ory Show). They and a circle of their friends, including the painter Fernand LTger, were fascinated by Cubism and developed their own variant which was referred to as "reasonable" Cubism. But Duchamp, perhaps under the influence of his friend Francis Picabia, tended to go his own way somewhat. Pictures from this era show him developing an interest in the depiction of movement. Sad Young Man on a Train (1911), for example, shows Duchamp's venture into repetitive forms in which the barely discernible figure of the man recedes as if reflected in a self-replicating series of mirror images. In some ways his ideas resembled those of the futurists but since the first Futurist exhibition did not take place in Paris until these pictures had already been painted Duchamp seems to have developed the ideas on his own. He was, however, influenced, as he later recalled, by the experimental time-lapse photographs of Etienne-Jules Marey and the serial photographs of natural motion made by Eadweard Muybridge. But it is not difficult to see how the discussions of 'simultaneity' among his Cubist circle would have given him the notion.
Duchamp applied the "pseudo-scientific term 'elementary parallelism'" to describe the use of "repeated vertical forms across the surface of canvas" (Ades, Cox & Hopkins, 44). And he continued his experiments with the idea in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1 (1911), a painting that falls somewhere between the Sad Young Man and the second Nude in terms of its depiction of movement. Whatever indications of movement there are in the first painting are small, as can be seen in contrasting it with the first Nude where the act of walking down the stairs is strongly, of stiffly, indicated--as if a mannequin had been positioned in this fashion. But with the famous Nude the amount of action, the apparent movement of all the limbs in succession, creates a flurry of lines. As Duchamp said of it, "my aim was a static repr...