Marcel Duchamp in New York

(Paperback)

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Artist, anti-artist, joker, trickster, shape-shifter-the Loki of 20th-century art-Marcel Duchamp broke every rule, questioned every tradition, and launched the New York art world into the future. And then, just as suddenly, he appeared to lose interest and devote himself to chess.

When his work exploded like an art bomb in New York in the 1910s, American art was still stuck in the 19th century, if not the Renaissance. Bored with tradition, Duchamp set about reinventing art itself: what it is, what it's for, how it's made. He hung a snow shovel from the ceiling, turned a urinal upside down, and "painted" with dust and string between two panes of glass. He built op-art mobiles, explored gender fluidity, and reduced his oeuvre to a suitcase-sized portable museum. Then, apparently done with making art, he walked away.

Only after his death did the world discover he'd secretly spent two decades on one final, mystifying work: a peep-show-like installation suggesting that the act of looking at art is itself voyeuristic. Not being around to explain it was his ultimate, thought-provoking prank.

His contemporaries were shocked-he was even kicked out of his own exhibition once-but Duchamp, with a wink, prodded them to think differently. Virtually every American art movement of the mid-to-late 20th century can trace its lineage back to his offhand-seeming gestures. Today, he's discussed and imitated more than ever.

Marcel Duchamp in New York explores how the city shaped his radical vision. Escaping the bourgeois conventions of France ("The things life forces men into-wives, three children, a country house, three cars!"), Duchamp found New York liberating and alive with visionaries. "New York itself is a complete work of art," he declared. After years of intermittent visits, he made it home-and it was there, in its electric atmosphere, that he created much of his most groundbreaking work.

Author Bio

John Strausbaugh is an award-winning author, historiographer and journalist. From 1988 through 2002 he was a writer and editor at the now legendary New York Press. His most recent books include three deep explorations of New York City history. The Village, his epic history of Greenwich Village (Ecco, 2013), was hailed as "rare and refreshing" in the New York Times and selected as one of Kirkus Review's Best Books of 2013. City of Sedition (Twelve, 2016), his history of New York City during the Civil War, won the Fletcher Pratt Award for best nonfiction of the year, and the Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies. Victory City (Twelve, 2018), a paradigm-shifting look at New York during World War II, was praised as "a compulsively engaging read" (Washington Post) and "remarkable" (New York Journal of Books). In 2024 PublicAffairs published his The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned. The Wall Street Journal called it a"brisk, rip-roaring account of the Soviet side of the space race." He lives in Manhattan.