Are We Too Reverent of Marcel Duchamp?
An Artnet review (published April 8, 2026) assesses the Museum of Modern Art’s major Marcel Duchamp exhibition and questions whether the presentation is overly reverential. The show is organized by Matthew Affron, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin, and is co-organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns key Duchamp works including The Large Glass (1915–23) and Étant donnés (1946–66), both too fragile to travel. It traces Duchamp’s career from early works to an Andy Warhol “Screen Test” filmed when Duchamp was 78, two years before his death in 1968, and revisits his 1913 Armory Show scandal with Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and his 1917 Fountain submitted under the alias “R. Mutt.” The article also notes Duchamp’s French birth in 1887 and his early ties to Cubism, including references to Picasso, Braque, and Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 book The Cubist Painters.
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