The essential Duchamp

Ten years after 'Anemic cinema', Duchamp had a series of 12 designs printed on both sides of six cardboard disks. He then packaged the disks like a commercial product and introduced them to the public at a rented booth in the annual fair of the Association of French Inventors and Manufacturers. With these optical gadgets, he deliberately crossed the line separating fine art from industrial culture.

The nude figure is here portrayed as a mobile, mechanised form. To achieve this effect, Duchamp combined cubist abstraction, modern mathematical concepts of geometric space, and ideas for representing movement borrowed from scientific photography. Duchamp submitted 'Nude descending a staircase (no 2)' to the Salon des Indépendants, an important annual exhibition of modern art in Paris, in the spring of 1912. The hanging committee, which was led by some of his fellow cubists, asked Duchamp to make some changes to the work. Perhaps they objected to the representation of dynamic movement. It may also be that the subject of a nude walking down stairs or Duchamp’s writing the title in big block letters at the bottom of the canvas seemed preposterous. Duchamp withdrew the work. Ultimately, 'Nude descending a staircase (no 2)' became a success by scandal at the Armory Show in New York the following year.

Duchamp had this formal portrait taken at a Munich photographic studio and then sent off to Paris for publication in Guillaume Apollinaire’s essay collection 'The cubist painters' (1912), one of the first books to be published on the topic of cubism.

The components of 'Bicycle wheel', the first readymade, were an ordinary wheel, the two-bladed fork that normally attaches the wheel to the bicycle’s frame, and a four-legged white stool upon which Duchamp mounted both the wheel and fork. Duchamp did not make 'Bicycle wheel' as a work of art; at the time, its purpose was to divert his mind like a plaything. However, 'Bicycle wheel' connects to motifs of rotation in many other works. The original was lost when Duchamp left Paris in 1915. He reconstituted it in 1916 as the first readymade replica, and other versions followed over the years.