A urinal, a bicycle wheel and a mustache drawn on the Mona Lisa. A century later, Marcel Duchamp's jokes are still the arguments the art world has with itself. On Saturday, October 10, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opens Marcel Duchamp, the first major U.S. retrospective of his work in more than 50 years. It runs through January 31, 2027, and if you have ever argued about whether something "counts" as art, this is the source.
Why Philadelphia
This is the only city where this show could really land. In 1950, Duchamp helped steer the collection of his main patrons, Louise and Walter Arensberg, to the museum as a gift. That made Philadelphia his permanent home. According to the museum's exhibition announcement, it now holds the world's most significant Duchamp collection, around two hundred paintings, sculptures and works on paper, plus the deepest archive on his life.
The last major U.S. survey was in 1973 and 1974, organized by the same two institutions behind this one: the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, where this retrospective ran from April through August. A related version heads to the Grand Palais in Paris in spring 2027.
What you will see
About 300 works, in order, from his early cartoons for the satirical press through his years with the Cubists in Paris. The big moments are all there:
- Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912). Rejected by his own Cubist friends, then a scandal at the 1913 Armory Show in New York.
- The readymades. Ordinary mass-produced objects declared art, starting in 1913. Expect versions of Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack, In Advance of the Broken Arm (a snow shovel) and Fountain (1917), the porcelain urinal laid on its back and signed with a fake name.
- L.H.O.O.Q. (1919). The Mona Lisa postcard with an added mustache and beard. Read the letters aloud in French and the title becomes a crude joke.
- The Large Glass (1915 to 1923). His painting on glass, formally The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, with a section on how he planned and built it.
- Box in a Valise (1935 to 1941). His portable museum of himself, miniature replicas of his own work packed in a case. This is the most extensive presentation of it ever, with three deluxe examples, a complete set of standard copies and never-before-seen preparatory material.
There is also Rrose Sélavy, the female alter ego he adopted around 1920, whose name is a pun on "Éros, c'est la vie," or "Eros, that's life," and his long turn toward chess. The show ends with the studies for Étant donnés (1946 to 1966), the room-sized diorama he built in secret for twenty years while everyone assumed he had quit art. The finished piece and The Large Glass are on permanent view in Galleries 281 to 283, just beyond the exhibition.
Tickets and how to go
A timed ticket costs $35 and includes general museum admission, and members get in free. You pick a one-hour entry window, and the museum warns that demand means a queue, so allow up to two hours to line up and see the show. Friday through Monday, the same ticket also gets you into the Rodin Museum. Bring headphones: the free Bloomberg Connects app carries an audio tour with the curators and recordings of Duchamp himself.
Curators Matthew Affron of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo of MoMA have also written an illustrated catalogue, published by MoMA, if you want the whole argument on paper.
Duchamp's ideas run straight through the art people line up for now. Damien Hirst's spots on Barrie cashmere and Gérard Zlotykamien's street art both owe him something. And for another big museum show worth planning a trip around, see RM x SFMOMA.
Fifty years is a long time to wait. Get the early slot.
