Marcel Duchamp’s Long-Awaited U.S. Survey Arrives at MoMA
More than half a century has passed since the last major U.S. survey of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), and the gap itself has become part of the story. This month, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York will open a major exhibition devoted to the artist, organized with the Philadelphia Art Museum — the same institutions that staged the landmark 1973 presentation curated by Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine.
The new exhibition, developed by Ann Temkin, Michelle Kuo, and Matthew Affron, began taking shape in the late 2010s before the pandemic interrupted its progress. Temkin has described that delay as fitting for Duchamp, whose career was marked by hesitation, revision, and works that never settled into a single final form. That sensibility shapes the exhibition’s structure: rather than treating replicas as stand-ins for lost originals, the curators have arranged the show chronologically so visitors can see when each object was actually made.
The result is meant to expose the oddness of Duchamp’s practice. Some early works no longer survive, including readymades that were discarded because they looked like ordinary household objects. By placing later versions beside the historical timeline, the exhibition makes visible the artist’s recursive method — a practice of repetition, reworking, and deliberate instability.
Around 300 works will be on view, including Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), Fountain (1917), and Étant donnés (1946-66). The inclusion of Fountain is especially pointed: the urinal, signed and inverted, is presented here as Duchamp’s work, despite recent speculation that has tried to shift its authorship elsewhere.
For the curators, Duchamp’s significance lies not only in his most famous objects but in his refusal to accept the limits of what art could be. Temkin calls him an inventor rather than simply an artist, while Kuo emphasizes how he expanded the field into something spatial, temporal, and even multi-sensory. That breadth helps explain why Duchamp still feels contemporary: his methods anticipated a 21st-century art world in which process, repetition, and instability remain central concerns.
The exhibition opens at MoMA on April 12 and then travels to the Philadelphia Art Museum on October 10, where it remains on view through January 31, 2027.
