O aleijadinho

E. Renato Olmedo-González
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
ARTH 3400—20th Century Art
Written Assignment 1
Visual Analysis: Marcel Duchamp’s Sad Young Man on a Train (1911) Visually thrilling, puzzling and compelling, Marcel Duchamp’s Sad Young Man on a Train (1911, The Guggenheim, New York City) is a geometric, movement-focused oil painting that combines the various simultaneous perspective elements that characterize the artistic depictions of Cubism but it’s portrayed upon the ideas of Futurism: speed, technology, youth, destruction and violence. The method in which the “young man,” which is composed of opaque ochre-colored discernable “body parts,” is represented conveys the cubist component of the painting, while the way the young man is arranged throughout the painting—in a progressive, transitive motion that alludes the movement of a train—can be seen as its futurist component. In Sad Young Man, Duchamp depicts a figurative painting in which, based on its literal title that works as key to the overall understanding of the work, the viewer is given “a sad young man on a train.” Although the aesthetic composition of this work can evoke a feeling of uncertainty and distortion when first looked, the cubist composition of the “young man” is given to the viewer in various shapes and abstract forms that, by the way in which they are rhythmically arranged throughout the entire composition, give the image of a single man in transition, as it seems to be engaged in a constant movement. The transitional figure in the work, once its discernable components are realized, occupies the majority of the canvas, giving it monumentality. The distorted figure, which backs the viewer as it appears to move forward towards the right edge of the composition, is felt as vacant, melancholic and solitary as it’s carried away by the “train.” The energetic and vivid—essentially “young”—depiction of movement in Sad Young Man, evoked by the specific arrangement of its distinguishable