MoMA opens Duchamp run
MoMA opened its first U.S. Marcel Duchamp exhibition in over 50 years on April 12, a long‑running show scheduled through August 22 that spotlights the artist’s trickster works ( ). The exhibition is billed as a major institutional revisiting of Duchamp’s influence on modern and contemporary art practices (x.com).
The Museum of Modern Art opened a Marcel Duchamp retrospective on April 12, its first United States survey of the artist since 1973. (moma.org) The New York run is scheduled through August 22, 2026, in MoMA’s Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions on Floor 6. The museum says the show includes about 300 works made between 1900 and 1968. (moma.org) MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized the exhibition with the Centre Pompidou, and MoMA credits Ann Temkin, Michelle Kuo, and Matthew Affron as its lead curators. The show will travel to Philadelphia in October 2026. (press.moma.org, frieze.com) Duchamp is the artist most closely tied to the “readymade,” his term for ordinary manufactured objects presented as art. MoMA points to Fountain, the 1917 urinal signed “R. Mutt,” as the example that changed arguments about art and authorship. (moma.org) The exhibition also reaches back before the readymades to paintings that made Duchamp famous. MoMA says Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) sent shock waves through New York when it appeared at the 1913 Armory Show. (moma.org) The point of a survey like this is that Duchamp’s reputation often rests on a handful of works, while the rest of his output is less often seen together. MoMA says the show spans painting, sculpture, film, photography, drawings, and printed matter across six decades. (press.moma.org) That breadth matters because Duchamp’s influence runs through several later movements at once. MoMA places him in the orbit of Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop, rather than a single school. (moma.org) The museum is also revisiting an artist it helped canonize. MoMA says the last major Duchamp retrospective was the 1973 survey it organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, more than 50 years ago. (press.moma.org) Outside MoMA, the opening is already shaping the spring art calendar in New York. Hyperallergic reported that Gagosian will open a Duchamp show on April 25 timed to run alongside the museum retrospective. (hyperallergic.com) For visitors, the practical fact is simple: MoMA’s Duchamp exhibition is now open in Manhattan, and the museum has given it more than four months on the calendar. That gives New York its longest concentrated look in decades at the artist who made “Why is this art?” a permanent museum question. (moma.org)
