Five Essential Books About Marcel Duchamp

Few artists have sparked more critical response than Marcel Duchamp—the subject of a big MoMA retrospective on view April 12 through August 22. Even Picasso’s legacy finds in the Frenchman’s conceptual practice a divergent and influential foil. While Cubism and collage revolutionized pictorial space and its aesthetic offshoots, Duchamp upended the very premise of aesthetics. In his wake, objects and images appear no longer as ends unto themselves, but rather vectors of unresolved questions.