Marcel Duchamp valuation

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was born near Rouen, in Normandy, into a family of artists: his brothers were the painter Jacques Villon and the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and his sister Suzanne Duchamp was a painter too. He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1904 and 1905, painted first in the manner of Cézanne and the Fauves, and then made his own version of Cubism, culminating in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912, which caused a scandal at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. That year he mounted a bicycle wheel on a stool, the first of his readymades, ordinary objects chosen and declared to be art; Fountain, a urinal signed R. Mutt and submitted to an exhibition in New York in 1917, became the most discussed object of the century. He worked on The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, the Large Glass, from 1915 to 1923, took the female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, and from the 1920s spent much of his time on chess. The Box in a Valise, a portable museum of his own work in miniature, followed from 1935 to 1941, and his last major work, Étant donnés, made in secret from 1946 to 1966, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Early paintings and drawings are almost all in museums, and most of the original readymades are lost; what comes to market are the later versions and editions. In 1964 he authorised a set of replicas of fourteen readymades with the Milan dealer Arturo Schwarz, each in eight signed and numbered examples plus proofs, and these are the readymades buyers usually mean. The Box in a Valise was issued in several series over many years with differing contents, the first edition of the Rotoreliefs, in 1935, ran to five hundred sets, and there are many prints, multiples and signed ephemera. The series, the edition and the number, and the advice of the Association Marcel Duchamp, settle most questions, and later unauthorised copies are common.