Marcel Duchamp - Druckgraphik

Marcel Duchamp’s printmaking works are a vital instrument of his conceptual practice, reflecting his critical interrogation of originality, authorship, and reproducibility.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, printmaking techniques served Duchamp not primarily for image production but as vehicles for conceptual and linguistic ideas. A key example is L.H.O.O.Q. (1919/1964), where he used reproduction and minimal graphic intervention (a drawn mustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa) to radically destabilize the relationship between high art and mass imagery, and between original and copy. His Rotoreliefs (1935) similarly employed print technology to create serial, kinetic objects that make vision itself their subject.

Of particular significance is the Boîte verte (Green Box, 1934)—a collection of 94 printed notes, sketches, and diagrams related to The Large Glass. Here, printmaking as a medium enabled not just serial reproduction but emphasized the equivalence of idea and execution. Duchamp’s interest lay less in craftsmanship than in deploying printed matter to unfold conceptual complexity.

These print works epitomize an expanded understanding of graphic art: not as a reproduction of an original, but as an autonomous, equal manifestation of conceptual art. This catalogue accompanied the 2003 exhibition in Vienna with texts from Eva Christina Kraus/ Valentina Sonzogni, Ursula Panhans-Bühler, Ernst Strouhal, Martin Zeiller.