Marcel Duchamp - Exhibition - MoMA - New York

“Why is this art?” is a question often asked by viewers of contemporary art. It is virtually impossible to answer it without referring to the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Over a six-decade career, Duchamp challenged the very definition of the artwork, ushering in a new era of creative license—the reverberations of which are still felt today. While resistant to “-isms,” Duchamp had a hand in modern art movements ranging from Cubism to Surrealism to Pop. His pursuits were marked by continuous reinvention and deliberate inconsistency: “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

With its fragmentation of the human form, Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) produced shockwaves when it debuted at the legendary Armory Show in New York in 1913. His invention of the readymade as a form of sculpture forever altered the parameters of art and authorship, epitomized by his scandalous work Fountain (1917), a mass-produced urinal turned on its side and signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt.” And his monumental painting-on-glass The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23) liberated painting as a medium from both the canvas and the wall. For the next 50 years, Duchamp continued to innovate in unexpected ways. For his “portable museum,” The Box in a Valise (1935–41), the artist painstakingly reproduced his life’s work to date in miniature. Go to Website

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