"Nude Descending a Staircase"

"The tiresome thing," once said Marcel Duchamp, "was that every time I met someone [in the US] they would say 'Oh! Are you the one who did that painting [Nude descending...]? ' The funniest thing is that for at least thirty or forty years the painting was known, but I wasn't. Nobody knew my name. In the continental American sense of the word, 'Duchamp' meant nothing. There was no connection between the painting and me." Pierre Cabanne, Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, p. 45

This quote resonates! I heard of the painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" (right) long before I heard of Marcel Duchamp by name, because it was my mother's prime example of radical and strange modern art; I think she mentioned it often, with incredulity. To lots of people her generation, it was the epitome of what was bad in modern art -- not serious, not beautiful, not realistic, not comprehensible, not awesome, not Art.

Was I intrigued? Maybe. During the time I was growing up and hearing about "Nude...", I am sure that I never saw a reproduction of it -- when I finally found out what it looked like, I think I was disappointed, since it's a relatively typical cubist work, and I had seen Cezannes, Picassos, etc. before it. And I had seen nudes. I had always thought my mother was uncomfortable with some level of nudity in the painting, but it isn't really very nude at all. She had some other problem with it.

Working through this personal history with Marcel Duchamp, I begin to wonder if my mother herself knew what the picture looked like -- after all, she was familiar with Picassos and Cezannes. I suspect that she visualized it as much nuder than it was. She always thought that her own acceptance and public permissiveness of nudity in great art was mysterious, as she wouldn't have accepted nudity in any other venue. I now know that "Nude Descending a Staircase" earned its reputation at the Armory Show in 1913, when my mother was three years old, but in her view it seemed more contemporary than that. She reflected the slow pace at which it became somehow mainstream.

A few years after I was thinking about my mother's generation and Marcel Duchamp's "Nude...", my sister happened to look in an old art book that belonged to our mother. In it, she found a 1964 clipping from the St.Louis Post Dispatch reporting an interview with Marcel Duchamp. He noted the connection between his work and pop art, predicted the demise of pop art, and propagated the myth that he had not done any art work for decades. What’s important is that it demonstrates my mother’s continuing interest in him.