Marcel Duchamp

A catalog documenting an exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s editioned readymades at Gagosian Gallery, New York, replicating his American debut at Cordier & Ekstrom in the same building in 1965 and including new essays. Marcel Duchamp’s first readymade, a standard bicycle wheel attached to a wooden stool, came about “as a pleasure, something to have in my room the way you have a fire, or a pencil sharpener, except that there was no usefulness.” Over the ensuing decades many of his readymades were lost or destroyed, but in 1964 Duchamp, working with acclaimed gallerist Arturo Schwarz, supplanted the original readymades with fourteen precisely executed editioned multiples, a process which culminated in an exhibition in New York in 1965. 

Adina Kamien-Kazhdan chronicles this process in a new essay that provides significant insight into Duchamp and Schwarz’s relationship, as well as detailing the creation of the editions. Calvin Tomkins’ new profile of Duchamp prefaces this beautiful book and is a welcome addition, serving as the perfect introduction to the black-and-white installation shots from the 1965 show and the full-page color photographs of each readymade.

About the Author:

Calvin Tomkins is an author and art critic for The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of The Bride and the Bachelors, which traces Duchamp’s legacy through profiles and the artist and his contemporaries. Dr. Adina Kamien-Kazhdan is the David Rockefeller Curator at the Stella Fischbach Department of Modern Art, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.