Readymades, replicas, reiterations: MoMA show explores Marcel Duchamp the inventor

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are mounting the first major US survey of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) in 53 years, revisiting the institutions that hosted the landmark 1973 exhibition curated by Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine. Co-curator Ann Temkin, working with MoMA’s Michelle Kuo and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Matthew Affron, said development began in the late 2010s but was delayed by the pandemic, a pause she called an “appropriate Duchampian delay.” The exhibition uses strict chronology to emphasize Duchamp’s remakes, replicas, and lost works, showing objects only when they were physically made rather than substituting later versions for earlier readymades. It includes around 300 works such as Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), Fountain (1917)—presented as unquestionably by Duchamp—and Étant donnés (1946–66).

Read the full article at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events