She took a large role as an avant-garde artist, working through a career that spanned five decades, during a turbulent time of great societal change.

Her early works reflected styles ranging from Intimism and Fauvism to Impressionism and a conservative Cubism, often depicting family and childhood scenes around Rouen.

At age 21, in 1911, she married a local pharmacist named Charles Desmares but quickly divorced, moving to Paris to serve as a nurse during the First World War, living in Marcel's apartment in rue la Condamine.

During this time, she continued to work as an artist, establishing a presence in the Parisian quarter of Montparnasse and often asking Marcel for feedback or advice.

Between 1916 and 1921 she produced a significant body of work in a formal language that has come to be called 'mechanomorphic' - images taken from commonplace mechanical or technological objects arranged to describe or infer human agency, desire or behavior.

[1] In a letter to her written in January 1916, Marcel elaborated on his concept of the ready-mades and mentioned the Bicycle Wheel and the Bottlerack which she should have encountered in the studio.

She produced "Un et une menacés," "A Threatened Male and Female" which references mechanical symbolism as well as real machine parts, which greatly lends itself to the Dadaist movement.

As a wedding present, Marcel sent them instructions for a readymade which involved suspending a geometry textbook on the porch and letting the wind and rain gradually tear it apart.

Jean and Suzanne were not very involved until 1921, but both exhibited three works in the prestigious Salon des Indèpendants, alongside artists such as Francis Picabia.

[3] In 1921, Jean and Suzanne sign, along with 20 other artists, the Dada souléve tout, a manifesto created by Tristan Tzara to rebuke the increasingly fascist Italian Futurist, Marinetti.

In 1945, after the war, Suzanne Duchamp became a member of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs and regularly exhibited landscapes, portraits, and flower still lifes at its salons.