and irony to dismantle the conventions of the early twentieth-century art world.
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Each print is produced to order using 12-colour giclée printing on FSC-certified archival paper. Designed in Britain and printed at your nearest production hub to reduce waste and speed up delivery.
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Specific Features
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- Archival matte fine-art paper, FSC-certified
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- Frames in black, natural wood, dark wood or white
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Museum-grade giclée on FSC-certified archival matte paper, with framed and canvas options.
- Paper sizes: A4, A3, A2, A1, A0 and B2 (50×70 cm)
- Canvas: XS (20×30 cm) to Large (60×90 cm)
- Frames: black, natural wood, dark wood or white
Apolinère Enameled - Marcel Duchamp
Artist Biography
Marcel Duchamp
He was born near Rouen in Normandy, the brother of the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon and the painter Jacques Villon. The family produced three significant artists, which is unusual. Marcel was the youngest and the most destructive.
His early career moved through Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism in rapid succession. Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), a Cubist-Futurist painting of fragmented motion, caused a scandal at the New York Armory Show in 1913. One critic called it 'an explosion in a shingle factory'. The painting made Duchamp famous in America before he had set foot there.
He moved to New York in 1915. His contribution to art from this point was largely conceptual. The 'readymades', ordinary manufactured objects designated as art by the artist's choice (a bottle rack, a snow shovel, the urinal), dismantled the idea that art required skill, craft, or even making. The artist's decision was sufficient.
He spent twenty years officially retired from art, playing chess at a competitive level. In secret, he was building Etant Donnes, an installation visible only through two peepholes in a door. It was revealed after his death in 1968 and is permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He had been working on it for twenty years while telling everyone he had stopped making art.
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