An excellent, well-researched life of the rather enigmatic Frenchman who has been such an influence on the art of the past thirty years, particularly in America. The son of a provincial notary, Duchamp had two elder brothers both of whom were major artists, which made them a hard act to follow. He virtually gave up painting while still a young man and settled in New York, where he led a life which varied between long periods of reclusiveness and bouts of bohemian living. Duchamp was a great womaniser, a social charmer, a dedicated chessplayer, and a deliberate noncompetitor who nevertheless fostered his own legend with astuteness and always had influential patrons and friends. World fame came late, and he seems never to have earned much money from his art, but his second marriage, to the former wife of Matisse's artdealer son Pierre, helped to make his final years a kind of indian summer.