More than any of his early modernist contemporaries, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) has had a huge impact on art throughout the last century into our own. He pioneered a cerebral, ironic practice whose DNA is still apparent in works like Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian: a banana duct-taped to the wall which became a sensation when it sold at the 2019 Basel Art fair for $120,000 before fetching $6.2 million at auction five years later.
Whether this was a good thing or a bad one, Duchamp would have likely nodded his approval. He uniquely understood how art operates within culture—i.e., not as a function of individual expression but rather as a phenomenological exchange between art, viewer and society.
“Art is a habit-forming drug,” he told writer Calvin Tompkins in a wide-ranging 1965 New Yorker profile. “That’s all it is…. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.” For Duchamp, the “onlooker is as important as the artist.”
Duchamp was agnostic about the efficacy of art from early on. Starting out as a painter, he turned against the medium for being “retinal”—i.e., too pleasing to the eye at the expense of ideas. This led to a string of revolutionary innovations that broke down various barriers: Between artistic and factory-produced objects (through his “Readymades” series); male and female (through his performative persona, Rrose Sélavy); and aesthetics and empiricism (though his 3 Standard Stoppages and optical experiments like his Rotary Glass Plates). These paradigm-shattering achievements eventually echoed through Pop, Performance and Conceptual Art in the ensuing decades.
Duchamp’s foundational role in the development of 20th-century art is now the subject of a MoMA retrospective representing the first comprehensive look at the artist in North America in more than 50 years. Co-organized with the Philadelphia Museum with help from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the show will be on view at MoMA until August 22, 2026, introducing Duchamp to 21st-century audiences, while tracing a career that, in terms of the artist’s familial background in any case, seemed pre-ordained. Below, ARTnews revisits Duchamp’s life, art, and aesthetic vision through some of his best-known works.
Read more of our Marcel Duchamp coverage here.
