Marcel Duchamp's Controversial "Nude"

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) became one of the best known painted images of the twentieth century when it developed into a major focal point for the hilarity and outrage that surrounded the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art. On view in New York, in February and March, the exhibition--which is better known as the Armory Show, after its location--was presented by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS) and assembled chiefly by two of its members, Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn, who went to Europe to select the works. When the show opened it proved to be one of the wonders of the age, and a defining moment in the history of American art. The American public, and even the members of the AAPS, had never seen anything like these works, which ranged from Van Gogh and Gauguin to Picasso and Brancusi. Duchamp's painting, with its seemingly provocative title and abstraction at a level seldom seen before by its audience, was greeted with shouts of laughter and a leavening of disgust. The painting was certainly very radical compared with most of the American works displayed at the Armory, but it was a relatively tame exercise and did not really compare with the vision of some of the other painters. Gradually, however, the fame of the piece and changes in taste in art have made it an image that is not difficult for most people to appreciate. The painting's greatest legacy resides in its position in the foreground of the arrival of

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s had suggested Duchamp might change. And it has long been open to speculation whether Duchamp did, in fact, have some mischievous intention in his selection. For, as Tomkins remarks, this is not a great painting and had it been called "something more prosaic--Study in Movement, say, or Composition #2--there would probably have been no furor at all" (79-80). But the furor caused by the Armory Show itself would not have been any less even if Duchamp's painting had not become the focus of so much attention. The deliberations of the AAPS regarding the show are mostly lost. But it is clear that Davies and Kuhn took over and began expanding the show at an incredible rate. What had originally been intended as an exhibition of what was best in the work of the AAPS artists and other Americans with a showing of new work from Europe became something much broader under their guidance. The AAPS included two basic factions, the Realists who were led by Robert Henri and included such emerging luminaries as John Sloan and George Bellows, and the "more radical group" that included Maurice Prendergast, the only true American post-Impressionist, William Glackens, and Davies, the somewhat eccentric Symbolist (Brown, 235). The radical sectio

Category: Arts - M