Marcel Duchamp · 1912

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

1912

Marcel Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2' (1912) fuses Cubism and Futurism to record the very motion of a figure through time. A single nude is refracted into a cascade of overlapping geometric planes down a staircase, like a canvas translation of chrono-photography. Its sensational debut at the 1913 New York Armory Show introduced American audiences to modernism; today it is the centrepiece of the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Exhibition Venue

Image source: Wikimedia Commons