Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was also a friend of Maurice Princet, and also studied the new geometries with him quite deeply (the huge book by Lois Dalrymple on the 4th dimension in modern art devotes 45 pages to him!) To Duchamp, as to many artists, the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry seemed revolutionary and subversive!
Portrait of Chess PlayersThe Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
Marcel Duchamp, 1911Marcel Duchamp, 1915-1923

In Portrait of Chess Players on the left, the chess pieces are located on a plane between the heads of the two players and grasped in one player's hand. Preparatory drawings make it plain that the subject of this painting is the mental process involved in a chess game.

At the end of 1912, he gave up on conventional oil painting all together, believing it had become "purely retinal". In The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), Duchamp replaced the sense of the artist's hand with the look of machine-made materials on glass.

He made copious mathematical notes that explore ways to create a four-dimensional Bride, and which refer to Jouffret's Traité elementaire de géometrie à quatre dimensions and the work of the famous mathematician Poincaré.

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