Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a scandal because it refused to look like a nude. At the 1913 Armory Show in New York, crowds hunted for a woman in a tangle of brown angles, a critic compared it to an explosion in a shingle factory, and a former president mocked it in print.
Duchamp had painted it in Paris in 1912, when he was twenty-five. It turned one body moving down a flight of stairs into a chain of overlapping positions, the way a photographer's plate holds every instant of a galloping horse. Most visitors in New York never saw a body at all.
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The first people to throw it out were not the critics. In the spring of 1912, a year before New York, the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants in Paris tried to keep it off the walls. The committee was made of Cubists, the most radical painters in France, and two of them were Duchamp's own brothers.
The objection, as Duchamp remembered it, was the title, which they found too literary. He was twenty-five, he had begun as a Cubist himself, and he did not argue.
So the question is not only why New York laughed. A crowd that had never seen modern art found the picture ridiculous in 1913. The painters who had invented modern art had found it wrong a year earlier.
Who asked Duchamp to pull his own painting?
His brothers did. Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon came to him on behalf of the hanging committee and asked him to withdraw the canvas, or at least to paint over the title and give it another one. The Philadelphia Museum of Art describes the committee as fellow Cubists who tried to exclude the picture.
Duchamp remembered the day this way: "I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi." Albert Gleizes was one of the Cubists who felt the nude did not fit what the group had been exploring.
I find the brothers' verdict harder to shrug off than any critic's, because a stranger can be dismissed and a brother cannot. The museum says the episode "precipitated his break with the Cubists." Within a year, the American painters Arthur Davies and Walter Pach invited him to send work to New York, and he sent the same canvas the Cubists had refused.
What You'll Discover
What the crowds were hunting for.
What a former president called it.
Where the idea really came from.
Who bought it for 324 dollars.