Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre has functioned as a machine for producing interpretations. Scholars have approached it through radically different disciplines and traditions: from alchemy and non-Euclidean geometry to numerological speculation and queer theory. Psychoanalytical readings emphasize desire and perpetual deferral. Long before the emergence of contemporary theories of gender, Duchamp explored forms of selfhood that exceed binary distinctions.

Given this plethora of wild hermeneutics, it may come as a surprise – and perhaps as a disappointment to some – that the most extensive ­retrospective of his work ever staged, artlessly titled “Marcel Duchamp,” chooses to simply present the works chronologically. Curated by Matthew Affron, Michelle Kuo, and Ann ­Temkin, it allows for the work to unfold in sequence, emphasizing the development of Duchamp’s practice over time without proposing a new interpretative framework.

Personally, I find the approach liberating. It lets the works speak for themselves. And one soon discovers connections between works that complicate things. The straightforward curatorial principle – chronology – turns out to be philosophically rich. Not surprisingly, the concept of chronos – time – is soon revealed to be an evasive one. Jorge Luis Borges famously mentions a labyrinth that consists of one straight line. [1] The timeline of Duchamp’s career is such a maze.

Following the 1934 publication of The Green Box, containing 94 facsimiles of notes and photo­graphs, Duchamp’s work prompted renewed critical attention, most notably from Gabrielle Buffet and André Breton. In a 1936 issue of Cahiers d’art, Buffet stresses the artist’s will to “relentlessly eradicate everything traditional” from his art, “which explains why it has appeared so rarely and slowly.” [2] The year prior, in an essay published in Minotaure, Breton mentions 35 works and produces a first chronology of the readymades, claiming that they all revolve around the The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23) like satellites. By treating the enigmatic notes in The Green Box as a key to interpreting the structure of this magnum opus, also known as The Large Glass, he established an interpretive framework that later critics have largely adopted. [3]

Compared to that of prolific ­contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso or Alexander Calder, ­Duchamp’s production can appear humble, but the MoMA survey contains more than 300 objects, some of which I have never before seen in the flesh. In the catalogue, the curators discuss the widespread myth – promoted by Duchamp himself – that he gave up making art in his early 30s to devote all of his time to playing chess and doing nothing: “For an artist who liked to characterize himself simply as a ‘respirateur’ – a ‘breather’ – there are in fact vast quantities of things to see.” [4]

Yes, there really is a lot to see. Considering the fact that Duchamp famously questioned the hegemony of the eye in modern art – what he called the “retinal” – it is remarkable how visually appealing many of the works are. They are full of perspectival ploys and smart optical effects. One simply can’t stop looking at them. They are begging to be deciphered. I enjoyed the galleries with early paintings, from the 1910 Chess Game, which opens the show, to other Post-Impressionist portrayals of family members and close acquaintances, including Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel (also 1910), depicting a childhood friend with mysteriously radiating hands – according to Jean Clair, an indication of the young Duchamp’s openness to occult dimensions. [5] It is ­compelling to observe how, within a span of merely two years, he worked his way through the ­possibilities of Cubism and as early as 1911 – with Coffee Mill – arrived at a kind of diagrammatic art. This tiny painting clearly prefigures The Large Glass and, according to some scholars, the entirety of his subsequent development, including later works that abandoned painting as a medium to instead explore words and things in ways nobody had done before. [6]

Duchamp occupies a singular place in ­modern art because he repeatedly destabilized the relationship between thought and object. Many of his works exist in multiple versions – some reconstructed years after their original appearance, while others emerged only gradually from projects conceived decades earlier. Art historians have often followed Duchamp’s own retrospective narratives, tracing the genealogy of ideas rather than the chronology of things. The result has been a picture of the artist as a figure whose conceptual breakthroughs precede and determine every subsequent manifestation. MoMA’s exhibition resists this tendency. By ­foregrounding when these objects were actually produced and circulated, this show restores their historical thickness. The readymade ceases to be a mental operation and becomes something that unfolds across decades of fabrication, exhibition, disappearance, and return.

Many of Duchamp’s readymades are reconstructions, made by others. They make visible a network of collaborators and interpreters who played a crucial role. Richard Hamilton’s reconstructions, produced in close dialogue with Duchamp, belong not to the 1910s but to the postwar period in which they were made. Arturo Schwarz’s commercial editions of the 1960s similarly emerge as historical objects in their own right rather than transparent windows onto an original conceptual act. The same is true of Ulf Linde’s full set of replicas, created in ­Sweden with Duchamp’s approval. These things are not mere supplements to an already completed ­oeuvre. They are episodes in the continuing life of ­Duchamp’s fundamentally collaborative work.

Since The Large Glass is permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and ­cannot be moved, the New York installment of the show – which will travel to Philadelphia in the fall – instead presents Hamilton’s 1966 replica. This creates a curious lacuna in the galleries displaying works made in the 1910s that reference aspects of this absent centerpiece and somehow revolve around it like moons around a missing planet. You have to travel half a century along the timeline until you can examine the Bride and the Bachelor machine, the two main components of the legendary glass. It’s one of many displacements, one of several necessary curatorial ­syncopations, characteristic of a show that examines an oeuvre full of puzzling returns, repetitions, and delays.

The concept of delay recurs in Duchamp’s own writings at the most strategic places. “Use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting: picture on glass becomes delay in glass,” reads one of the key notes in The Green Box. [7] Introducing the concept of the readymade, he explains, “The readymade can later be looked for. – (with all kinds of delays).” [8] It is striking how these early text fragments anticipate developments that took place decades later. It is in fact hard to imagine better introductory texts for the show than these dense aphorisms.

Duchamp’s notion of delay invites ­comparison with the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), according to which an event acquires its meaning only retrospectively, through a later experience that reactivates and reinterprets it. Encounters, gestures, and decisions can appear insignificant at the moment of their occurrence, only to become decisive in light of later developments.

In a comparable way, Duchamp’s career resists any straightforward chronology. The artist’s trajectory unfolds less as a linear sequence than as a series of time loops and reversals through which meaning travels backward as much as forward. In this sense, “delay” is not merely a ­postponement but a structure of retrospective constitution: The meaning of an artistic act emerges belatedly.

Duchamp’s career is therefore intelligible only from the end backward. He constructed it step-by-step. Take the story of Fountain, the readymade that was rejected by the jury of a New York exhibition in 1917. In what remains my favorite study of Duchamp’s work, Elena Filipovic describes the mechanics behind this legendary “scandal,” which was hardly noticed by anyone. The rejected object discreetly disappeared, but Duchamp had it photographed by the most respected art photographer of the day, Alfred Stieglitz. The pissotière itself was never to be seen again. But the story had just begun. In Filipovic’s words, the ­rejection of Fountain was no more than a footnote to a local story: “Not a scandal. Not even noticed. Not yet. The so-called invention of the readymade still needed to be constructed.” [9] This came about through writings and through the Boîte-en-valise, a kind of portable museum that Duchamp launched in 1936. Instead of creating new works, he reproduced his paintings and readymades in miniature and packed them into a series of suitcase-like boxes. The importance for Duchamp of the museum as an institution – in miniature or full-scale – is a theme emphasized by the curators of the MoMA show.

Replicas of Fountain from 1950, 1963, and 1964 repeatedly catapult us back to an “original” scene that exists only as an echo or an evasive afterimage. Ironically, the puzzling temporal loops involved only become decipherable in relationship to the strict timeline.

Chronology may appear to be an ­uninspiring curatorial approach, but it makes visible the temporal maze erected by the works themselves. This is a remarkable show. It gives us a labyrinth that consists of one straight line. And Borges was right: “Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves …” [10]

“Marcel Duchamp,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 12–August 22, 2026.

Daniel Birnbaum is a writer and curator based in Paris. He is a professor of philosophy at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and the cofounder of the Institute for Art Criticism there.

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