Marcel Duchamp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is mounting a major retrospective of Marcel Duchamp, with more than 300 works and the permanently installed Étant donnés. The show follows his career chronologically, from painting to readymades, film, photography, and printed matter.
Announced on October 28, 2026, the exhibition is the first major U.S. retrospective devoted to Duchamp in more than 50 years. It gathers work across the many forms he explored, from early painting to the hard-to-classify pieces that later defined his practice.
For artists, Duchamp remains a useful model for how an art practice can shift the terms of looking. The article notes that in 1912 he decided to leave oil painting behind and step away from the art world so he could work as he pleased; that choice helps explain an oeuvre that refuses a single category.
The exhibition brings together landmark works such as Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Fountain, and L.H.O.O.Q. These works ask viewers to think about making and seeing at the same time, showing how an idea, a gesture, or an object can become exhibition material.
The permanently installed Étant donnés adds a physical anchor to the visit. It also shows an artist repeatedly revisiting his own forms, miniaturizing and reconfiguring them, until the work becomes both highly coherent and impossible to reduce to a single method.
Source : Hyperallergic