The art of painter and engraver Émile Frédéric Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, paint, and make music together.

When he was later asked about what had influenced him at the time, Duchamp cited the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whose approach to art was not outwardly anti-academic, but quietly individual.

In 1911, at Jacques' home in Puteaux, the brothers hosted a regular discussion group with Cubist artists including Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, and Alexander Archipenko.

During this period, Duchamp's fascination with transition, change, movement, and distance became manifest, and as many artists of the time, he was intrigued with the concept of depicting the fourth dimension in art.

The later more figurative machine painting of 1914, Chocolate Grinder (Broyeuse de chocolat), prefigures the mechanism incorporated into the Large Glass on which he began work in New York the following year.

In addition to displaying works of American artists, this show was the first major exhibition of modern trends coming out of Paris, encompassing experimental styles of the European avant-garde, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism.

At about this time, Duchamp read Max Stirner's philosophical tract, The Ego and Its Own, the study which he considered another turning point in his artistic and intellectual development.

He started The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even image, and began making plans for The Large Glass – scribbling short notes to himself, sometimes with hurried sketches.

[25] The same year, Duchamp also attended a performance of a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel's 1910 novel, Impressions d'Afrique, which featured plots that turned in on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets and humanoid machines.

He credited the drama with having radically changed his approach to art, and having inspired him to begin the creation of his The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass.

"[29] After World War I started in August 1914, with his brothers and many friends in military service and himself exempted (due to a heart murmur),[30][31] Duchamp felt uncomfortable in Paris.

Duchamp's circle included art patrons Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, actress and artist Beatrice Wood and Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures.

Duchamp showed a larger version of his Young Man and Girl in Spring 1911, a work that had an Edenic theme and a thinly veiled sexuality also found in Picabia's contemporaneous Adam and Eve 1911.

[37]: 181–186 Along with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp published multiple Dada magazines in New York—including The Blind Man and Rongwrong—which included art, literature, humor and commentary.

In 2017–2018, the French expert Johann Naldi found and identified seventeen unpublished works in a private collection, classified as a national treasure on May 7, 2021 by the French Ministry of Culture, including Des souteneurs encore dans la force de l'âge et le ventre dans l'herbe by Alphonse Allais, consisting of a green carriage curtain suspended from a wooden cylinder.

[42] Duchamp worked on his complex Futurism-inspired piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) from 1915 to 1923, except for periods in Buenos Aires and Paris in 1918–1920.

The piece is partly constructed as a retrospective of Duchamp's works, including a three-dimensional reproduction of his earlier paintings Bride (1912), Chocolate Grinder (1914) and Glider containing a water mill in neighboring metals (1913–1915), which has led to numerous interpretations.

Joseph Nechvatal has cast a considerable light on The Large Glass by noting the autoerotic implications of both bachelorhood and the repetitive, frenetic machine; he then discerns a larger constellation of themes by insinuating that autoeroticsm – and with the machine as omnipresent partner and practitioner – opens out into a subversive pan-sexuality as expressed elsewhere in Duchamp's work and career, in that a trance-inducing pleasure becomes the operative principle as opposed to the dictates of the traditional male-female coupling; and he as well documents the existence of this theme cluster throughout modernism, starting with Rodin's controversial Monument to Balzac, and culminating in a Duchampian vision of a techno-universe in which one and all can find themselves welcomed.

In 1920, with help from Man Ray, Duchamp built a motorized sculpture, Rotative plaques verre, optique de précision ("Rotary Glass Plates, Precision Optics").

[45] In 1968, Duchamp and John Cage appeared together at a concert entitled "Reunion", playing a game of chess and composing Aleatoric music by triggering a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard.

[47] Rrose Sélavy, and the other pseudonyms Duchamp used, may be read as a comment on the fallacy of romanticizing the conscious individuality or subjectivity of the artist, a theme that is also a prominent subtext of the readymades.

In 1918, Duchamp took leave of the New York art scene, interrupting his work on the Large Glass, and went to Buenos Aires, where he remained for nine months and often played chess.

The problem was included in the announcement for Julian Levi's gallery exhibition Through the Big End of the Opera Glass, printed on translucent paper with the faint inscription: "White to play and win".

Duchamp's influence on the art world remained behind the scenes until the late 1950s, when he was "discovered" by young artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were eager to escape the dominance of Abstract Expressionism.

The show was organised by André Breton and Paul Éluard, and featured "Two hundred and twenty-nine artworks by sixty exhibitors from fourteen countries... at this multimedia exhibition.

Marcel Duchamp was named as "Generateur-arbitre", Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst were listed as technical directors, Man Ray was chief lighting technician and Wolfgang Paalen responsible for "water and foliage".

In the middle of the grand hall underneath Duchamp's coal sacks, Paalen installed an artificial water-filled pond with real water lilies and reeds, which he called Avant La Mare.

A single light bulb provided the only illumination,[63] so patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art (an idea of Man Ray), while the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air.

Around midnight, the visitors witnessed the dancing shimmer of a scantily dressed girl who suddenly arose from the reeds, jumped on a bed, shrieked hysterically, then disappeared just as quickly.

Breton with Duchamp organized the exhibition "Le surréalisme en 1947" in the Galerie Maeght in Paris after the war and named set designer Frederick Kiesler as architect.