Abstract

Marcel Duchamp was in contact with the Salon Cubists in his cubist period . Unlike Picasso and Braque, they formulated some theories based on the new concepts of philosophy, literature, and physics in the early 20th century: Time, Simultaneity, and the Fourth Dimension. These concepts are related to their Platonistic quest for truth, and Time and Simultaneity functioned as the ways to represent the invisible truth, the Fourth Dimension. Thus it is conceivable that Duchamp also sympathized with their quest for truth. In the Cubists' paintings the fragmentation of an object caused by Simultaneity results in the destruction of a narrative sequence in the traditional paintings; on the contrary, Duchamp's paintings like Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 carry it because he depicts an autonomous movement of an object, and a painter sees it from a static viewpoint. Furthermore, he depends on the relationship between words and painting to imply the Fourth Dimension. Consequently, I concluded that the uniqueness of Duchamp is that he never excluded the external elements such as words from painting; In other words, he still carried the viewpoint of a traditional painter