Do We Have Duchamp All Wrong? A Brilliant MoMA Retrospective Reintroduces One of Modernism’s Greats

Artists are often secretive creatures, hesitant to disclose too much, and none more so than Marcel Duchamp, who spun slipperiness into an art form. But I think Duchamp may have given the game away when he made Genre Allegory (1943), one of the more than 300 works included in his Museum of Modern Art retrospective opening this Sunday. Produced as a commission for an “Americana” issue of Vogue, it’s a star-studded map of the United States turned sideways. Duchamp constructed the nation out of gauze, leaving it puckered and stained, as though it were a patch set atop a festering wound.

A couple things are worth remembering here: first, that Duchamp, a Frenchman by birth, relocated to the US the year before he made Genre Allegory, having fled the Vichy regime; and second, that the US was one of many nations embroiled in World War II, whose bloodshed would continue for two more years after the piece was made. With all that in consideration, Genre Allegory comes off as pretty unpatriotic. No surprise Vogue spiked the commission.

Genre Allegory seems like a clear protest from an artist whose name does not summon impassioned activism. That’s because in 101-level art history courses, Duchamp is still taught as the man who invented the readymade, seizing objects that were already out there in the world—urinals and bottle racks, shovels and bicycle wheels—and re-presenting them as sculptures of his own. (Some say the credit really belongs to his colleague Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who’s nowhere near as famous.)

But what if all these works were more than just conceptual gambits? What if we have Duchamp all wrong? Prior to entering the MoMA retrospective, I wouldn’t have called Duchamp a political artist. Now, I wonder if I understood him at all. I take that as a sign that this show is a great one.

Its curators—Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo of MoMA and Matthew Affron of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the exhibition heads next—do not so much upend Duchamp’s oeuvre as reintroduce it. More than 50 years ago, in 1973, these same institutions organized the last major Duchamp retrospective held in the US. That 300-work show built on Walter Hopps’s legendary exhibition for the Pasadena Art Museum—held in 1963, at a time when Duchamp was still relatively obscure—and solidified the artist’s place in the canon.

With Duchamp firmly recognized as a forerunner to everyone from Jasper Johns to Cameron Rowland, MoMA has now staged another retrospective of roughly the same scale. Methodically moving from the start of Duchamp’s career in the early 1900s to its end in the late 1960s, the curators take a just-the-facts approach, refusing to impose a narrative arc over this elusive artist. (The show’s catalog is similar: in lieu of the expected set of essays from critics and historians is a 48-page timeline by Alexandra Drexelius, an assistant who worked on the show, followed by a lengthy treatise from the curators on institutionalizing Duchamp, who expressed so little regard for museums that he once claimed he avoided the Louvre for more than 20 years.)

The show is less notable for its thesis—it doesn’t really have one—than for its arrival at exactly the right moment. Ours is a time when artists are responding to a chaotic world with spare, sleek artworks that are protest-minded, even if they don’t always seem that way. These are works that resist by refusing to reveal all, just as Duchamp’s work once did; they’re often termed “quiet,” a word that could also be applied to much of Duchamp’s art. How appropriate, then, that MoMA’s show arrives about a month before Duchamp’s inclusion in the main exhibition of Venice Biennale, titled “In Minor Keys.”

Ironically, MoMA’s Duchamp retrospective is a decidedly major-key affair, filling the entire sixth floor with tantalizing deep cuts and world-famous masterpieces alike. Duchamp nerds—there are many of them—will find much to admire in this chronological presentation. For example: the original version of Fountain, Duchamp’s 1917 urinal sculpture, is not included in an early gallery devoted to his beloved readymades, made in the years before and during World War I. It’s an admirable curatorial flourish, because real Duchampheads know the first Fountain was lost. (Fear not: copies from 1950, 1963, and 1964 are on hand in the later galleries, which contend with how Duchamp demolished the dichotomy between original and replica.)

Duchamp-curious initiates in wait will also delight in this show. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the painting that Duchamp famously withdrew from an anti-Salon in Paris and then exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, is visiting MoMA from the Philadelphia Museum, which loaned the painting to this institution for the first time since 1973. Nude Descending a Staircase ostensibly depicts a figure walking down a flight of stairs, as its title suggests, but the mannequin-like person is abstracted beyond recognition. The painting remains thrilling.

Neither of these works has ever struck me as a protest, though you could make the case that Duchamp’s removal of Nude Descending a Staircase from the 1912 Salon des Indépendants counts as one. (Duchamp pulled the work because the exhibition’s organizers objected both to the title and the content of the picture.) But the MoMA retrospective made me recall that both were expressions of non-compliance in their time. If one now expects to see works like Fountain and Nude Descending a Staircase in museum galleries, it wasn’t always that way.

Duchamp’s artworks resisted performing as expected, bucking tradition and function. There are hat racks strung from the ceiling, looking more like crabs than usable household furniture, and there are miniature windows whose panes have been painted over in black, making it impossible to peer through them. There are artworks that cannot be fully seen: for example, With Hidden Noise (1916) is a mass of twine sandwiched between two steel plates containing an “unknown object,” as the checklist describes it. (Duchamp himself didn’t know what it was: he let his patron Walter Arensberg decide which mysterious item to place in there.) And there are songs that cannot be fully heard, as in Musical Erratum (1913), Duchamp’s score for a composition unplayable on any known instrument.

You don’t always get what you want in Duchamp’s art, which is exactly the point. His approach was all about flouting expectations and fighting the system. He even went against himself at times. “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste,” he once said.

That much is obvious from the start of the MoMA exhibition, which suggests that Duchamp could have been a great painter, had he not zagged in a different direction. The earliest paintings on view, produced while Duchamp was still a teenager, are pleasant, innocuous landscapes dominated by chunky strokes of green—Post-Impressionism lite. But by 1910, when Duchamp was in his 20s, his paintings grew stranger, and his figures started to denature. In Yvonne and Magdeleine Torn in Tatters (1911), a painting of at least two women, it’s tough to tell whose nose belongs to which face.

In the next gallery, color starts to drain away from Duchamp’s paintings until all that’s left are greys and blacks. This is the palette of the machine-made, that which is inhuman, and Duchamp would drive the point home in Coffee Mill (1911), a tiny painting of a grinder that expels a cascade of brown beans. With its arcing arrow and its images of the gears in motion, it looks more like a diagram in a manual than a painting fit for a gallery.

Duchamp’s ensuing readymades, many of them iconic works of the Dada movement of the 1910s, continued to vex and befuddle. He sometimes signed them under aliases such as Rrose Sélavy—not a real woman, albeit one whose identity Duchamp sometimes assumed for his photographic self-portraits. Under her name, he even made a faux stock company that came with real bonds. The bonds picture the market as a sham, a game to be played with élan and wit, just as Duchamp did when he took up chess, one of his main obsessions.

He also critiqued the art market, whose incessant desire for profit he undermined by copying his own readymades, thus degrading the value of the originals. Alongside those copies, he made tiny replicas that he placed in little suitcases that he termed “portable museums,” the first of which was produced between 1935 and 1936. Known as “Boîtes-en-valises,” these works were meant as “a way of economizing a bit,” as Duchamp once said. (In typical Duchamp fashion, the word “economizing” does a lot of work, referring both to the diminutive size of the objects held within his valises and the capital required to obtain one of them.) MoMA wisely gives these sets a spacious gallery of their own.

The “Boîte-en-valise” gallery is the MoMA show’s ecstatic high point, and the exhibition never quite recovers from it. The later galleries are spent building up to Duchamp’s final work, Étant donnés (1966), an assemblage in which a peephole in a shut door reveals a nude woman laying on a hill. But the work is not here—it’s permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum—and its absence is deeply felt.

MoMA does, however, have another great work from the same year as Étant donnés: Andy Warhol’s “Screen Test” for Duchamp. Warhol’s “Screen Tests” were exercises in cruelty designed to grind down their subjects, who were asked to sit before a camera for minutes on end, with no direction for what do while they nervously waited for the film to run out. But unlike many of Warhol’s other victims, Duchamp doesn’t cave to the torture, because giving in would imply defeat. Across four soundless minutes, he smokes a cigar, he puts his finger to his lips, he nods. Occasionally, he smiles and stares into the lens. I won, Duchamp seems to say. Checkmate.