PAINTING AND
THE READYMADE
AND “PAINTING”
by Gwenaël Kerlidou, June 11, 2026
Marcel Duchamp
Museum of Modern Art, NY, 04/12- 08/22
Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Ave., NY, 04/25 – 06/27
“Fountain”, 1964 replica of the 1917 original, at MoMA, photo by the author.
Ultimately, the outcome of a visit to the current Duchamp extravaganza at the Museum of Modern Art in New York may just be to raise in a viewer’s mind the question of the reason for it. As its timing neither seems to respond to a specific discussion within the art world nor to a significant scholarly discovery of new historical material, one may wonder why our particular moment deserved such an ambitious retrospective. Did Duchamp’s fading cult really need yet another institutional push ?
Similarly, but with more security guards per square foot than most museums in the world, the exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery uptown, timed with MoMA’s, with no new artifact nor different curatorial approach to the artist’s work, doesn’t seem to have any other purpose than the very pedestrian one to showcase the remaining readymade editions still available on the market.
In any case, this may be as good an occasion as any, not necessarily to add anything to the already plethoric literature on Duchamp’s work, but possibly to reassess the relationship of abstract painting to the readymade. If the conflicted relationship of the readymade to “painting” has been thoroughly examined, perhaps it is now time to turn the tables around and look at the relationship of abstract painting to the readymade.
What the MoMA show made clear, though, is the two parallel tracks, the two different speeds operating in Duchamp’s oeuvre: the instantaneous and the “delayed” (his own term). The immediacy of the gesture of provocation, the instant nominalism of the readymade, versus the slow maturation and the extended time frame of the more ambitious “literary” works. In a way, what really came through there is that the readymades were merely an epiphenomenon to Duchamp’s main body of work, a few brief flashes of intuition in a long dark night of obscurantism.
From the “Nude Descending a Staircase” and “The Large Glass”, via Mona Lisa (“L.H.O.O.Q.” can be read in French as “Elle a chaud au cul”, which translates either as “She’s in heat” or “She’s sexually promiscuous” -perhaps the most sexist of all his libidinous middle school puns by today’s standards) and Rrose Sélavy to “Etant Donné”, an endless stream of male interpretations follows Duchamp’s own lifelong self-absorbed sublimation of his repressed sexual anxieties and gives us a good sense of the male gaze’s range of projections. In addition, and surprisingly for a professed iconoclast, with “The Large Glass” and “Etant Donné”, his two major works, in the best academic tradition Duchamp reintroduced the notion of the masterpiece, but, this time, as symbolic “bricolage” and interpretive maze. The ultimate irony of it is that by taking his own personal mythology so seriously, starting with the “Boites en valises”, and in his later years with his many recorded pontifications, Duchamp seemed to get caught in his own game and fall in the trap he had set out for the viewer.
This is the least interesting part of Duchamp’s work, but certainly generating the most fascinating commentaries. In contrast, the most engaging one, at least in this visitor’s eye, is concerned with the nominalist definition of the readymade and with its conflicted relationship to “painting”.
“Bottle Rack”, a display of three different replicas of the 1914 original, at MoMA, photo by the author.
“Bottle Rack”, replica as displayed at the Gagosian Gallery, photo by the author.
In today’s art world context of formal and conceptual stagnation, of endless repetitions and outright regressions, it may be difficult to imagine how fast and furious changes came in the early days of the last century. Historically, there is no question that the emergence of the ready-made so close on the heels of the first Cubist collages created an unparalleled momentum. Picasso and Braque’s first papiers collés and collages are from 1912, by 1913 synthetic Cubism already started to morph into a new academism, “Bottle Rack”, Duchamp’s first named readymade happened in 1914, etc. But all of this might have been too much too fast for artists to process at the time.
After this double rejection at age 25, when his “Nude …” was turned down by his friend Albert Gleizes, then by his brothers Jacques and Raymond, a sort of settling of scores as avant-garde strategy seemed to have grown into a major obsession for Duchamp. Rebellious immaturity, combined with feelings of injustice, frustration and class entitlement contributed to his justification of a resentful critique of painting via personal attacks on painters. “Dumb as a painter” or “high on turpentine”, Duchamp’s famous quips, notoriously made them a favorite target of his mordant adolescent wit. But, as a master of sublimation and of the repressed himself, beyond his public disparaging of it, “painting” remained his forbidden (and thus fetishized) secret object of desire. His separation of the conceptual and the retinal sides in painting is a good example of his misconception of it. But even as a flawed intuition it still pointed to an issue which would later become a cornerstone of Clement Greenberg’s insistence on opticality in painting.
In 1914 the idea of the readymade was in the air. One has a sense that had it not been Duchamp, someone else would have taken the leap. The jury is still out on whether “Fountain” had anything to do with the work of Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Loringhoven. But Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau and Hans Arp experimentations weren’t too far from it either. If it had been someone else, its formulation would likely not have taken these vengeful “rubbing your nose in your own contradictions” undertones that Duchamp imparted “Fountain” with. Modern art would have turned out very differently and so would our historical narratives of it.
It is puzzling that the MoMA catalogue’s critical apparatus didn’t include a contribution by Thierry de Duve. It would have opened the debate up to the most recent aspects of the discussions on Duchamp. Fortunately, a guest editor invitation by the Brooklyn Rail in its May issue redressed that negligence. In that month’s release don’t miss Leah Modigliani and Agnieszka Kurant excellent contributions. One of de Duve’s many insights (especially for painters) in his lifelong examination of the Duchamp phenomenon is that both the readymade and abstraction emerged out of the same historical moment. But as tempting as it may be to elaborate all kinds of theories on that synchronicity, Duchamp’s rebellion still operated very much within the paradigm of the Beaux-Arts Academy, which is the main reason why one cannot give much weight to the proposition that modern art and postmodernism emerged, as has been floated, from that single event: American postmodernism being first and foremost a generational rejection of the precepts and limitations of Greenberg’s own flawed interpretation of pre–WWII European modern art.
“Bicycle Wheel”, one of the many different replicas of the 1913 lost original, at MoMA, photo by the author.
In “Duchamp’s Telegram” de Duve examined the historical impact of the readymade from the viewpoint of the discourse on art within its own historical/philosophical predefined categories. An ironclad demonstration and a recalibration of the institutional discourse, but which seems to ignore the gap between the internal logic of the individual experience and the social discourse about it. From a painter’s perspective these are two very different levels of approach: Painting and its discourse as social, cultural institution, versus the coherence of the artist‘s subjective investment in the work, which, for example, led Braque and Picasso to the discovery of collage. A significant discrepancy explaining the general mistrust of painters towards Duchamp.
To get back to the simultaneous emergence of abstraction and the readymade, what may have united them initially, at least in linguistic terms, is the attempt at autonomy from the referent. But if the readymade asserted the independence of the signified (the literary interpretation) from the referent, abstraction upheld the autonomy of the signifier (the language of forms and colors) from the referent. Both substituted the other missing element with the institutional discourse of the establishment. It is this small but quite significant semantic displacement of perspective which makes them irreconcilable.
Duchamp’s choice of the signified (discourse) over the signifier (form) as the way out of the academic dependence on the referent is what turned out to be so critical (and fateful for postmodernism) because it was a return to Symbolism. It is what made him the perfect methodological model for conceptual art and postmodernism, ultimately ushering in a new era of heavy-handed conceptual academic symbolism, lasting from the late sixties to today.
What Duchamp and Greenberg did have in common is that, for opposite reasons, they met improbably on a definition of “painting” as institutional discourse: For Duchamp it was the boogeyman of art, for Greenberg it was its redemption. Duchamp rebelled against it, Greenberg reinforced it. What neither of them could anticipate was that “painting” would turn out to be a lot less rigid of an esthetic category than they assumed it to be in their days. Since then, it evolved into a very adaptable self-critical instrument to think about itself in relation to both cultural institutions and the state of the world, a way to articulate the symbolic visually, instead of linguistically. Also, it should be fairly clear to today’s audiences that the meaning covered by the umbrella term “painting”, was not the same for Duchamp in 1914 Paris than for Rauschenberg in the New York of the late fifties, nor is it the same for today’s painter. It has evolved since then into a kind of multidimensional concept being constantly redefined within each historical context. From modern to postmodern narratives, each time “painting” has been declared dead, it was as an institutional discourse, and each time it was the subjective/individual response to the institutional discourse which reinvented it.
Rauschenberg’s reception of Duchamp’s telegram, to follow de Duve’s thinking, came as a generational rebellion against the Greenberg/Ab Ex status quo. Forty years later he echoed Duchamp’s vengeful rejection of Cubism. But he also reacted to Greenberg’s fetishization of planarity in “painting” by the fetishization of a prank.
When Greenberg intently ignored Duchamp in the fifties, he mirrored Gleizes rejection of the “Nude”. He rejected what didn’t seem to fit his agenda, just as Gleizes didn’t think that Marcel’s painting was a good example of what he thought Cubism needed to be. But when he declared that the monochromatic unpainted canvas could potentially be a picture, although “not necessarily a successful one”, he implicitly acknowledged the possibility that the last painting could be a readymade.*
With the postmodern institutionalization of conceptual art, in a status quo reversal, abstract painting became the underdog. Whatever quotient of subversion was left within contemporary art migrated towards abstraction. An irony not lost on someone like Olivier Mosset, who has long emphasized the old Marcel-Clement dichotomy, confronting the readymade and the exacerbated fetichism of consumer culture’s found objects (motorcycles or cars) to the monochrome and placing both artist and viewer in the center of the conundrum, in the position of having to critically navigate that conflicted schism in contemporary culture.
Meanwhile, the concept of the found object slowly worked its way into abstract painting and became part of the equation that painters were increasingly taking into account. From Jasper Johns’ Flags and Maps (images as readymades) to Noël Dolla’s 1966 Drying Racks, and Blinky Palermo’s 1966-72 Stoffbilders (tinted fabric as ready-made color), among countless other good examples, “painting” slowly metabolized the idea of the readymade, a process which proved to be surprisingly productive for abstraction: In Lacanian terms, the readymade acted for “painting” as a much-needed intrusion of the real in the realm of the symbolic.
What does it say about us that we love (or love to hate) the Duchamp story so much that it has become such a flashpoint in the discussions of our interpretations of our own history? Perhaps we have just become too entangled in our own historical narratives that we haven’t yet found a way to step out of them when they stop making much sense in our changing socio-economic context.
Duchamp is perhaps the best example of the following art world principle (please note, artworld, not art): No matter how socially, esthetically or ideologically subversive one may intend to be when one enters the art world as an artist, socio-economic success is going to turn one into the very opposite of what one intended to be. Like it or not, sooner or later the socially recognized rebel is bound to rejoin the ranks of the academy and become a representative of the status quo. Transgression will inevitably be co-opted into yet another tool of ideological repression (or is it regression?).
The rest, my friend, pardon my French, “n’est que bavardage” (is only chit-chat).
*See Thierry de Duve’s, “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas”, and also his “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint”.
MoMa exhibition merchandise, photo from MoMA’s website.