null

Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) Postcard



SKU:
400100284452
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) Postcard
  • Philadelphia Museum of Art Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) Postcard
$1.50
Frequently bought together:

Description

Newsworthy in it's day, it is never too late to share this iconic work with friends and family across the globe!

About the Work:

This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited in New York in February 1913 at the historic Armory Show of contemporary art, where perplexed Americans saw it as representing all the tricks they felt European artists were playing at their expense. The picture's outrageousness surely lay in its seemingly mechanical portrayal of a subject at once so sensual and time-honored. The Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed from its remarkable aggregation of avant-garde concerns: the birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the Futurists' depiction of movement; the chromatography of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins; and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers. The painting was bought directly from the Armory Show for three hundred dollars by a San Francisco dealer. Marcel Duchamp's great collector-friend Walter Arensberg was able to buy the work in 1927, eleven years after Duchamp had obligingly made him a hand-colored, actual-size photographic copy. Today both the copy and the original, together with a preparatory study, are owned by the Museum.

— Ann Temkin, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 307.

  • Museum exclusive
  •  4" x 6"
  • Paper 110 lb card stock thickness
  • Made in the USA
View AllClose