Marcel Duchamp

Notwithstanding Cubism and other movements of early Modern art, it was Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel mounted on a stool that utterly changed the course of 20th-century art history. The Readymade, as it came to be called, radically proposed that making art was no longer rooted in craft but rather in the conceptual process of artistic decision-making, which included taking a common object and calling it art. Bicycle Wheel (1913) was the first in a series of similar pieces that were mostly lost over the next 50 years until 1964, when Duchamp had the works—14 in all—re-created as editioned multiples. They've become coveted works in their own right, and to celebrate the golden anniversary of their publication, they are collected in this exhibition.