Marcel Duchamp

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. Duchamp’s radical subversions of artistic conventions include the painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) and the appropriation of readymade objects to make Bicycle Wheel (1913), Fountain (1917), and L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), among other iconoclastic works. Duchamp supplanted these first readymades, many of which were lost or destroyed, with fourteen precisely executed multiples published by gallerist Arturo Schwarz in 1964. The 2014 Gagosian exhibition presented these editioned works on the fiftieth anniversary of their American debut in the same building by Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, emphasizing their continued relevance.

The catalogue is fully illustrated and includes texts on each work. Essays include “Shaving the Mona Lisa” by Calvin Tomkins, author of The Bride and the Bachelors (1965), a book tracing Duchamp’s influence on modern and contemporary artists that Gagosian also published in revised and expanded form in 2014. Art historian Adina Kamien-Kazhdan contributed “Mirrorical Return: Marcel Duchamp’s Editioned Readymades,” a consideration of the creative relationship between Duchamp and Schwarz and the fabrication of the editions.