See How Marcel Duchamp Broke the Rules and Shocked the Art World Again and Again
The subversive French artist is receiving his first retrospective in the United States in more than 50 years. Decades after his death, his work is still influencing contemporary art
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In November, a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million.
For some, Comedian, as Maurizio Cattelan’s creation was known, was a clever work of genius. David Galperin, head of contemporary art for Sotheby’s, told the Washington Post’s Ashley Fetters Maloy that the banana “transcends geographies, language, understanding, cultural differences.”
Others were left with questions: Why did a banana sell for millions of dollars? How could critics and scholars find meaning in a banana and duct-tape? And, perhaps most crucially, why is this considered art?
Similar questions arose in 1917, when the French artist Marcel Duchamp obtained an ordinary urinal, flipped it on its side, signed it “R. Mutt” and called the piece Fountain.
Quick fact: Marcel Duchamp’s everyday objects
In addition to Fountain, the artist’s “readymades” include a perfume bottle, a bicycle wheel, a window and a snow shovel.
When a photograph of the urinal appeared in the Dadaist journal The Blind Man, an editorial opined: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.” Others kept asking: Why is this art?
Amid deluges of art generated by artificial intelligence and bananas taped on walls, contemporary viewers may find guidance at a major retrospective exhibition of Duchamp’s works next year. Opening at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on April 12, 2026, before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the fall, “Marcel Duchamp” is the artist’s first retrospective in the United States since 1973—when the same two institutions showed Duchamp’s works.
Assembling nearly 300 pieces, the exhibition offers a window into Duchamp’s six decades of creation and subversion.
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“Duchamp remains mysterious,” Michelle Kuo, chief curator at MoMA, tells ARTnews’ Alex Greenberger. “The totality of his oeuvre still isn’t well known. What is talked about most often is only the tip of the iceberg, and his diverse body of work leaves much to be investigated.”
The exhibition begins in the early 1900s, when Duchamp was sketching, painting and largely abiding by the rules of the art world, as in a portrait of his younger sister, Yvonne. But in 1913, his famously controversial Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2—a painting of mechanical parts replacing the human form—debuted at the groundbreaking Armory Show in New York.
Duchamp soon broke with Cubism, as he did with all conventional movements. “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste,” he once said, in the spirit of constant reinvention.
In 1917, Fountain roiled, confounded and inspired the art world. It was Duchamp’s first “readymade,” a mass-produced, everyday object that the artist believed could be “elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.” He defied centuries of artistic tradition that emphasized the artist’s skill and focused instead on how the artist can shape ideas and intention.
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That transgression continued two years later, when Duchamp doodled a mustache and beard on a postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and called it L.H.O.O.Q., which, when spoken aloud in French, sounded like an obscenity.
The centerpiece of the exhibition will be an extensive collection of various editions of Duchamp’s Box in a Valise, a collection of his greatest hits that he created to fit within a suitcase. Never-before-seen archival material will offer viewers insight into how Duchamp crafted his miniature urinals and shrunken copies of his most famous works, which enabled his ideas and art to spread far and wide.
Even without major Duchamp retrospectives in the U.S., curators and critics say that his influential, boundary-pushing works are never far from the cutting edge of contemporary art.
“Duchamp may not be on the lips of many artists, over a century after his revolutionary moves in the art world, but he is in their subconscious,” Naomi Beckwith, the chief curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, tells Artnet’s Thomas Girst. “Whenever an artist makes a gesture and calls it art, or refuses traditional material, or proclaims that their ritual, their event, their gathering or whatever they do as an artist, is art, they are quoting Duchamp. He made artists, rather than objects, the key ingredient in art.”
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Duchamp’s art resists straightforward interpretations, which is another reason why it has endured, argues Matthew Affron, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Every generation gets the Duchamp that it wants,” he tells ARTnews.
Duchamp’s model of the “readymade” is particularly well poised to speak to the contemporary moment, at a time when creating an image is as simple as a single click of a mouse.
“Duchamp’s approach to both art and life makes him more compelling than ever,” artist Ai Weiwei tells Artnet. “In an era of artificial intelligence, he stands in stark contrast. His aesthetic vision will endure.”
“Marcel Duchamp” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from April 12 to August 15, 2026.
