Through a hundred works brought together for the first time, the Center Pompidou devotes a monographic exhibition to the painted work of Marcel Duchamp. A new approach, knowingly paradoxical, the exhibition intends to show the paintings of the man who, according to the modernist doxa, killed painting.

Marcel Duchamp Nude descending the staircase n ° 2 (1912) © Adagp, Paris 2013

Marcel Duchamp
Nude descending the stairs n ° 2 (1912)
© Adagp, Paris 2013

At the center of this pictorial work and the subject of the exhibition, the visitor is notably invited to review the paintings and drawings that led Marcel Duchamp to the realization of his great work, commonly called the Large Glass, The Bride Bare by his bachelors, even, started in 1910 and declared unfinished by the artist in 1923.

In order to place this work in the coherence of a slow and complex genesis, Marcel Duchamp had conscientiously grouped his paintings in the hands of a small circle of collectors while replicating them in his Box-in-Suitcase, for posterity and those which he will call the "viewers". Little known in Europe, these paintings, most of which are kept in the Philadelphia Museum of Arts, are brought together at the Center Pompidou, surrounded by book, pictorial, scientific and technical sources from which Duchamp drew during these crucial and fertile years. The exhibition thus offers some new reading keys to better approach and understand a manifest and programmatic work.

Marcel Duchamp The Bride (1912) © Adagp, Paris 2013

Marcel Duchamp
The Bride (1912)
© Adagp, Paris 2013

From cartoons to the Nude descending the stairs, from mathematics to the theme of the bride, from perspective works to films by Etienne-Jules Marey or Georges Méliès, from Impressionism to Cubism, from Cranach the Elder to Edouard Manet or Odilon Redon, passing by Francis Picabia or František Kupka, the route invites the public to follow, step by step, with essential and unexpected references, the construction of one of the richest and fascinating works of modern art, The Big Glass. The exhibition unveils the pictorial research of Marcel Duchamp, his fawn period, his symbolist borrowings, his cubist explorations, the nonsense and the humor that characterize his work, notably through the artist's original autograph notes, preserved at Centre Pompidou. She reveals her interest in literature and words as in the optical, physical and mechanical sciences.

The Center Pompidou contributes with Marcel Duchamp. Painting, even. writing the history of the art of our time and a renewed reading of the work of one of the most emblematic figures of XNUMXth century art.

Exhibition “Marcel Duchamp. Painting, even. "
24 September 2014 - 5 January 2015
Centre Pompidou
Paris