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After opening to fanfare at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, the long-awaited Marcel Duchamp retrospective lands at the Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/a> this weekend. <\/p>\n It\u2019s a homecoming of sorts for the rule-breaking, relentlessly inventive French modernist who has fascinated and puzzled art lovers for decades, as PMA boasts the largest collection of his delightfully eccentric works in the world<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cMarcel Duchamp,\u201d running through Jan. 31, 2027, marks the first major U.S. retrospective of his work in more than 50 years, with some 300 paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and ready-mades (a term Duchamp invented to describe manufactured objects, like a divisive urinal titled Fountain, that he bought, altered slightly, and put on display to rankle and humble the stuffy art world). <\/p>\n The Philadelphia iteration features exclusive artworks that can only be viewed at PMA, including the radical, abstract glass piece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923), also called The Large Glass, which Duchamp installed himself<\/a> in 1954.<\/p>\n The chronological show starts much like any other; at the beginning of the artist\u2019s career as he learned through experimenting with watercolors, etchings, and oil painting, like his groundbreaking cubist work from 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) \u2014 the PMA also presents a rare display of versions one and three. But the exhibition quickly transforms into a more eccentric display, which curators and fans alike dub \u201cDuchampian.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cChronology seems like a very simple, straightforward logic for an exhibition, but as with all things Duchampian, what seems normal actually becomes very strange,\u201d said exhibit co-organizer Michelle Kuo, MoMA\u2019s chief curator-at-large and publisher, at the Art Museum\u2019s press preview on Thursday.<\/p>\n Duchamp\u2019s many eras of reinvention fuel the Alice in Wonderland-like journey from traditional to unconventional as the viewer descends into his perplexing, cerebral artistic expressions that gleefully defy expectations. Subversive and playful, these works include the trippy film Anemic Cinema and machines that evoke optical illusions, like 1920\u2019s Rotary Glass Plates and 1925\u2019s Rotary Demisphere. Spirals appear frequently, like the moving projection above the exhibit\u2019s entryway inviting audiences inside a whimsical portal.<\/p>\n There\u2019s much rich cleverness to explore, like the artist\u2019s female alter ego, Rrose S\u00e9lavy, a punny name that in French sounds like, \u201cEros, c\u2019est la vie,\u201d loosely meaning \u201ceroticism, that\u2019s life.\u201d Several portraits feature Duchamp in drag as Rrose, photographed in the early 1920s by South Philadelphia-born surrealist Man Ray<\/a>.<\/p>\n The following gallery, though, is where patrons are \u201csupposed to start getting a little bit dizzy,\u201d said Matthew Affron, the Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern art at PMA, on the press tour. <\/p>\n Multiple urinals, snow shovels, bottle racks, and replicas of L.H.O.O.Q. (Duchamp\u2019s mustachioed rendition of Mona Lisa) underscore the power of repetition in the ready-made genre. His bo\u00eete-en-valise works are miniature versions of artworks he made previously, serving as portable museums<\/a> that he made as he moved to the U.S. to escape the war in France. <\/p>\n Museums, though, were not keen on his modernist inventions for much of his career, and that contentious relationship is also examined at PMA. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an interesting paradox that Marcel Duchamp didn\u2019t really like visiting museums. He was suspicious of their authority. He thought they gave too much weight to what is already in the past,\u201d said Affron. <\/p>\n \u201cAt the same time, he knew that he needed the institution of the museum to take care of the legacy of his work, so that future generations \u2014 us \u2014 could evaluate it.\u201d<\/p>\n Lo Drexelius takes a close look at Marcel Duchamp\u2019s \u201cNude Descending a Staircase\u201d on exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026.Read more<\/a>Jose F. Moreno \/ Staff Photographer<\/p>\n Maybe the most important thing to keep in mind for visitors is that the exhibit pathway, fittingly, requires a counterintuitive detour after the show-specific gift shop. <\/p>\n Philadelphia art fans who are familiar with the museum\u2019s Duchamp gallery in the North Wing already know this, but newcomers might need a bit more guidance to reach galleries 281-283, where two unmissable, immovable artworks are on view: The Large Glass and \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s, an assemblage that Duchamp created secretly toward the end of his life, when the art world believed he had retired from artmaking to pursue his passion for chess. <\/p>\n (Chess serves as another essential element here, as visitors can play casual games on the East Balcony during the exhibit run; in January, the museum will host a chess tournament with Philadelphia champion Jennifer Shahade<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s is in a small, dark, nondescript gallery where it hides behind large wooden doors under a brick arch, visible only through two peepholes. A naked woman lies on a bed of grass, legs splayed, holding a gas lamp in one hand as her head is obscured. Artist Jasper Johns once called it<\/a> \u201cthe strangest work of art in any museum.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s just one example of Duchamp\u2019s undeniable, groundbreaking weirdness \u2014 part of a body of work that curators tried to avoid over-interpreting for contemporary audiences. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not trying to unriddle all the riddles,\u201d Affron said.<\/p>\n