At the very beginning of his career, Marcel Duchamp frequented the world of cartoonists rather than that of painters. Indeed, his first drawings were published in satirical magazines. Might not the paradigm of the cartoon (the effective combination of caption and drawing) therefore be seen as the general matrix of most of his works?

After graduating in art history at the University of Strasbourg, he began working as a conservator, initially at the Musée des Sables d’Olonne, then at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and lastly at the Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Pompidou), Paris, where he was responsible for the collection of contemporary art until 1998. Since 1999 he has been teaching at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.