An Animated Painting

by Marcel Duchamp

           Nude Descending a Staircase [No. 2] (1912), by Marcel Duchamp, was one of the first contemporary paintings to show movement within a single frame.  Animation of life via photos and drawings had been done before Duchamp with the likes of Eadweard Muybrdige and the optical toys, but he challenged the art of creating animation.  He proved that animation can be created in more mediums than celluloid and pen on paper.  Space, time, and movement are needed to depict real life via animation.  Marcel Duchamp denies the space needed to make his painting into an animation.  Duchamp’s painting remains on the cusp of animation by just denying his painting the space needed to recreate life in two dimensions.

Before going into a further discussion about animation, the term must be defined.  Jeff Malpas, Australian philosophy professor at University of Tasmania, looked at animation from a philosopher’s perspective. Malpas returns to the Latin root of animation, “anima” meaning soul or mind, and connects that meaning to both spirit and movement which are needed in a body.[iii]  Animation, in film terms, means a series of image shown frame-by-frame at a certain speed.  Unless specified, the term does not mean cartoon animation which the word has come to be associated with today.

Humans have been trying to depict movement for centuries, starting with the drawings by paleolithic people’s depiction of life and hunting.  From the ancient Greeks to sketches by Leonardo da Vinci trying to recreate life and motion in 2-D was not very successful until the invention of the optical toys such as the Phenakistoscope (1830s) and the Zoetrope (1860s). The Phenakistoscope was a sort of pinwheel with pictures painted on the front that created a mini animation when spun and the Zoetrope was a hollow cylinder with successive images painted on the inside surface interrupted by vertical slits for the viewer to see the animation once spun. [i]  Now, hand drawn and computer animated films are able to imitate life[ii] to a high degree of accuracy.  Each of these examples depict short animation by showing a number of images spread out on a surface with the slight changes so the illusion of movement occurs.

Malpas states that animation needs both time and space in order to work naturally. [iv]  The optical toys consisted of both time and space by having multiple frames which depicted a movement in stages.  These devices predate the earliest cartoons which consisted of hand drawn images of motion frame-by-frame. Variations of the drawing method or stop motion pictures of statues were used until computer animation was invented in the late 20^th century .  For film on celluloid to be created, a system of cameras had to be set-up to take pictures of real life across a certain amount of space for a certain amount of time in order to animate the live images.  Pierre Janssen took multiple images of the sun across the sky, leading to Etienne-Jules Marey to take multiple pictures on the same photographic plate so the progression of movement was able to be seen, but not in the same smooth motion that film depicts. Eadweard Muybridge was the first to take multiple images on separate photographic plates, before showing them in succession.[v]  This succession of showing the images creates animation according to Malpas and one of the first films.

Marcel Duchamp stated that the idea for Nude Descending a Staircase [No. 2] was to “map the motion and energy of the body as it moves through space” came from Muybridge’s photography experiments.[vi]  Duchamp does so by not focusing on the body itself, but the lines that make up the body and create the motion.  In doing so he imitates the animation of the nude thus taking the painting another step away from life.  Duchamp’s painting denies the scene the space Malpas says is needed to create animation , by confining the 20 frames of the body into single frame. Additionally, the two-dimensional body, when 3-D on 2-D surfaces was already created, further exaggerates its denial of true animation.  He was the first to call these images art and display movement and “broke the chains of naturalism”[vii].  The depiction was considered unnatural because viewers were unable to identify the woman or clearly see the movement.  Up until the showing of his image, paintings and sculptures had depicted movement in an imitated or exaggerated way so the viewer could interpret movement. Duchamp paints a simple scene and forces the audience to separate the animated images and use the whole piece to create a short animated film.

While Nude Descending a Staircase [No. 2] by Duchamp is technically just a painting, he includes 20 stills within the one frame that animation would separate. During the end of 1912 film was still new and Duchamp had some basic understanding to be able to paint a piece of art that remains a step away from animation. Duchamp’s painting is a precursor to the 2-D drawing films later created, but revisited in present day with Malpas in mind. In the end what makes the painting not animation is movement, which must be more than perceived movement through overlaying images. Animation at its core is the illusion of live movements and his painting, and he challenged early 20^th century viewers to separate the images into a comprehensible succession of images that could become a woman descending a staircase.

[i] Rosenhahn, Bodo, et al. Human motion: understanding, modelling, capture, and animation / edited by Bodo Rosenhahn, Reinhard Klette, and Dimitris Metaxas, vol. 36.;36;, Springer, Dordrecht, the Netherlands, 2008. 8

[ii] Malpas, Jeff. ” With a Philosopher’s Eye: A ‘Naive’ View on Animation.” Animation 9.1 (2014): 65-79. Web. 22 July 2016. 66.

[iii] Malpas, 70.

[iv] Malpas 73-74.

[v]Rosenhahn, Bodo, et al., 9-11.

[vi] Taylor, Michael R. . “Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase [No. 2] and The 1913 Armory Show Scandal Revisited.” Archives of American Art Journal,51.3 (2012): 50-65. Web. 22 July 2016. 57.

[vii] Taylor, 51.