Alastair Sooke looks back on the riddling Frenchman’s important, but little-known, summer holiday in Herne Bay exactly 100 years ago.
No modern artist was as riddling and enigmatic as the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp. Born in 1887, he spent his life upending expectations about what art could be. Even his most diehard disciples were confounded by his decision in 1923 to stop producing art in order to concentrate upon chess, at which he competed in tournaments around the world.