Marcel Duchamp's Secret Masterpiece - The Daily Beast

Rachel Wolff

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Marcel Duchamp's Secret Masterpiece - The Daily Beast

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: agupewyz
• Nombre de lectures: 87
• Langue: Français

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9/21/09 8:37 PM

Marcel Duchamp's Secret Masterpiece - The Daily Beast

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-28/marcel-duchamps-secret-masterpiece/p/

For two decades, Marcel Duchamp fooled the world into thinking he had retired, while quietly creating

his last great work. Rachel Wolff on the multiple love affairs that inspired it.

Tucked away in a dark nook of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary wing lies one of the most

confounding works of art of all time. It is perverse, bizarre, funny, poignant, sad, scary, revealing, literal, and symbolic all at

once. And as one might expect, photographs have never done it justice.

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Marcel Duchamp’s

Étant donnés

is radically different from the 20th-century provocateur’s previous work (urinal-as-sculpture, a

bicycle wheel fastened to the top of a stool,

Nude Descending a Staircase

). The piece begins with a wooden barn door pierced

with two inconspicuous peepholes. For the uninformed or uncurious, that’s where it ends (it’s not hard to imagine the inner

dialogue: “It’s just a door? How ‘Duchampian’”).

Marcel Duchamp's Secret Masterpiece

by

Rachel Wolff

August 28, 2009 | 12:10am