‘Marcel Duchamp’ Is a Blockbuster Retrospective of the Conceptual Maverick Who Made Art Modern

A half hour stroll up Fifth Avenue is all that separates the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, but more than that divides “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” at the Met and “Marcel Duchamp” at MoMA. The shows are bookends of Western Art — the High Renaissance “prince of painters” and the godfather of contemporary art. Fifty years after Duchamp’s last retrospective, he’s at the avant-garde’s bleeding edge.Duchamp and Pablo Picasso between them are owed credit — or blame — for much of what today goes by modern art. Holland Cotter, writing in the Times, reckons that Duchamp revolutionized “the entire art game and redefined what art is and what can be art.” Duchamp, though, is more fugitive than the ubiquitous Spaniard. Mr. Cotter writes that “Picasso is seen everywhere; Duchamp is hard to find.” This show has him framed and in focus. One of the curators of “Marcel Duchamp,” Michelle Kuo, declares that “More than any other modern artist, Duchamp challenged and transformed the very definition of an artwork.” He didn’t start off that way, though. Three of his siblings were also accomplished artists. The first part of the show discloses Duchamp as an accomplished painter, braiding the influence of Paul Cézanne with the harsh geometries of Cubism and the wild colors of Fauvism.Before Duchamp declared that a urinal could be art, “Portrait of the Artist’s Father” shows him in command of classical technique as well as the currents then- swirling across the Continent. “The Chess Game,” is an exposition of the pastime that was a lifelong obsession, set against a verdant green background that recalls Klimt’s late landscapes. The darker “Paradise” is a troubled excursion into Eden, a fantasy gone sour, haunted by Paul Gauguin.‘Multiple Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,’ Broadway Photo Shop, New York, 1917. Artists Rights Society via The Museum of Modern Art“Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was a milestone. In 1912, Duchamp submitted it to the Salon des Independents at Paris, only for it to be angrily rejected. It caused a sensation the next year at the Armory Show at New York City. Duchamp became a star. The piece is resonant with the millennia old tradition of the nude, as if the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” had a 20th century makeover.Marcel Duchamp, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),’ 1912. If Cubism was about static shapes, Duchamp was growing more interested in how to capture movement. “Bride” shows Duchamp taking notes from the Italian Futurists, who were captivated by dynamism, speed, technology, and violence. The bride here is a kind of machine, perhaps anticipating, albeit in analog fashion, the erotic possibilities of AI. By 1913, at just 25 or so, Duchamp had largely given up on painting, though he would live another five decades. Central to Duchamp’s fame are his “readymades,” which Duchamp hesitated to define but the Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme called an “an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.” The first of these was “Bicycle Wheel,” from 1913. The original has been lost, but later versions are on display here. In the same category is “Fountain,” from 1916 — the urinal. A 1919 parody of a pocket-size reproduction of the “Mona Lisa” features a goatee and mustache.That work’s title is “L.H.O.O.Q,” which if sounded out in French famously says “she has a hot ass.” Duchamp’s sense of humor is also evident in a full gallery of works undertaken by his alter ego, Mademoiselle Rrose Sélavy, who was photographed by Man Ray and became something of a Dadaist pin up. Her name is a pun on “Eros, c’est la, meaning “Sex, that’s life.” Here Duchamp was miles ahead of the curve on gender bending performance art. A surprisingly moving gallery is given over to “La boîte-en-valise,” or “Box in a Suitcase,” a series of miniature reproductions of Duchamp’s own artworks inspired by age old “cabinet of curiosities” and the notion of a “Surrealist box.” The boxes form a kind of portable museum that was sold via a subscription service. Duchamp, like many of the 20th century’s artists, was a refugee to America from Europe, a flight that gives suitcases a pathos. Marcel Duchamp, ‘To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour,’ 1918.The art historian Janis Mink writes that “it was Duchamp who responded most radically to the changes brought about in the art world by the industrial age. And yet Duchamp was the least spectacular of artists this century has produced to date.” Her monograph on him is subtitled “Art as Anti-Art.” To Duchamp we owe much of the contemporary abjuring of beauty in favor of “concepts.” It is a brilliant legacy, but also a baleful one.

‘Marcel Duchamp’ Is a Blockbuster Retrospective of the Conceptual Maverick Who Made Art Modern

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