Question 1

True or false: Duchamp was a founding member of the Dada movement in New York City.

Accepted Answer

False. He was associated with Dada but never formally founded it; Dada started in Zurich, and Duchamp worked independently in New York with Picabia and Man Ray.

Question 2

True or false: Duchamp altered the Mona Lisa by adding a mustache and beard, titling it 'L.H.O.O.Q.'

Accepted Answer

True. In 1919, he drew a mustache and goatee on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, with the title sounding like 'Elle a chaud au cul' in French—a vulgar pun.

Question 3

True or false: Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase' was initially banned in the U.S. for obscenity.

Accepted Answer

False. No ban occurred; the painting caused scandal at the 1913 Armory Show for its Cubist style, with critics mocking it as 'an explosion in a shingle factory.'

Question 4

True or false: Duchamp once submitted a urinal as art under a pseudonym, but it was rejected from an exhibition.

Accepted Answer

True. He submitted 'Fountain' under the name R. Mutt to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition, which rejected it despite their open-entry policy.

Question 5

True or false: Duchamp created a work called 'The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even' that was famously unfinished.

Accepted Answer

True. Also known as the Large Glass, he worked on it from 1915 to 1923 but declared it 'definitively unfinished,' leaving it shattered and unassembled.

Question 6

True or false: Duchamp's 'Bicycle Wheel' was the first-ever kinetic sculpture in modern art.

Accepted Answer

False. While 'Bicycle Wheel' (1913) is an early readymade and moves, Tatlin’s 'Counter-Reliefs' and other works predate it as kinetic sculptures by a few years.

Question 7

True or false: Duchamp famously retired from art in the 1920s to play chess, but secretly continued making art for decades.

Accepted Answer

True. He announced his retirement in 1923 to focus on chess, but worked secretly on 'Étant donnés' from 1946 to 1966, revealed only after his death.

Question 8

True or false: Duchamp won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952 for his art manifestos.

Accepted Answer

False. He never won a Nobel Prize; he did receive a Guggenheim International Award in 1961 for a mobile sculpture, but literature was not his field.

Marcel Duchamp Trivia Questions