Readymade Primitivism: Marcel Duchamp, Dada, and African Art

Abstract

It has long been axiomatic that the readymades of Marcel Duchamp exemplify the New York dada movement. But the mass‐produced objects that he famously chose and inscribed with his name were also a response to another paradigm of early twentieth‐century modernism: that of primitivism. Indeed, it is surprising to discover the extent to which the immediate culture from which the readymades emerged was one saturated in notions about the so‐called ‘primitive’, the result of a sudden influx of African art into New York in the years following the First World War. This essay re‐situates the readymades within this historical context and posits that they allegorized primitivism. It is equally argued that the profound impact of African art on the development of twentieth‐century modernism exceeds traditional art‐historical narratives. If Duchamp's primitivism has remained largely invisible it is because of the ways in which the primitive (as a set of ideas about art that are racial in origin) has been corralled within Western modernism.