Marcel Duchamp at MoMA: Five Artists Trace a Legacy That Still Shapes Contemporary Art
What does Marcel Duchamp leave behind for artists working now? At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a new retrospective opening this weekend and on view through August 22 offers one answer: a body of work that still unsettles painting, sculpture, identity, and the very idea of what art can be.
The exhibition arrives with a simple but revealing premise. Five artists were asked to reflect on Duchamp’s influence, and their responses sketch a portrait of an artist who remains difficult to pin down — painter, trickster, readymade pioneer, celebrity, and, as the article also notes, a figure whose chauvinistic patriarchal position cannot be ignored. More than a century after he began pushing art beyond traditional categories, Duchamp still seems to operate less as a fixed historical figure than as a set of active questions.
Josephine Halvorson, an American artist, describes a formative encounter with Duchamp while living at the French Academy in Rome’s Villa Medici from 2014 to 2015. There, she painted a studio window repeatedly through the night, producing works that later seemed to echo Duchamp’s “Fresh Widow” (1964), which she encountered in the exhibition “Studio Systems” at the American Academy in Rome, curated by Peter Benson Miller. Halvorson says the resemblance was uncanny: both works turn a window into something stranger, more unstable, and more conceptually charged than it first appears.
For Halvorson, the connection runs deeper than visual similarity. Her practice begins with objects already in the world, then translates them through painting, a process that resonates with Duchamp’s readymade logic. She also links her work to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the shifting light of Matisse’s “French window at Collioure,” noting Duchamp’s interest in change, motion, and the space between Cubism and kineticism. In her account, coincidence is not incidental but generative — a way of thinking through how art acquires meaning across time and place.
The article also turns to Alex Da Corte, whose work extends Duchamp’s concerns into color, glass, and performance. Da Corte discusses Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” reverse glass painting, and his own 2022 Whitney Biennial work, which engaged Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy. Together, these reflections suggest that Duchamp’s influence is not confined to a single invention or style. It persists because his work keeps opening onto new forms of looking, new identities, and new arguments about what art is allowed to be.
