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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tIts curators\u2014Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo of MoMA and Matthew Affron of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the exhibition heads next\u2014do not so much upend Duchamp\u2019s oeuvre as reintroduce it. More than 50 years ago, in 1973, these same institutions organized the last major Duchamp retrospective held in the US. That 300-work show built on Walter Hopps\u2019s legendary exhibition for the Pasadena Art Museum\u2014held in 1963, at a time when Duchamp was still relatively obscure\u2014and solidified the artist\u2019s place in the canon.<\/p>\n
\n\tWith Duchamp firmly recognized as a forerunner to everyone from Jasper Johns to Cameron Rowland, MoMA has now staged another retrospective of roughly the same scale. Methodically moving from the start of Duchamp\u2019s career in the early 1900s to its end in the late 1960s, the curators take a just-the-facts approach, refusing to impose a narrative arc over this elusive artist. (The show\u2019s catalog is similar: in lieu of the expected set of essays from critics and historians is a 48-page timeline by Alexandra Drexelius, an assistant who worked on the show, followed by a lengthy treatise from the curators on institutionalizing Duchamp, who expressed so little regard for museums that he once claimed he avoided the Louvre for more than 20 years.)<\/p>\n
\n\tThe show is less notable for its thesis\u2014it doesn\u2019t really have one\u2014than for its arrival at exactly the right moment. Ours is a time when artists are responding to a chaotic world with spare, sleek artworks that are protest-minded, even if they don\u2019t always seem that way. These are works that resist by refusing to reveal all, just as Duchamp\u2019s work once did; they\u2019re often termed \u201cquiet,\u201d a word that could also be applied to much of Duchamp\u2019s art. How appropriate, then, that MoMA\u2019s show arrives about a month before Duchamp\u2019s inclusion in the main exhibition of Venice Biennale, titled \u201cIn Minor Keys.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tIronically, MoMA\u2019s Duchamp retrospective is a decidedly major-key affair, filling the entire sixth floor with tantalizing deep cuts and world-famous masterpieces alike. Duchamp nerds\u2014there are many of them\u2014will find much to admire in this chronological presentation. For example: the original version of Fountain<\/em>, Duchamp\u2019s 1917 urinal sculpture, is not included in an early gallery devoted to his beloved readymades, made in the years before and during World War I. It\u2019s an admirable curatorial flourish, because real Duchampheads know the first Fountain<\/em> was lost. (Fear not: copies from 1950, 1963, and 1964 are on hand in the later galleries, which contend with how Duchamp demolished the dichotomy between original and replica.)<\/p>\n \n\tDuchamp-curious initiates in wait will also delight in this show. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2<\/em> (1912), the painting that Duchamp famously withdrew from an anti-Salon in Paris and then exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, is visiting MoMA from the Philadelphia Museum, which loaned the painting to this institution for the first time since 1973. Nude Descending a Staircase<\/em> ostensibly depicts a figure walking down a flight of stairs, as its title suggests, but the mannequin-like person is abstracted beyond recognition. The painting remains thrilling.<\/p>\n \n\tNeither of these works has ever struck me as a protest, though you could make the case that Duchamp\u2019s removal of Nude Descending a Staircase<\/em> from the 1912 Salon des Ind\u00e9pendants counts as one. (Duchamp pulled the work because the exhibition\u2019s organizers objected both to the title and the content of the picture.) But the MoMA retrospective made me recall that both were <\/em>expressions of non-compliance in their time. If one now expects to see works like Fountain <\/em>and Nude Descending a Staircase<\/em> in museum galleries, it wasn\u2019t always that way.<\/p>\n \n\tDuchamp\u2019s artworks resisted performing as expected, bucking tradition and function. There are hat racks strung from the ceiling, looking more like crabs than usable household furniture, and there are miniature windows whose panes have been painted over in black, making it impossible to peer through them. There are artworks that cannot be fully seen: for example, With Hidden Noise<\/em> (1916) is a mass of twine sandwiched between two steel plates containing an \u201cunknown object,\u201d as the checklist describes it. (Duchamp himself didn\u2019t know what it was: he let his patron Walter Arensberg decide which mysterious item to place in there.) And there are songs that cannot be fully heard, as in Musical Erratum <\/em>(1913), Duchamp\u2019s score for a composition unplayable on any known instrument.<\/p>\n \n\tYou don\u2019t always get what you want in Duchamp\u2019s art, which is exactly the point. His approach was all about flouting expectations and fighting the system. He even went against himself at times. \u201cI have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste,\u201d he once said.<\/p>\n \n\tThat much is obvious from the start of the MoMA exhibition, which suggests that Duchamp could have been a great painter, had he not zagged in a different direction. The earliest paintings on view, produced while Duchamp was still a teenager, are pleasant, innocuous landscapes dominated by chunky strokes of green\u2014Post-Impressionism lite. But by 1910, when Duchamp was in his 20s, his paintings grew stranger, and his figures started to denature. In Yvonne and Magdeleine Torn in Tatters<\/em> (1911), a painting of at least two women, it\u2019s tough to tell whose nose belongs to which face.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the next gallery, color starts to drain away from Duchamp\u2019s paintings until all that\u2019s left are greys and blacks. This is the palette of the machine-made, that which is inhuman, and Duchamp would drive the point home in Coffee Mill<\/em> (1911), a tiny painting of a grinder that expels a cascade of brown beans. With its arcing arrow and its images of the gears in motion, it looks more like a diagram in a manual than a painting fit for a gallery.<\/p>\n \n\tDuchamp\u2019s ensuing readymades, many of them iconic works of the Dada movement of the 1910s, continued to vex and befuddle. He sometimes signed them under aliases such as Rrose S\u00e9lavy\u2014not a real woman, albeit one whose identity Duchamp sometimes assumed for his photographic self-portraits. Under her name, he even made a faux stock company that came with real bonds. The bonds picture the market as a sham, a game to be played with \u00e9lan and wit, just as Duchamp did when he took up chess, one of his main obsessions.<\/p>\n \n\tHe also critiqued the art market, whose incessant desire for profit he undermined by copying his own readymades, thus degrading the value of the originals. Alongside those copies, he made tiny replicas that he placed in little suitcases that he termed \u201cportable museums,\u201d the first of which was produced between 1935 and 1936. Known as \u201cBo\u00eetes-en-valises,\u201d these works were meant as \u201ca way of economizing a bit,\u201d as Duchamp once said. (In typical Duchamp fashion, the word \u201ceconomizing\u201d does a lot of work, referring both to the diminutive size of the objects held within his valises and the capital required to obtain one of them.) MoMA wisely gives these sets a spacious gallery of their own.<\/p>\n \n\tThe \u201cBo\u00eete-en-valise\u201d gallery is the MoMA show\u2019s ecstatic high point, and the exhibition never quite recovers from it. The later galleries are spent building up to Duchamp\u2019s final work, \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em> (1966), an assemblage in which a peephole in a shut door reveals a nude woman laying on a hill. But the work is not here\u2014it\u2019s permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum\u2014and its absence is deeply felt. <\/p>\n \n\tMoMA does, however, have another great work from the same year as \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>: Andy Warhol\u2019s \u201cScreen Test\u201d for Duchamp. Warhol\u2019s \u201cScreen Tests\u201d were exercises in cruelty designed to grind down their subjects, who were asked to sit before a camera for minutes on end, with no direction for what do while they nervously waited for the film to run out. But unlike many of Warhol\u2019s other victims, Duchamp doesn\u2019t cave to the torture, because giving in would imply defeat. Across four soundless minutes, he smokes a cigar, he puts his finger to his lips, he nods. Occasionally, he smiles and stares into the lens. I won, Duchamp seems to say. Checkmate.<\/p>\n \n\tRead more of our Marcel Duchamp coverage\u00a0here and here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/reviews\/marcel-duchamp-moma-retrospective-review-1234780609\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5-Way-Portrait-of-Marcel-Duchamp_2000px.jpg?w=1024″] Artists are often secretive creatures, hesitant to disclose too much, and none more so than Marcel Duchamp, who spun slipperiness into an art form. But I think Duchamp may have given the game away when he made Genre Allegory (1943), one of the more than 300 works included in his Museum of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1874712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1874712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1874712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1874712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1874712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1874712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1874712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1918_To-Be-Looked-at-from-the-Other-Side-of-the-Glass-with-One-Eye-Close-to-for-Almost-an-Hour.jpg?w=400\")
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