Publishing to coincide with a major MoMA Retrospective, this book revisits the artist who upended modern art, and the city that made it possible.

Artist, anti-artist, joker, trickster, shape-shifter: Marcel Duchamp broke with tradition and pushed the avant-garde decisively forward. When his work exploded like an art bomb in New York in the 1910s, American art was still mired in the nineteenth century. Duchamp, bored with tradition, reimagined what art could be, what it was for, and how it might be made-hanging a snow shovel from the ceiling, inverting a urinal, "painting" with dust and bits of string between panes of glass, and reducing his entire oeuvre into a briefcase of miniatures. Duchamp Takes New York traces this bold, playful energy, showing how the city inspired and staged his avant-garde experiments.

Duchamp's offhand gestures reshaped the course of twentieth-century American art, laying the groundwork for nearly every major movement that followed. And then, at the height of his influence, Duchamp appeared to walk away-declaring himself finished with art and devoting his energies to becoming a chess champion instead. Only after his death did it emerge that he had spent two decades secretly working on one final, unsettling work, leaving the world to try to comprehend it without explanation-his ultimate prank.

John Strausbaugh, a longtime chronicler of the city, puts New York at the center of Duchamp's story. Fleeing the comforts of French bourgeois life-"wives, three children, a country house, three cars!"-Duchamp found New York instantly liberating. It was here that he produced much of his most radical work and eventually settled for good, once declaring, "New York itself is a complete work of art." Duchamp's art simply can't be pinned down, without first recognizing his relationship to New York.

Autorentext

John Strausbaugh is an author, historiographer and journalist. His most recent books include three deep explorations of New York City history. The Village, his epic history of Greenwich Village, was hailed as "rare and refreshing" in the New York Times. City of Sedition (2016), his history of New York City during the Civil War, won the Fletcher Pratt Award and the Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies. Victory City (2018), was praised as "a compulsively engaging read" (Washington Post). He is a former editor of the legendary downtown weekly New York Press, and has been a contributing writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Manhattan.

Leseprobe

It took Duchamp until the following summer, June 1942, to reach New York, after arranging to ship the supplies to make fifty Boxes, which he was counting on for income. He was about to turn fifty-five. Unlike Man Ray, he was delighted to be back. And why not? While Paris would be a Nazi-infested ghost town until the end of the war, wartime New York was a boomtown, starting a climb that would take it to the apex of its twentieth-century trajectory. From the postwar years into the '60s, no city on the planet rivaled it for wealth, influence, or prestige. Among other factors, with Paris shut down, New York took over again as the art capital of the West and held that crown much longer this time than it had earlier in the century. Along with Duchamp and Ernst, the cream of European creative and intellectual life had fled the Nazis for New York. Their collective impact on New York's culture was going to be incalculable. Fulfilling what Duchamp had said to the press back in 1915, the ruins of Europe were the past, New York was the future.

Even though he was still insisting he wasn't an artist anymore, Duchamp was right where he needed to be. He'd make vacation trips to Europe, but Manhattan was now his permanent home for the rest of his life. He would become a naturalized citizen in 1955. In New York, during the last decades of his life, Duchamp's legend as the visionary who dynamited the old definitions of art would bloom, and he helped it along, the slightly aloof éminence grise of his own legacy.