Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the readymade radically changed the definitions of art and the artist. His elevation of everyday, mass-produced objects like Fountain (1917), a urinal, or Bicycle Wheel (1913), to the status of artworks, challenged the importance of technical skill, originality and aesthetic beauty, paving the way for conceptual art. If you want to understand contemporary art, the first major North American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in over 50 years, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou, is now showing at MoMA in New York. Covering 6 decades, the exhibition traces Duchamp’s radical redefinition of art, from early paintings such as Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) to the invention of the readymade, with iconic works like The Large Glass with L.H.O.O.Q., which saw the artist alter the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee, blending humour and provocation in a challenge to artistic tradition. Until August 22.
Image credit: Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1950 (replica of 1917 original) Porcelain urinal, 30.5 × 38 × 45.7 cm. Courtesy of MOMA
