9. Marcel Duchamp – Nude Descending A Staircase #2, 1912
‘Nude Descending A Staircase, No. 2’ is a 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp. The work is widely regarded as a Modernist classic, and has become one of the most famous of its time. Before its first presentation at the Parisian Salon des Indépendants, it was rejected by the Cubists as too Futurist, and subsequently caused a huge stir during its exhibition at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Duchamp’s brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, sent by the Salon des Indépendants hanging committee, asked him to voluntarily withdraw the painting, or paint over the title and rename it as something else. According to Duchamp, Cubists such as Albert Gleizes found that his nude wasn’t quite in line with what they had already investigated. The hanging committee objected to the work, Duchamp stressed, on the grounds that it had “too much of a literary title”, and that “one doesn’t paint a nude descending a staircase, that’s ridiculous… a nude should be respected.”
Julian Street, an art critic for the New York Times wrote that the work resembled “an explosion in a shingle factory,” and cartoonists jumped on the bandwagon satirising the piece. It was never the less sold to the San Francisco lawyer and art dealer Frederic C. Torrey, who hung it in his home in Berkeley. In 1919 he commissioned a full-size copy of the work, selling the original to Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg. In 1954 it entered the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as a bequest from the Arensbergs.