Duchamp takes New York : with John Strausbaugh
Date
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Admission
Open to the public
RSVP required
$10 | General admission
FREE | Village Preservation and Salmagundi club members
About the Event
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.
About the Speaker
John Strausbaugh, a longtime chronicler of the city (in books such as The Village, City of Sedition and Victory 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.
Hungry?
Grab a bite to eat after the event from our dining room (a normally member-only benefit)! Ticketed attendees who would like to stay for drinks and dinner should make dining reservations in advance via our Reservations page with the message “Duchamp talk”.