Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
The Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/a>\u2019s major gallery devoted to Marcel Duchamp has always been a source of shock. Nestled at the end of the museum\u2019s north wing, it\u2019s a shrine for modern-art pilgrims seeking contact with a mysterious 20th century figure who helped to redefine what qualifies as art \u2014 which is to say, just about anything.<\/p>\n But visitors to the space today may be jolted by what it doesn\u2019t contain. <\/p>\n Gone is Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), the 1912 modernist take on the human body in motion that made Duchamp\u2019s reputation as the art world\u2019s bad boy. Conspicuously absent is one of the gallery\u2019s most notorious residents: Fountain, a seemingly ordinary white porcelain urinal whose entry into the visual lexicon has delighted or enraged art fans for decades.<\/p>\n Seventeen works by Duchamp are gone from this gallery alone \u2014 a total of 92 items from the PMA\u2019s permanent collection \u2014 and their absence in recent weeks has perplexed visitors.<\/p>\n But the disruption in the way the main Duchamp gallery has appeared for decades is temporary. The vanished works are on loan to the Museum of Modern Art, where they will join the first North American Duchamp retrospective in more than 50 years. The MOMA show<\/a> opens April 9, and in October, the Duchamp works return to Philadelphia, where the exhibition<\/a> runs for more than three months. <\/p>\n A related Duchamp retrospective organized by the Centre Pompidou will be on view from March to July 2027 at the Paris museum.<\/p>\n Losing that many works to MOMA meant leaving a major hole at the PMA, which, as holder of the largest collection of Duchamp materials anywhere, draws Duchampians from far and wide. And so Matthew Affron, who stewards the Duchamp Collection at the PMA, decided to turn back the clock. <\/p>\n Now and for at least the next several months, the Duchamp gallery will evoke the way the artist and others installed it in 1954, with some of the very same works.<\/p>\n Instead of being a single-artist collection, the new hanging presents Duchamp\u2019s work in conversation with those of his contemporaries \u2014 Picasso, Juan Gris, Piet Mondrian, Georges Braque, and others.<\/p>\n The installation spotlights Duchamp\u2019s relationship with the PMA, which was like no other. The museum was a particularly fruitful meeting of artist, curator, and collector; and that relationship paid dividends. Many of the works in the current temporary show, \u201cMarcel Duchamp, Curator,\u201d<\/a> were originally acquired by major collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg with help from Duchamp.<\/p>\n \u201cDuchamp had a sideline as a kind of independent broker or dealer in works of art and helped the Arensbergs acquire many works not only by himself, but by many other artists who he admired,\u201d said Affron, the museum\u2019s curator of modern art, \u201cso he had a hand in acquiring some of those works.\u201d<\/p>\n The show \u201cacknowledges his very important role in helping the Arensbergs, first of all, to put together their collection over 30 years and then helping to install the collection here once it came as a gift,\u201d said Affron.<\/p>\n Some Duchamp works haven\u2019t gone on the road, and could not have done so easily. <\/p>\n The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass (finished in 1923), still towers over the room, firmly anchored into the floor. (The replica of the work realized by artist Richard Hamilton will be part of the MOMA show.)<\/p>\n And Duchamp\u2019s most inscrutable work remains in its darkened lair. <\/p>\n After making his mark on the avant-garde, Duchamp turned his attention to chess and, as far as the world knew, spent the last 24 years of his life playing tournaments and engaging in chess theory. But after his death in 1968, it was revealed that Duchamp had been working in secret for two decades in his New York studio on his last major piece, which he intended for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.<\/p>\n A 25-year-old assistant curator from the PMA named Anne d\u2019Harnoncourt arranged for the work\u2019s acquisition and oversaw its installation, and the museum unveiled it in 1969.<\/p>\n The work \u2014 with the elaborate name of \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) \u2014 is more experienced than viewed. Visitors walk into a dark, empty space where they may notice a set of crude wood doors framed by a brick arch. It takes a closer look to realize that there are two peepholes in the doors. <\/p>\n Through the peepholes, beyond a break in a brick wall, is a sculptural tableaux: a nude woman lying in a verdant landscape, her legs spread, lifting a gas lamp in the air with one arm.<\/p>\n Arcadia or crime scene? Nothing explains it.<\/p>\n Artist Jasper Johns proclaimed it \u201cthe strangest work of art in any museum.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201csexual frankness\u201d of the piece, Affron says, concerned the museum at first.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they were thinking about how to launch it with the public, they didn\u2019t want a scandal and the [Duchamp] family also didn\u2019t want a scandal,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so what they decided to do was have a completely quiet opening. Now, it\u2019s said that attendance doubled at the museum in the first week, so it clearly made an impact.\u201d<\/p>\n At that same time, d\u2019Harnoncourt redid The Large Glass gallery, turning it into a monographic Marcel Duchamp gallery, \u201cand that\u2019s how it\u2019s been since then,\u201d Affron said.<\/p>\n For all of the startling firepower of \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s, some museum visitors walk past its niche without realizing it\u2019s there.<\/p>\n D\u2019Harnoncourt<\/a>, of course, went on to become the museum\u2019s director. After her death in 2008, the gallery was renamed \u2014 but what name? It\u2019s either the Anne d\u2019Harnoncourt Gallery or the Galerie Rrose S\u00e9lavy (\u201cRrose S\u00e9lavy\u201d being Duchamp\u2019s female alter ego), depending on where you are standing in relation to a lenticular gallery label flickering between one name or the other.<\/p>\n To this day \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s and The Large Glass have remained, like two great suns exerting gravitational pull on smaller works around them.<\/p>\n The current, temporary setting \u2014 putting Duchamp alongside his contemporaries, plus additional works by other Duchamp siblings in an adjacent gallery \u2014 emphasizes both what Duchamp had in common with other artists of the day, and how radical a departure The Large Glass was from their work.<\/p>\n \u201cDuchamp was aloof from that art world, but he was not completely separate from it,\u201d said Affron. Within it, \u201che carved a very special place.\u201d<\/p>\n There is innovation in the artists lining the walls of the d\u2019Harnoncourt\/Galerie Rrose S\u00e9lavy, in the works of Picasso, L\u00e9ger, Mondrian, and others. But, says Affron: \u201cThey were still part of a continuum, and they were thinking about some of the same questions that their predecessors were thinking about in terms of how you compose an image and how you get creative about the means of representing things.\u201d<\/p>\n The Large Glass, on the other hand, breaks two-dimensionality by using a transparent (glass) canvas. Duchamp deploys some conventional materials, but also startlingly nontraditional ones, like electricians\u2019 tape, a motif from an optician\u2019s chart, and dust.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t express his own hand. It doesn\u2019t express his own feelings,\u201d says Affron. \u201cHe took these hard materials which he associated with modern world machinery technology and he experimented, mixing them with paint to try to step away from that precedent into who knows what.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMarcel Duchamp, Curator\u201d and \u201cDuchamp Brothers and Sisters\u201d \u2014 works of Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Suzanne Duchamp \u2014 and The Large Glass and \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s are ongoing (Galleries 281, 282, and 283) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. philamuseum.org<\/a>, 215-763-8100.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min The Philadelphia Museum of Art\u2019s major gallery devoted to Marcel Duchamp has always…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69,191271],"class_list":{"0":"post-363672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-philadelphia-museum-of-art-moma-duchamp-show"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}