Marcel Duchamp

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of... the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement. Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory. The word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917.
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Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This... method was fundamental to LeWitt's definition of Conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print: Tony Godfrey, author of Conceptual Art , asserts that conceptual art questions the nature of art, a notion that Joseph Kosuth elevated to a definition of art itself in his seminal, early manifesto of conceptual art, "Art after Philosophy" . The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of Clement Greenberg's vision of Modern art during the 1950s. With the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and the English Art & Language group began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible .
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The Section d'Or , also known as Groupe de Puteaux or Puteaux Group, was a collective of painters and critics associated with an offshoot of Cubism known as Orphism . Based in the Paris suburb of Puteaux, they were active from 1912 to around 1914, coming to prominence in the wake of their... controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911. The movement began with an exhibition at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris in 1912, which was also accompanied by publication of the treatise Du Cubisme by Metzinger and Gleizes. In addition to featuring works by the Duchamp brothers, Raymond Duchamp-Villon,Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp, other exhibitors included artists such as Archipenko, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, André Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Jean Marchand and Francis Picabia, among others. The opening address was given by Guillaume Apollinaire. The group's title was suggested by Jacques Villon, after reading a 1910 translation of Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura by Joséphin Péladan.
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