MoMA opens Duchamp show
MoMA opened a Marcel Duchamp exhibition on April 12 — its first comprehensive U.S. Duchamp show in more than 50 years — and the show runs through August 22. (x.com) (x.com). The exhibition arrival was posted across social feeds this week as a major spring museum opening. (x.com)
The Museum of Modern Art opened a Marcel Duchamp retrospective on April 12, bringing the artist’s work back to a major United States survey for the first time since 1973. (moma.org) The New York exhibition runs through August 22, 2026, on Floor 6 in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. MoMA said the show includes nearly 300 works across six decades, from 1900 to 1968. (moma.org) (press.moma.org) MoMA and the Philadelphia Art Museum organized the exhibition with the collaboration of the Centre Pompidou. The curators are Ann Temkin, Michelle Kuo, and Matthew Affron. (press.moma.org) (artforum.com) Duchamp is the artist most closely tied to the “readymade,” the idea that an ordinary manufactured object can become art when an artist selects and reframes it. MoMA points to Fountain, his 1917 urinal signed “R. Mutt,” as the best-known example. (moma.org) The show also tracks Duchamp before and beyond Fountain. MoMA said it includes Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), the 1912 painting that caused a stir at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, known as The Large Glass. (moma.org) (press.moma.org) That breadth is part of the point. MoMA said the exhibition spans painting, sculpture, film, photography, drawings, and printed matter, pushing against the shorthand that reduces Duchamp to a single urinal or a single art-world provocation. (press.moma.org) (gothamist.com) The timing closes a 53-year gap. The Art Newspaper reported that the last major United States survey was the 1973 retrospective co-organized by MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the same two institutions behind the new show. (theartnewspaper.com) The curators are also leaning into Duchamp’s habit of remaking and revisiting his own work. The Art Newspaper said the installation follows a strict chronology so viewers can see when originals disappeared, when replicas were made, and how repetition became part of his practice. (theartnewspaper.com) After New York, the exhibition travels to the Philadelphia Art Museum from October 10, 2026, to January 31, 2027, and then to the Grand Palais in Paris in spring 2027. For now, MoMA is the first stop in a three-city run built around an artist whose central question—what counts as art—still anchors the museum’s case for the show. (artforum.com) (moma.org)
