Francis Picabia, Daughter Born without Mother, 1916-17, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008.

Man Ray, Noire and Blanche, 1926, Courtesy The Sir Elton John Photography Collection © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London.

Marcel Duchamp, Etant donnés, 1946-66, Virtual Reproduction 2004, Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008.

Francis Picabia, Conversation I, 1922, Tate © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008.

Man Ray, Interior (Still Life and Room), 1918, Tokyo Fuji Art Museum © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London.

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), Portrait of Man Ray and Salvador Dali, Paris, Detail, 1934.

Man Ray, Message à Marcia: Three Pairs of Natural Paintings (part 1), c1958-65, Collection of Joan and Michael Salke, Naples, Florida, USA © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London.

Man Ray, Message à Marcia: Three Pairs of Natural Paintings (part 2), c1958-65, Collection of Joan and Michael Salke, Naples, Florida, USA © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London.

Kay Bell Reynal, Marcel Duchamp Playing Chess, 1952, Photograph, 22 x 20cm.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ Paris and DACS, London 2007.

Man Ray, Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp),. 1921, Photograph by Man Ray, Art Direction by Marcel Duchamp, Silver print, 5-7/8" x 3-7/8", Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Man Ray, Marquise Casati, 1922, Centre Pompidou © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008 Photo CNAC / MNAM Dist.RMN / © Adam Rzepka.

Man Ray, Le Violin d¹Ingres, 1924.

Marcel Duchamp, Etant donnés, 1946-66, Virtual Reproduction 2004, Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008.

Marcel Duchamp, Young Man and Girl in Spring, 1911, Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008.

Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Widow, 1920 replica 1964, Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008.

Man Ray, Cadeau 1921, Tate, Presented by the Tate Collectors Forum 2002, © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008, Iron and nails.

Francis Picabia, Femmes au Bull-Dog, 1940- 1942, Centre Pompidou © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008, Oil on cardboard, 105 x 76 cm.

Man Ray, Emak Bakia, 1926, remade 1970, Tate © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London.

Francis Picabia

Marcel Duchamp/ Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23, replica 1965-6, Tate. Presented by William N. Copley through the American Federation of Arts 1975 © Richard Hamilton and Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008, Oil, lead, dust and varnish on glass.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2), 1912, Oil on canvas, 146 x 89 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Tate Modern
Bankside
London
+44 20 7887 8888
Level 4
Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia
February 21-May 26, 2008

This exhibition aims to chart the artistic and personal relationships of three of the great figures in early twentieth-century art, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia.

Together they created the Dada movement in New York during the First World War, and, unusually within the history of modern art, they remained friends, with periods of varying intensity, throughout their lives. At the heart of the friendships lay a shared outlook on life, manifested in their works through jokes and a sense of irony, iconoclastic gestures, and a pronounced, if often coded, interest in sexual relations and eroticism. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia aims to explore the various affinities and parallels between the work of these three, showing how they responded to each others’ ideas and innovations.

Picabia was a painter, Man Ray worked in all media but became celebrated as a photographer and Duchamp abandoned the life of a professional artist, yet became a revered figure for later generations of artists. The exhibition begins in the 1910s, with works showing the artists’ attempts to respond to and go beyond the implications of Cubism and abstraction. It will feature seminal early works including Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No.2), 1912, which created a furor when it was exhibited in America in 1913, Picabia’s I See Again in My Memory My Dear Udnie, 1913-14, and Man Ray's The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, 1916.

Duchamp (July 28, 1887-October 2, 1968) is most often associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements, his participation in Surrealism was largely behind the scenes, and after being involved in New York Dada, he barely participated in Paris Dada.

Thousands of books and articles attempt to interpret Duchamp's artwork and philosophy, but in interviews and his writing, Duchamp only added to the mystery. The interpretations interested him as creations of their own, and as reflections of the interpreter.

A playful man, Duchamp prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much with words, but with actions such as dubbing a urinal "art" and naming it Fountain. He produced relatively few artworks as he quickly moved through the avant-garde rhythms of his time.

Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the Haute-Normandie Region of France, and grew up in a family that liked cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Emile Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, painted and made music together.

Marcel Duchamp was the brother of: Jacques Villon (1875-1963), painter, printmaker; Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918), sculptor; and Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889-1963), painter.

As a child, with his two older brothers already away from home at school in Rouen, Duchamp was closer to his sister Suzanne who was a willing accomplice in the games and activities conjured from his fertile imagination. At 10 years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers' footsteps when he left home and began schooling at Lycée Corneille in Rouen. For the next seven years he was locked into an educational regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not an outstanding student, his best subject was mathematics, and he won two mathematics prizes at the school. He also won a prize for drawing in 1903, and at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize validating his recent decision to become an artist.

He took drawing classes and learned academic drawing from a teacher, who unsuccessfully attempted to protect his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamp's artist mentor was his brother Jacques Villon, whose fluid and incisive style he sought to imitate. At 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting Suzanne Duchamp in various poses and activities. That summer he also painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils.

Duchamp's early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles. He experimented with classical techniques and subjects, as well as Cubism and Fauvism. When he was later asked about what 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.

He studied art at Académie Julian (1904 to 1905), but preferred playing billiards to attending classes. During this time Duchamp drew and sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use visual and/or verbal puns. Such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life.

In 1905 he began his compulsory military service working for a printer in Rouen. There he learned typography and printing processes — skills he would use in his later work.

Due to his brother Jacques Villon's membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamp's work hung in the 1908 Salon d'Automne. The following year his work displayed in the Salon des Indépendants. Of Duchamp's pieces in show, critic Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, "... Duchamp's very ugly nudes...", though the two were to become friends. He also became lifelong friends with exuberant artist Francis Picabia after meeting him at the 1911 Salon d' Automne, and Picabia proceeded to introduce him the life of fast cars and 'high' living.

In 1911 at his eldest brother Jacques Villon's home in Puteaux the Duchamp brothers hosted regular discussion group with other artists and writers including Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Roger de la Frenaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, and Alesander Archipenko. The group came to be known as the Puteaux Group, and the artists' work dubbed Orphic cubism. Disinterested in the Cubists' seriousness and their focus on visual matters, he did not join Cubist theory conversations, and gained a reputation of being shy. However, that same year he painted in a Cubist style and added his impression of movement by repeating imagery.

During this period Duchamp's fascination with transition, change, movement and distance began to manifest, and like many artists of the time he was intrigued with the concept of the 4th dimension and depicting it.

Works from this period included his first "machine" painting, Coffee Mill (Moulin à café) (1911), which he gave to his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The Coffee Mill shows similarity to the "grinder" mechanism of the Large Glass he was to paint years later.

In his 1911 Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'echecs) there is the Cubist overlapping frames and multiple perspectives of his two brothers playing chess, but to that Duchamp added elements conveying the unseen mental activity of the players. (Notably, "échec" is French for "failure".)

Duchamp's first controversial work, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un éscalier n° 2) (1912), depicts the motion of the mechanistic nude with superimposed facets, similar to motion pictures. The painting shows elements of both the fragmentation and synthesis of the Cubists, and the movement and dynamism of the Futurists.

He first submitted the piece to appear at the Cubist Salon des Indépendants, but jurist Albert Gleizes asked Duchamp's brothers to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting, or paint over the title that he had painted on the work and rename it something else. His brothers did approach him with Gleizes' request, and Duchamp quietly refused. Of the incident Duchamp later recalled, "I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that."

Later he submitted the painting to the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, which displayed works of American artists and was the first major exhibition of the modern trends coming out of Paris. American show-goers, accustomed to realistic art, were scandalized, and the Nude was at the center of much of the controversy.

About this time Duchamp read Max Stirner's philosophical tract, The Ego and Its Own, the study of which he considered another turning point in his artistic and intellectual development. He called it " … a remarkable book … which advances no formal theories, but just keeps saying that the ego is always there in everything."

Duchamp also credited the 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 with radically changing his approach to art, and inspiring him to begin his creation of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (Even The Large Glass).

While in Germany in 1912 he painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings and a bride stripped bare by her bachelors image, and began making plans for the Large Glass — scribbling short notes to himself, sometimes with hurried sketches, but it would be over 10 years before the piece was completed. Little else is known about the two-month stay in Germany except that the friend he visited was intent to show him the sights and the night life.

Later that year he travelled with Picabia, Apollinaire and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia through the Jura mountains, an adventure that Buffet-Picabia described as one of their "forays of demoralization, which were also forays of witticism and clownery ... the disintegration of the concept of art." Duchamp's notes from the trip avoid logic and sense with a sort of surrealistic mythical flavor.

Duchamp painted few canvases after 1912, and in those he did, he attempted to remove "painterly" effects, and instead used a technical drawing approach.

His broad interests took him to an exhibition of aviation technology during this period, and about it Duchamp said to his friend Constantin Brancusi, "Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propellor? Tell me, can you do that?" Ironically, Brancusi later sculpted bird forms that U.S. Customs officials mistook for aviation parts and for which they attempted to collect import duties.

During this decade Duchamp began working as a librarian in the Bibliotèque Sainte-Geneviève where he earned a living wage and withdrew from painting circles into scholarly realms. He studied math and physics — areas where exciting new discoveries were taking place. The theoretical writings of Henri Poincaré particularly intrigued and inspired Duchamp. Poincaré postulated that the laws believed to govern matter were created solely by the minds that "understood" them and no theory could be considered "true." "The things themselves are not what science can reach..., but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality," Poincaré wrote in 1902.

Duchamp's own art-science experiments began during his tenure at the library. To make one of his favorite pieces, 3 Standard Stoppages (3 stoppages étalon), one at a time from a height of 1 meter, he dropped three 1-meter lengths of thread onto a prepared canvases. They landed in three random undulating positions. He varnished them into place on the blue-black canvas strips and attached them to glass. Then he cut three wood slats into the shapes of the curved strings, and put all the pieces into a croquet box. Three small leather signs with the title printed in gold were glued to each of the "stoppage" backgrounds. The piece appears to literally follow Poincaré's School of the Thread, part of a book on classical mechanics.

Work on The Large Glass continued into 1913 with his invention of inventing a repertoire of forms with notes, sketches and painted studies, and even drawing some of his ideas on the wall of his apartment.

In his studio he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. Later he denied that its creation was purposeful, though it has come to be known as the first of his readymades. "I enjoyed looking at it," he said. "Just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace."

Meanwhile, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 was scandalizing Americans at the Armory Show, and the sale of all four of his paintings in the show financed his trip to America in 1915.

After World War I was declared in 1914, with his brothers and many friends in military service and himself exempted, Paris felt uncomfortable to Duchamp. He decided to emigrate to the then neutral United States, and to his surprise he found he was a celebrity when he arrived in New York in 1915 where he quickly befriended art patron Katherine Dreier and artist Man Ray. Duchamp's circle also included art patrons Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, actress and artist Beatrice Wood and his friend Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures, and though he spoke little English in the course of supporting himself by giving French lessons and some library work, he quickly learned the language.

For two years the Arensbergs who remained his friends and patrons for 42 years were the landlords to his studio with payment to be The Large Glass. He turned down an offer of $10,000 per year for all of his yearly production made by an art gallery preferring to work on The Large Glass.

For Duchamp creating Société Anonyme in 1920, along with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray, was the beginning of his life-long involvement in art dealing and collecting. The group collected modern art works, and arranged modern art exhibitions and lectures into the 1930s.

By this time Walter Pach, one of the coordinators of the 1913 Armory Show, sought Duchamp's advice on modern art, and beginning with Société Anonyme, Dreier depended on his counsel in gathering her collection, as did Arensberg. Later Peggy Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art directors Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney consulted with Duchamp on their modern art collections and shows.

New York Dada had a less serious tone than that of Europe, and wasn't a particularly organized venture. Duchamp's friend Picabia connected with the Dada group in Zürich, bringing to New York the Dada ideas of absurdity and anti-art. Together with Man Ray and many from the group that met almost nightly at the Arensberg home or caroused in Greenwich Village, Duchamp contributed his ideas about art and his humor to the New York activities, much of which ran concurrent with the development of readymades and The Large Glass,

Duchamp and Dada are most often connected by his submission of Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. The Independent Artists shows were unjuried and all pieces that were submitted were displayed. However, the show committee said that Fountain was not art and rejected it from the show causing an uproar amongst the Dadaists and led Duchamp to resign from the board of the Independent Artists.

In 1915 Duchamp began doing his "readymades" — found objects he chose and presented as art. He assembled the first readymade, a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, in 1913 about the same time as his Nude Descending A Staircase was attracting the attention of critics at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, though it wasn't until two years later he called it a readymade.

Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, is considered to be the first "pure" readymade. Prelude to a Broken Arm (Nov. 1915), a snow shovel, followed soon after. His Fountain, the urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt that shocked the art world in 1917, was selected in 2004 as "the most influential artwork of the 20th century" by 500 renowned artists and historians.

Research published in 1997 by Rhonda Roland Shearer speculates that Duchamp's "found" objects may actually have been created by Duchamp.

Duchamp carefully created The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), working on the piece from 1915 to 1923 except when he was in Buenos Aires and Paris in 1918-1920. He executed the work on two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. His notes for the piece, published as The Green Box, reflect the creation of unique rules of physics, and myth which describes the work, and describe that his "hilarious picture" is intended to depict the erratic encounter between a bride, and her nine bachelors.

Until 1969 when the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed his Etant donnés tableau, The Glass was thought to be his last major work.

Duchamp's interest in kinetic works shows as early as the notes for The Large Glass and the Bicycle Wheel readymade, and despite losing interest in "retinal art" he retained interest in visual phenomena.

In 1920, with help from Man Ray, Duchamp built what has come to be known as Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) (Rotative plaque de verre). The piece, which he did not consider art, involved a motor to spin pieces of rectangular glass on which were painted segments of a circle. When the apparatus spins, the circle segments appear to be closed.

Man Ray set up to photograph the initial experiment, but when they turned the machine on for the second time, a belt broke, caught a piece of the glass which after glancing off of Man Ray's head, crashed into bits.

After moving back to Paris in 1923, at Andre Breton's urging and the financing of Jacques Doucet, he built another optical device based on the first one - Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics). This time the optical element was a globe cut in half with black concentric circles painted on it. When it spins the circles appear to move backwards and forwards in space. Duchamp asked that Doucet not exhibit the apparatus as art.

Rotoreliefs were the next phase of Duchamp's spinning works. To make the optical "play toys" he painted designs on flat cardboard circles and spun them on a phonographic turntable that when spinning the flat disks appeared three-dimensional. He had a printer run off 500 sets of six of the designs and set up a booth at a 1935 Paris inventors' show to sell them. The venture was a financial disaster, but some optical scientists thought they might be of use in restoring three-dimensional sight to people with one eye.

In collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret, Duchamp filmed early versions of the Rotoreliefs and they named the film Anémic Cinéma (1925-1926).

Later, in Alexander Calder's studio in 1931, while looking at the sculptor's kinetic works Duchamp suggested that he call them "mobiles" which Calder did for his upcoming show. To this day this type of sculpture is called "mobiles".

Rrose Sélavy, or Rose Sélavy, was one of Duchamp's pseudonyms. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie", which translates to English as "such is life". It has also been read as "arroser la vie" ("to make a toast to life").

Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray of Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it. Duchamp used the name in the title of at least one sculpture, Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy?. The sculpture, a type of readymade called an assemblage, consists of an oral thermometer, a couple dozen small cubes of marble resembling sugar cubes inside a birdcage.

In 1918 Duchamp left his work on the Large Glass and the art scene, and went to Buenos Aires, Argentina for nine months where he often played chess, and carved from wood the only chess set he himself made, though a local craftsman made the knights. He returned to Paris in 1919, where he lived until he returned to the United States in 1920. By the time he moved to Paris in 1923 he was no longer a practicing artist. Instead he played and studied chess, which he played for the rest of his life to the near exclusion of all other activity. Duchamp's obsessive fascination with chess can be traced back much earlier to the themes of his major art pieces. The most immediately obvious of these is the chess position known as "trébuchet" (the trap), which gave its title to the Readymade of 1917: a coat rack with four hooks, which is nailed to the floor, hooks uppermost.

Not only did he design the 1925 Poster for the Third French Chess Championship, but he finished the event at fifty percent (3-3, with 2 draws), and thus earned the title of chess master. During this period his fascination with chess distressed his first wife so much that she glued his pieces to the board, which possibly contributed to their divorce four months later. He went on to play in the French Championships and also in the Olympiads from 1928-1933, favoring hypermodern openings like the Nimzo-Indian. Sometime in the early 1930s, Duchamp realized that he had reached the height of his ability and had no real chance of winning recognition in top-level chess. Over the following years, the intensity of his participation in chess tournaments declined but he discovered correspondence chess and became a chess journalist writing weekly newspaper columns.

In 1932 Duchamp teamed up with fellow chess theorist Halberstadt to publish L'opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled). This treatise describes the Lasker-Reichelm position, a unique and extremely rare position that can arise in the endgame of a chess match. In conclusion, the authors observe that the most Black can hope for is a draw. Given accurate play by White, Black can only succeed in delaying the progress of events, ultimately losing to White. They demonstrate this, plotting game play on enneagram-like charts that fold in on themselves. Grasping the central theme of this work, the endgame, is important to understanding Duchamp's complex attitude towards his artistic career. While his contemporaries were achieving spectacular success in the art world by selling their visions to high society collectors and trend setters, Duchamp observed "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art — and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position." Duchamp can be seen, very briefly, playing chess with Man Ray in the short film Entr'acte (1924) by Rene Clair.

His theme of the endgame was picked up by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett who used it as the narrative device for his commercially successful 1957 play of the same name, Endgame. One of Duchamp's most notable chess games occurred in 1968, at a concert called Reunion at Ryerson University in Toronto.

His opponent was the avant-garde composer and event organizer John Cage. The music was produced by a series of photoelectric cells underneath each square of the chessboard which were sporadically triggered during normal game play.

On choosing a career in chess Duchamp had this to say: "If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him - as if anyone could — but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted."

Though Duchamp was no longer a practicing artist he continued to consult with artists, art dealers and collectors, but as far as most people knew at the time he did not produce art. From 1925 he often travelled to and from France and the United States, and made New York's Greenwich Village his home in 1942.

On June 8, 1927, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor, and they divorced six months later on 25 January 1928. It was gossiped at the time that it was a marriage of convenience for Duchamp, because she was the daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer. Early in January 1928 Duchamp told Lydie that he could no longer bear the responsibility and confinement of marriage, and a little over three weeks later they were divorced.

From the mid-1930s onwards he collaborated with the Surrealists and participated in their exhibitions. From then until 1944, together with Max Ernst, Eugenio Granell and André Breton, he edited the Surrealist periodical VVV, and also served as an advisory editor for View magazine which featured him in its March 1945 edition which introduced him to many Americans.

In 1954, he and Alexina "Teeny" Sattler married, and they remained together until his death.

Duchamp became a United States citizen in 1955 but his influence on the art world remained behind the scenes until the late 1950s when he was "discovered" by a young artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns who were eager to escape the dominance of Abstract Expressionism.

Interest in Duchamp re-ignited in the 1960s, and he gained international public recognition. 1963 saw his first retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, and in 1966 the Tate Gallery hosted a large exhibit of his work. Other major institutions, including the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed with large showings of Duchamp's work. He was invited to lecture on art and participate in formal discussions, as well as, interviewed for major publications.

1938 - The International Surrealist Exhibition was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris with more than 60 artists from different countries, showing around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations.

For the First Papers of Surrealism show in New York, surrealists called on Duchamp to design the exhibition. This time he wove a 3-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works. He made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring his friends to the opening of the show, so that when the finely dressed patrons arrived they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls, and skipping rope. His design for the show's catalog included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.

Duchamp's final major art work surprised the art world that believed he'd given up art for chess 25 years earlier. Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas (Etant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage) is a tableau, visible only through a peep hole in a wooden door, of a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden and legs spread holding a gas lamp in the air in one hand against a landscape backdrop.

Duchamp worked secretly on the piece from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio while even his closest friends thought he had abandoned art. It was a surprise to the art world in particular, as Duchamp had apparently decided to give up "retinal art", as already mentioned, but here Duchamp seemed to have produced a piece that appealed to the eye as well as the mind.

Marcel Duchamp died on October 2, 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and is buried in the Rouen Cemetery, in Rouen, Normandy, France. His grave bears the epitaph, "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent;" or "Besides, it's always other people who die."

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Pennsylvania, in South Philadelphia, in 1890, the eldest child of recent Russian-Jewish immigrants. The family would eventually include another son and two daughters, the youngest born shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1897. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray, a name selected by Man Ray's brother, in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-Semitism prevalent at that time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man at this time, and gradually began to use Man Ray as his combined single name.

Man Ray’s father was a garment factory worker who also ran a small tailoring business out of the family home, enlisting his children from an early age. Man Ray’s mother enjoyed making the family’s clothes from her own designs and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric. Despite Man Ray’s desire to disassociate himself from his family background, this experience left an enduring mark on his art. Tailor's dummies, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to clothing and sewing appear at every stage of his work and in almost every medium.

Man Ray displayed artistic and mechanical ability from childhood. His education at Boys' High School from 1904 to 1908 provided him with a solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. At the same time, he educated himself with frequent visits to the local art museums, where he studied the works of the Old Masters. After graduation from high school, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist instead. However much this decision disappointed his parents' aspirations to upward mobility and assimilation, they nevertheless rearranged the family's modest living quarters so that Man Ray could use a room as his studio. He stayed for the next four years, working steadily toward being a professional painter, while earning money as a commercial artist and technical illustrator at several Manhattan companies.

From the surviving examples of his work from this period, it appears he attempted mostly paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles. He was already an avid admirer of avant-garde art of the time, such as the European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery and works by the Ashcan School, but, with a few exceptions, was not yet able to integrate these new trends into his own work. The art classes he sporadically attended — including stints at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League — were of little apparent benefit to him, until he enrolled in the Ferrer School in the autumn of 1912, thus beginning a period of intense and rapid artistic development.

Living in New York City, influenced by what he saw at the 1913 Armory Show and in galleries showing contemporary works from Europe, Man Ray's early paintings display facets of cubism. Upon befriending Marcel Duchamp who was interested in showing movement in static paintings, his works begin to depict movement of the figures, for example in the repetitive positions of the skirts of the dancer in The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Shadows (1916).

In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled Self-Portrait, was exhibited the following year. He produced his first significant photographs in 1918.

Abandoning conventional painting, Man Ray involved himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement, started making objects, and developed unique mechanical and photographic methods of making images. For the 1918 version of Rope Dancer he combined a spray-gun technique with a pen drawing. Again, like Duchamp, he made "readymades" - objects selected by the artist, sometimes modified and presented as art. His Gift readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is an unseen object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Another work from this period, Aerograph (1919), was done with airbrush on glass.

In 1920 Ray helped Duchamp make his first machine and one of the earliest examples of kinetic art, the Rotary Glass Plates composed of glass plates turned by a motor. That same year Man Ray, Katherine Dreier and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection which in effect was the first museum of modern art in the U.S.

Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish the one issue of New York Dada in 1920, but he soon declared, "Dada cannot live in New York", and he moved to Paris in 1921.

It was in New York in 1913 that Man Ray met his first wife, Adon Lacroix. They married in 1914, separated in 1919, and were formally divorced in 1937.

In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, France, and soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), an artists' model and celebrated character in Paris bohemian circles. Kiki was Man Ray's companion for most of the 1920s. She became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images and starred in his experimental films. In 1929 he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller.

For the next 20 years in Montparnasse, Man Ray made his mark on the art of photography. Great artists of the day such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and Antonin Artaud posed for his camera.

With Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925.

In 1934, Surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered teacup, posed for Man Ray in what became a well-known series of photographs depicting Oppenheim nude, standing next to a printing press.

Together with Lee Miller — his photography assistant and lover — Man Ray reinvented the photographic technique of solarization. He also created a technique using photograms he called rayographs. Man Ray also directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur, such as Le Retour à la Raison (2 mins, 1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); L'Étoile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and Les Mystères du Château du Dé (20 mins, 1929).

Later in life, Man Ray returned to the United States, having been forced to leave Paris due to the dislocations of the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles, California from 1940 until 1951. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, Man Ray met Juliet Browner, a trained dancer and experienced artists' model. They began living together almost immediately, and married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. However, he called Montparnasse home and he returned there.

In 1963 he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait, which was republished in 1999 (ISBN 0821224743).

He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads: unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.

Picabia (January 22, 1879 - November 30, 1953) was a well-known painter and poet born of a French mother and a Spanish-Cuban father who was an attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris, France.

Born in Paris, he studied at École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Decoratifs. In the beginning of his career, from 1903 to 1908, he was influenced by the impressionist painting of Alfred Sisley. From 1909, he came under the influence of the cubists and the Golden Section (Section d'Or).

Around 1911 he joined the Puteaux Group, which met at the studio of Jacques Villon in the village of Puteaux. There he became friends with artist Marcel Duchamp. Some of the group's members were, Apollinaire, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Leger and Jean Metzinger.

From 1913 to 1915 Picabia traveled to New York City several times and took active part in the avant-garde movements, introducing modern art to America. These years can be characterized as Picabia's proto-Dada period, consisting mainly of his portraits mécaniques.

Later, in 1916, while in Barcelona he started his well-known Dada periodical 391, in which he published his first mechanical drawings. He continued the periodical with the help of Duchamp in America.

Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zürich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. (See Cannibale, 1921.) Again he changed his style in 1925, when he returned to figurative painting.

During the 1930s, he became a close friend of Gertrude Stein. In the early 1940s he moved to the south of France, where his work took a surprising turn - he produced a series of paintings based on the nude and glamour photos in French "Girlie" magazines, in a garish style which appears to subvert traditional, academic nude painting.

Before the end of World War II, he returned to Paris where he resumed abstract painting and writing poetry.

He had love affairs with dancers whom he painted. "I see again in my memory my dear udnie" for example, is a painting and an ode to a dancer he was involved with.

A large amount of his work involves the mechanical representation of people.

Francis Picabia died in Paris in 1953 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

Covering the period to the end of their careers and spanning nearly 40 years, the show will also feature Duchamp’s ready mades and optical experiments. It will include Man Ray’s rayographs (cameraless photographs), many of the iconic photographs of the interwar years, as well as examples of his many objects. Also on display will be important later paintings by Man Ray and Picabia, including a selection of the latter’s monster and late dot paintings. For the first time in Europe, Tate will show a newly-made projected version of Duchamp’s major late work, Given 1946-66. Unveiled only after Duchamp’s death, the original work is permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Unfolding in a loose chronology, themes explored in the exhibition include: the representation of movement; objects and their relationship to photography; light and transparency; the role of verbal allusions and puns in art; and performance and play-acting. Films by all three artists will also be shown, including Entr’acte 1924, which was scripted by Picabia and in which all three artists have cameo performances. There will be a rich section dedicated to the artists’ friendships, with photographs, letters, books and magazines.

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia is curated by Jennifer Mundy, Head of Collection Research at Tate, with assistance from Nicholas Cullinan, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.