Wednesday, June 18, 2014

"C'est arrive malgre moi” (Who's your Daddy?)


Undoubtedly, Marcel Duchamp can be easily positioned as the “Father of Conceptual Art” and all of its myriad trajectories and continuing artist offspring.

However, it is a little known fact that Duchamp did have one child - not with Alexina “Teeny” Sattler but with Jeanne Serre in 1911. 

Because Jeanne was a married woman, the birth of their illegitimate daughter, Yvonne "Yo" Sermayer, was kept secret. But Duchamp stayed involved in Yo’s life, even later organizing an exhibit of her artwork in New York City in 1967.(1)


IMAGE: Billy Al Bengston and Dennis Hopper tease Andy Warhol at the opening of Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum; photograph by Julian Wasser.
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1. Cros, Caroline. Marcel Duchamp, London, 2006, 109 and 184; see also The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp