From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s comprehensive retrospective “Marcel Duchamp” presents the artist’s work in a chronological timeline.
“Chronology seems like a very simple, straightforward logic for an exhibition,” said co-curator Michelle Kuo, of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “But as with all things Duchampian, what seems normal actually becomes very strange.”
The exhibition starts with sketches Duchamp made of his sisters when he was a teenager, then proceeds through his impressionist and Cubist phases, his conceptual Readymades and ends with a screentest the 79-year-old artist shot for Andy Warhol in 1966.
The exhibit’s 300 objects are meticulously presented on the timeline. Rather than simplifying the narrative of the artist’s life, the arrangement highlights Duchamp’s complexity: His works looped backward and echoed forward over his lifetime.
