MoMA Delivers with First American Marcel Duchamp Retrospective in 50 Years
The blockbuster exhibition puts an exclamation point on the artist’s permanent revolutionary status
On Sunday, the Museum of Modern Art opened “Marcel Duchamp,” a blockbuster exhibition that spans the artist’s entire career, from the pen-and-ink drawings that he made as a teenager to polaroids of his final artwork, the installation piece Étant donnés, which the artist worked on for two decades leading up to his death in 1969.
One of the truly special things about “Marcel Duchamp” is how well it gives a refresher on how shocking Duchamp was when he first came on the scene. If you want to begin to understand this, take a look at Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 within its series of three. Note that Duchamp started the series the year before the Titanic sank. Take a look at photos of how people dressed at the time, and realize that this now established Great Work of Art launched into that world.
Duchamp, who was born in Normandy in 1887, and was gifted with art-focused siblings who encouraged his talent, broke the news to the world that anything can be art. We have now been living with this concept for over a century. Why was this idea once and still infuriating to many? Because in the traditional sense of looking at paintings, the viewer’s relationship demands proof via painterly skill beyond beauty that the trade in on their time for looking at the art is that the person who did it is endless miles better at painting than they will ever be. Saying that anything is art denies this requirement, leaving only audacity and self-expression holding the artist to their pedestal. Consider that this conversation still arouses emotion today, and imagine what it sounded like a century ago when the dispute began.
“Duchamp’s influence is incalculable, and his myriad contributions have established him as one of the most important figures in modern culture,” says MoMA’s Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, Michelle Kuo.
“Marcel Duchamp” is arranged in chronological order. In the first room, the young painter rapidly cycles through what he learns from the prior generation of artists. He leans into multidimensional thinking in 1911’s Portrait of Chess Players, and it makes sense that a brilliant chess player like Duchamp would become impatient with a mere trio of dimensions. The exhibition includes all three versions of Nude Descending a Staircase, the painting that made Duchamp the enfant terrible of the landmark 1913 Armory Show, on the same wall in Room 2. There are fewer paintings in the third room, and eventually none by Duchamp, because he was busy stretching mediums, including the “readymades” that he started producing a few years later.
Versions of the incendiary urinal titled Fountain are in “Marcel Duchamp,” of course, although the original 1917 version of the “readymade” was appropriately lost. Overlooked behind the urinal is the fact that the man could paint. His line, his shading and his attention to composition make it clear that abstraction was a choice, but that is not the point here. A special treat: some of the pieces designed to be seen in motion will periodically be in motion, despite their age.
It’s extraordinary to observe how many waves of 20th century art Marcel Duchamp surfed and mastered. He was dadaist, cubist, surrealist, and a plethora of other art nouns rolled into one, and he excelled at all. He prefigured everything. Witness the Man Ray portrait of Duchamp as his female alter ego, Rrose Ssélevy. That’s right: before “genderbending” was a word, before Cindy Sherman, Duchamp created a female version of himself, whom he dressed up as for photographs and credited art to, or referenced in objets such as the doll-sized French doors known as Fresh Widow, marked “COPYRIGHT ROSE SELEVY 1922.”
The room devoted to Duchamp’s valise collections of mini-versions of his work is poignant, conceived as they were in the shadow of the encroaching WWII. How many accepted themselves as blessed to get out of Europe with their lives, and with the scope of a life boiled, edited, stripped away to one suitcase? Despite the darkness, it’s fun to see the efforts that he put into the miniaturization of his life’s work, right down to the tiny papier-mâché version of Fountain.
While the standard line on Duchamp’s later years is that he was less productive, the final rooms display just how relevant to the culture he remained as he curated his legacy. Andy Warhol made a screen test of him, which runs on a wall near the end of the galleries, and behind that wall is the photographic evidence of Duchamp’s painstaking work on Étant donnés.
“Marcel Duchamp” owes a debt to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for sharing a generous portion of their vast Duchamp holdings. The show will cross New Jersey in October to open in Philadelphia, where it will be near the two significant works that cannot leave Philadelphia: the fragile The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) and Étant donnés.
In a great retrospective, we glance over our shoulder to the entry upon leaving with the sense that we have been on a journey with the artist and that an entire world has passed. That sense is present in abundance with “Marcel Duchamp.”
“Marcel Duchamp” is on view a the Museum of Modern Art in New York City until August 22, 2026.
