A Duchamp Retrospective at MoMA Presents an Artist Who Challenged the Very Definition of Art

Between 1912 and 1914, Duchamp produced the Cubo-Futuristic The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, and two versions of a schematic, proto-Pop rendering of a machine used by confectioners to crush cocoa beans (The Chocolate Grinder); the latter would later appear as the central element in his magnum opus, The Large Glass.

Meanwhile, in 1913, Duchamp mounted the front wheel of a bicycle to a stool vertically so it could spin freely. He told Tompkins that he kept it around his studio as a “a pleasant gadget.” In 1914 it was joined by a bottle-drying rack purchased at a Parisian department store, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville.

With these objects,Duchamp crossed a Rubicon of art history, utterly changing the underlying assumptions about artistic practice. Now, anything could be art as long as the artist deemed it so. Duchamp took Braque’s and Picasso’s introduction of collage into painting to its logical conclusion, making concrete the leap from art to life.

Still, Duchamp didn’t fully appreciate what he’d done until a 1915 sojourn to New York, where he encountered a veritable Moloch of manufactured goods. This had the effect of clarifying the meaning of his “pleasant gadget.” In a letter to his sister Suzanne, Duchamp mentioned the bicycle wheel and the bottle rack, explaining that he’d also “bought some objects of similar taste” while in New York. “I will treat them as ‘readymade,’” he wrote. “I sign them and . . . then apply an English inscription.” He went on to cite one of his most famous works of this type, a snow shovel inscribed with “In advance of the broken arm,” and ended the letter by instructing Suzanne to sign the bottle rack back in Paris, “Après Marcel Duchamp.”

What followed was a string of Readymades, some of them altered or “assisted” by Duchamp. In one example, he scribbled a Van Dyke beard on a postcard of the Mona Lisa, then added underneath the image, “L.H.O.O.Q”—letters that, when sounded out in French, translate to “She’s got a hot ass.”

The most controversial Readymade of all, however, was a urinal turned upside-down titled Fountain, which Duchamp anonymously entered under the name R. Mutt to the inaugural exhibit of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. Though the rules committee stipulated that any piece would be accepted as long as the artist paid a $60 entrance fee, it refused to allow Fountain into the show area—prompting Duchamp to walk out with it. Fountain subsequently appeared in a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz on the cover of the Dada journal The Blind Man, in which Duchamp offered a spirited defense of R. Mutt’s intentions. “Whether Mr. Mutt . . . made the fountain or not has no importance,” he wrote. “He took an ordinary article of life . . . [and] created a new thought for that object.” He wryly added that the piece was a celebration of America, whose only true artworks were “her plumbing and her bridges.”

Duchamp bid a final adieu to painting with Tu m’ (1918), a friezelike summation of his ideas up to that point. Tu m’ floated the shadows of Readymades (like the bicycle wheel) across a surface covered in abstract and representational motifs: a procession of color swatches tapering toward a vanishing point, a pointing signboard hand, and a real tear in the canvas held together by safety pins with a bottle brush sticking out from it.

There were also references to 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14), in which Duchamp had substituted chance for rational measurement. For that work, he started by dropping three one-meter lengths of thread from a height of one meter onto a dark-blue canvas before gluing them down, then separating them into three equal strips sandwiched between pieces of glass. The result, a trio of undulating lines, served as templates for three irregularly edged rulers, or “stoppages,” cut out of wooden lath, which Duchamp depicted in Tu m’ next to diagrams made with them.

Duchamp began The Large Glass in 1915 in New York, working on it until 1923, when he returned to Paris. He continued to make frequent trips to New York until permanently settling there with the outbreak of World War II (he later became a U.S. citizen).

The Large Glass could be described as Duchamp’s attempt at formulating a new philosophy of visual thinking. Divided horizontally, it served as an assembly-line metaphor for sex with a Rube Goldberg–type contraption at its heart. The piece was a manifestation of ideas poured out in notes that Duchamp stored in a green box, which he later published as an editioned multiple formally called The Green Box (1934). A companion to The Large Glass, it decoded and obfuscated Duchamp’s intentions in equal measure.

Duchamp’s full title for the work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, spells out the yin and yang of amour, with the “bachelors” occupying the lower section and the “bride” the upper. The former reside in a kind of engine room of desire, with the aforementioned chocolate grinder (chocolate being known for its aphrodisiacal properties) positioned below an arc of schematic cones slipping into one another in a penetrative progression. The grinder is attached by booms to another mechanism—a sled with a paddle wheel for a propeller. The two, in turn, connect to nine “malic” molds representing the titular suitors, each from a typically masculine occupation at the time—policeman, cavalry officer, stationmaster, and so on.

Above them the bride floats serenely, an aggregation of cubistic shapes with one bit dangling down like a fallopian tube. Beside her is a cloudlike form occupied by three fluttering squares that Duchamp based on photos of a piece of gauze in an open window, swaying in the breeze. Duchamp called this part of the composition “The Milky Way,” which certainly evokes semen, though some have taken the image for a bridal gown being discarded.

On all of these motifs, Duchamp bestowed enigmatic labels—“Draft Pistons,” “Glider,” “Sieves,” “Oculist Witnesses”—that continue to confound to this day. So do his unorthodox methods of using glass in lieu of canvas and outlining figures in lead foil. Duchamp also employed dust that collected on the piece while it lay on his studio floor, permanently varnishing it onto sections of The Large Glass. He famously declared the work finished when it was cracked during shipping.

Duchamp achieved his first succés de scandale with Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912). The painting subversively disassembled a theme from classical art, shocking attendees at the 1913 Armory Show in New York and setting off a media firestorm that inadvertently underscored its import. The New York Times derided Nude as “an explosion in a shingle factory,” which perfectly describes its downward cascade of shim-like shapes. And a cartoon in the New York Evening Sun poking fun with the caption “Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)” was surprisingly faithful to Nude’s Einsteinian dynamics of form moving not only through space but through time.

Nude didn’t just offend parochial audiences adverse to modern art. In March 1912, Duchamp entered Nude into the Salon des Indépendants alongside the Cubist painters Albert Gleizes (and Jean Metzinger. Both detested Italian Futurism and considered Nude a Futurist parody of Cubism. They demanded the painting’s withdrawal from the exhibit, whereupon Duchamp bundled it into a taxi and took it home, put off from the idea of belonging to any sort of movement.

Meanwhile, Duchamp busied himself with other projects, most notably the creation of a female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, whose name is a pun on “Eros, c’est la vie.” Duchamp posed as Rrose in photos by a friend of his, the American-born photographer Man Ray, and associated her with several Readymades, the best known being Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? (1921), a birdcage with a thermometer and cuttlefish bone stuck into a jumble of marble “ice cubes.” Besides signing her name to other Readymades, Duchamp used her image for the label of a 1921 perfume-bottle Readymade dubbed Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (Beautiful Breath, Veil Water).

Like all of Duchamp’s works, Rrose Sélavy eludes interpretation while begging for it: She speaks to gender fluidity, but she could also be considered a synthesis of the bride and the bachelors from The Large Glass. Duchamp himself stated simply that having another identity seemed like a cool idea.

In 1923, Duchamp halted work on The Large Glass and abandoned his artistic practice to pursue his passion for playing chess. He supported himself by working in a library and serving as the buying agent for the collection of his West Coast patrons, Walter and Louise Arensberg. Duchamp had already signaled his weariness with art in Tu m’, whose title is often taken as a contraction for “Tu m’ennuies” (you bore me). Still, the finality of his decision to quit art was always more legend than fact.

Indeed, he continued to make objects, including Rotary Demi-Sphere (1925), a mechanized device for producing hypnotic optical effects, which followed a similar work, Rotary Glass Plates (1920). In 1935, he continued in this vein with his roto-reliefs—a series of discs decorated with images or a pattern that would become animated when spun on a record player—which he attempted to market as a form of home entertainment. He created exhibit installations for two seminal Surrealist shows (in 1938 and 1942) and consolidated his legacy with Boîte-en-valise (1935), a kind of retrospective in a briefcase containing miniaturized versions of his work.

Most important, he secretly labored on a three-dimensional elaboration of The Large Glass called Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage . . . (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas . . . ) (1946–68). Hidden in his studio until his death, Étant Donnés (the title is French for “given that”) comprised a diorama situated behind a rough wooden door with a peephole. Peering through it, one can spy a wall with a hole busted through it, and beyond that, a female nude sprawled spread-eagle on a bed of dried twigs, with one arm raising a gaslit lamp held in her hand. An idyllic landscape with a waterfall occupies the background.

Like The Large Glass, Étant Donnés presents a dissociative vision of sex, this time with intimations of rape and voyeurism contained inside a simulacrum of Renaissance perspective. It, too, emerged out of a note in The Green Box that read, “Given: 1° the waterfall 2° the lighting gas,” which became part of the work’s full title.

Étant Donnés, then, is a proposition about how allegory serves as connective tissue between viewer and artwork, and how determining meaning—which is always subjective—elevates the onlooker above the creator. “The artist himself doesn’t count,” Duchamp stated to Tompkins, speaking to what is essentially the conservative heart of Duchamp’s radical project. For in rejecting “retinal” painting, Duchamp was inveighing against the art-for-art’s-sake ideology that had led to modernism in the first place.

It’s no wonder that Picasso hated Duchamp with a passion, proclaiming, “He was wrong!” upon Duchamp’s death. Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course, as Duchamp’s revival of allegory persisted through Surrealism to the work of many contemporary painters.

Just as pertinently, Duchamp’s assertion that “the spectator completes the picture” is borne out whenever someone snaps a photo of an artwork with a phone camera and posts it online, erasing the distinction between the object and the attention economy it operates within.

Today, Duchamp’s views on art are taken as prophecy, yet his inscrutable vision also yielded one final irony: that while artists no longer count, Duchamp still does.