Painting of The Day : Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 | For Connel in Normal People . . . .

 I think it was this that Conn is recommended to go see when they go to Europe and stay with Marianne in the family villa . . . . it meant a lot to me as we had enjoyed a ‘study group’ on Duchamp at college run by the peerless Art Historian Fred Orton and the wonderful composer Gavin Bryars which remains one of the few high points of my time at art school

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2) is a 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp. The work is widely regarded as a Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time. Before its first presentation at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants in Paris it was rejected by the Cubists as being too Futurist.

The hanging committee objected to the work, on the grounds that it had “too much of a literary title”, and that “one doesn’t paint a nude descending a staircase, that’s ridiculous… a nude should be respected." Duchamp’s brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, sent by the hanging committee, asked him to voluntarily withdraw the painting, or paint over the title and rename it something else.

“But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that.” – Marcel Duchamp

I focused my attentions on Man Ray and Francis Picabia during this time and wrote papers on them both so we went on to meet Richard Hamilton (and his lovely partner fellow artist Rita Donagh) on whom I did my final thesis. We also went to the ICA Man Ray exhibition and were able to meet Sir Roland Penrose and his then wife, the Man Ray muse and artist, model and keen photojournalist herself (the first photographer into Bergen Belsen no less) Lee Miller

Happy Days . . . . .