Duchamp Takes New York

Historian Strausbaugh (Victory City) traces in this breezy biography the years French artist Marcel Duchamp spent shaping the Dadaist movement in New York City. Arriving from Paris two years after the 1913 Armory Show, where his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a buzz in the conservative American art establishment, Duchamp spent much of his adult life—more than 30 years—in New York and undertook many of his artistic experiments there. Over the years he became a key player in the American avant garde, using “readymade” objects as art (the most “infamous” of which was a urinal upended to resemble a fountain, which Strausbaugh suggests might actually have been the work of irreverent artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) and guiding such influential collectors as Peggy Guggenheim and Louise and Walter Arensberg. The author employs colorful detail to explore how Duchamp crafted his own image—he claimed for decades to be a “renegade anti-artist,” proclaimed he’d given up art for chess, and styled himself as a “loner” despite being the life of Manhattan’s “raucous, salacious” social scene. Also examined are his connections to such contemporaries as Man Ray and George Bellows. Mining contemporaneous art criticism and gossipy accounts from those in Duchamp’s personal and artistic circles, it’s a brief but lively portrait of a key player in one of the early 20th century’s most vital artistic movements. (Apr.)