In the 1940s, Picasso was almost every painter's ghostly father. In the '50s it was Hans Hofmann who schooled the abstract expressionists. Now, with the '60s rage for pop, who should turn up to be the grandada of the new generation but Marcel Duchamp, at 77 the century's most indestructible enfant terrible. As far back as anyone can remember, Duchamp has exulted in controversy. In 1913 his Nude Descending a Staircase, described at the time as "an explosion in a shingle factory," was the belly blow of Manhattan's Armory Show. He dabbled in dada in interbellum Paris by drawing a delicate mustache and goatee on a Mona Lisa reproduction. As a surrealist masquerading under the pseudonym of Rrose Selavy (c'est la vie), he exhibited his portrait on a perfume bottle, submitted a urinal titled Fountain to a 1917 salon, where it was hidden behind a screen.
There seemed no end to Duchamp's antic art. He hung a snow shovel, announced that it was a "readymade" work of art, and whimsically called it In Advance of a Broken Arm. He filled a bird cage with marble sugar lumps and titled it Why Not Sneeze. He made viewers dizzy with swirling patterns driven by electric motors, shocked gallerygoers with a foam-rubber breast labeled Please Touch, brought critics up short by stating that his grand design, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, on which he worked from 1915 to 1923, was intentionally left unfinished. Then, in 1923, in his grandest gesture of all, he announced that he was abandoning art for a worthier occupation: playing chess.
String & Scribbles. Duchamp's Solomon Grundy career became legend, all the more quixotic because his two brothers, Painter Jacques Villon and Sculptor Duchamp-Villon, went on to make careers in art that placed them near the top of their generation. By comparison, Marcel Duchamp seemed like a naughty boy who ties enigmatic, impudent, possibly lewd messages to balloons, then lets them fly off into the blue yonder. But now, 42 years after he abandoned art, his messages have come down to earth. Far from being gibberish, the scribblings now seem cryptic formulas for the future.
Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase was bought in 1913 for only $350. Now valued at $250,000 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is perhaps one more example of the public catching up with revolutionary art. But its technique of multiple exposures bridges the gap between Muybridge's galloping horses and Gjon Mili's stroboscopic studies of dancers. And even Du champ's greatest folly—dropping pieces of thread on the canvas and varnishing them where they fell—dramatized the importance that chance plays in painting, and seems an extraordinarily lucky hunch to a generation familiar with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings.