Duchamp Takes New York

Publishing to coincide with a major MoMA Retrospective, this book revisits the artist who upended modern art, and the city that made it possible. Artist, anti-artist, joker, trickster, shape-shifter: Marcel Duchamp broke with tradition and pushed the avant-garde decisively forward.When his work exploded like an art bomb in New York in the 1910s, American art was still mired in the nineteenth century.Duchamp, bored with tradition, reimagined what art could be, what it was for, and how it might be made-hanging a snow shovel from the ceiling, inverting a urinal, “painting” with dust and bits of string between panes of glass, and reducing his entire oeuvre into a briefcase of miniatures.Duchamp Takes New York traces this bold, playful energy, showing how the city inspired and staged his avant-garde experiments. Duchamp's offhand gestures reshaped the course of twentieth-century American art, laying the groundwork for nearly every major movement that followed. And then, at the height of his