Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Sweden
Picasso / Duchamp: "He was Wrong"

They may appear incompatible when contrasting the purpose of painting, and the eye versus the mind:

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.” - Pablo Picasso

“I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.” - Marcel Duchamp

The author Octavio Paz once wrote: "Perhaps the two painters who have had the greatest influence in this century are Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The former with his entire oeuvre; the latter with one single work, which is a veritable negation of the modern sense of work."

Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, the growing number of young artists who preferred Duchamp was something that Picasso could never reconcile. Richardson writes: “If it had been Matisse, who was always a rival, it wouldn’t have mattered. But who were they looking up to on the other side of the Atlantic but Marcel Duchamp of all people! Picasso despised him.” Allegedly, Picasso’s only comment on hearing that Duchamp had died was: “He was wrong.”

Picasso/Duchamp: “He Was Wrong” emphasises the rivalry, but also lifts up correspondences, and a proximity between Picasso and Duchamp that has often been virtually ignored. Both artists were promoted in the 1930s by the leader of the surrealist movement, André Breton, who also devoted an issue of the journal Minotaure to each of them.