I have been struggling for the right metaphor to explain the significance of MoMA’s new retrospective on the artistic career of Marcel Duchamp. As almost everyone knows, Duchamp is the guy who took a urinal, turned it on its side, signed it, and called it art. With that work and others—including dozens of other readymades—he inverted art from its focus on skill, technique, and visual impact to an emphasis on ideas and even acts. Before Duchamp, works of art were made by artists. Afterward, art was whatever an artist made.

Without Duchamp, we would probably not ask what a work of art means. (Yes, he’s to blame for that.) Nor would we sit through the many varieties of performance art. And we wouldn’t have the gnostic objects that so often clutter galleries, ranging from Piero Manzoni’s cans of his own excrement to the Earth Rooms of Walter De Maria to Ana Mendieta’s silhouettes. We wouldn’t even have the many varieties of painters who sought to de-skill their practice, like Andy Warhol, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, or Gerhard Richter, to name only a few.

Duchamp’s revolutionary works were created 50 years before he died in 1968. But it wasn’t until after the 1973 retrospective of his work at MoMA that conceptual art came to the forefront of contemporary art. And so, another half-century later, MoMA is reintroducing Duchamp to a generation that already knows him—even if they don’t know that they know him. That, finally, brings me to the right metaphor: MoMA’s new show is a bit like if Robert Johnson, the legendary guitarist and bluesman whose music would become the foundation of rock and roll, were reincarnated for a few nights to let us see what all the fuss was about.

Curators Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo from MoMA, and Matthew Affron from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, made it clear that they had a distinct strategy for presenting Duchamp to a new generation. They wanted to strip away the myths surrounding the mythmaking artist and treat their subject like any other, with a chronological explication of his career through the objects he made. That may seem, as they admit in the catalogue, very “un-Duchampian.” And yet, for an artist whose impact was mostly about ideas and posturing, it’s refreshing to focus on the actual works of art. Or, as Temkin said in the press preview, they wanted to “show the goods.”

Indeed, one of the central paradoxes of Duchamp’s career is that his influence has always outweighed our familiarity with his work. This is partly because the bulk of his art is locked up in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and you have to go there to receive a grounding in what Duchamp produced. That’s not a slam on the PMA; Duchamp’s major works are on display, but there is a mountain of other work in storage that isn’t painting or sculpture, but rather film, drawings, photography, and other printed matter.

Then there’s the issue of the readymades. Most of the original objects—the very ones Duchamp used to make his radical declaration that art is whatever artists say it is—are lost. No matter. Central to his idea was that he could re-create those objects not as facsimiles, but as sufficient works in their own right. So even though the original urinal and bottle rack are long gone, it doesn’t make the later examples of the urinal and bottle rack lesser works of art. That led the curators to make an important decision: Since they were presenting Duchamp’s career chronologically, they chose to show the borrowed extant readymades in galleries devoted to the moment when those readymades were, well, made.

Photo: Jonathan Dorado/Courtesy of MoMA

For instance, while the original 1917 Fountain is gone, Duchamp created different versions of the urinal for exhibitions in the 1950s and ’60s. Making the subtle but important statement that Duchamp didn’t merely make a fetish of the original object, the curators included those versions in the galleries devoted to the corresponding later periods, rather than to the “original” 1917-era works.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The MoMA show is highly crafted with a didactic purpose. You can breeze through and catch the highlights, which will still take you a good 45 minutes. Or you can let it guide you along the whole way. The curators won’t mind if you come back a few times to take it in digestible chunks. They just want you to get their point.

Duchamp came from a family of artists. His grandfather was a ship broker who made enough money to retire and devote himself to painting and printmaking. Marcel was one of four grandchildren who became artists, along with his brothers Gaston and Raymond—who abandoned legal and medical studies to pursue art careers—and his sister Suzanne.

Even though Duchamp would later disavow his own skill as a painter, the show opens with two rooms of his early paintings and drawings. Heavily influenced by fauvism and cubism, the paintings are good, and lead up to his famous Nude Descending a Staircase and the later cubist images that begin to play with the idea of the bride. The paintings really get interesting when we start to see Duchamp’s fixation on a chocolate grinder; there’s a whole wall of these paintings depicting the same object, though the colors and textures vary. The last of the paintings are based on Duchamp’s “stoppages,” or lengths of thread that he dropped to create the abstract lines used in MoMA’s own Network of Stoppages, from 1914.

Photo: Jonathan Dorado/Courtesy of MoMA

The next gallery is where we really get to the “goods”—it’s filled with vitrines containing many of the most important readymades, including the Monte Carlo Bonds, Apolinère Enameled, the Fresh Widow, and a blacked-out window that Duchamp had fabricated. The bombshell work here is L.H.O.O.Q. , from 1919, a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a Vandyke beard penciled on her face and the title below—which says “she has a hot ass” in French if you say each letter by name.

The famous large glass titled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, from 1915-23, would’ve been installed here if it could be moved from Philadelphia. But a bit later, we see Richard Hamilton’s re-creation of the large glass from the 1960s, which shows what the masterpiece’s impact might have been without the damage that left the thick glass panels crazed. (Duchamp decided to go with the flow and declare the cracks part of the work.)

The show skips through a gallery of works by Duchamp’s alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, which combine mechanically spinning discs and wordplay. Then comes the breathtaking assemblage of the artist’s less-recognized but hugely important La Boîte-en-valise—essentially a traveling, self-produced retrospective of his career in the form of an editioned work. Centering the show on this seemingly minor piece in Duchamp’s oeuvre is a masterstroke, framing everything that makes the artist both elusive and a lasting influence. After that, we get into the rooms that show later editions of the readymades and the preparations for Duchamp’s last work, the disturbing and equally immovable Étant donnés, from 1946-66.

A new wave of Duchamp appreciation among museum-goers should also spark new interest from the next generation of collectors. Gagosian opens a show of readymades on April 25, two days after Phillips is offering 100 editioned works by Duchamp in a sale curated by Francis Naumann. That one includes an example of La Boîte-en-valise estimated at $350,000; other Boîtes have sold for as much as $2 million and nearly $3 million. That’s not bad for a guy who pretended to have given up on making art.

While in Minneapolis, I learned that the city has embarked on a three-year, $250,000 annual deal with the Michelin Guide to have its restaurants rated by inspectors, with the hope of getting some starred restaurants on that side of the Mississippi River by next year. Candidates for the honor include Bûcheron—a French-inspired, farm-fresh, husband-and-wife restaurant where the Wallpowers ate on our first night, and which has already won a James Beard Award—and Owamni, a restaurant of Indigenous food that is given full white-tablecloth treatment, where I’ve previously eaten.

We also had excellent meals at two Asian-inspired places: Hai Hai, a celebration of Southeast Asian street food, and Diane’s Place, where Diane Moua expresses her Hmong heritage with French technique and her long experience as a star pastry chef. Diane’s is so hard to get into, we had to eat there at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. But the meal was well worth getting up for.

Between the restaurants and family events, we had no time to stop by Minneapolis’s excellent Institute of Art or the Walker. But I will be back in late June, when I hope to get to see the great German modernism show at the MIA. And for those of you in the Inner Circle, I’ll be back here tomorrow. (Sign up to join the festivities.)

Until then,
M