Duchamp's moving nude was mocked as an explosion in a shingle factory
Even the Cubists found it too much. Marcel Duchamp's own brothers asked him to withdraw or retitle his 1912 painting, since a nude, the hanging committee felt, should not be shown walking downstairs. A year later New York crowds jeered at it, and Theodore Roosevelt preferred the Navajo rug in his bathroom.
The canvas, about 147 by 89 cm, renders a figure in ochres and browns as nested cones and cylinders, repeated in overlapping stages so the body seems to fold into its own motion. Duchamp borrowed from the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey and from Muybridge's 1887 sequence of a woman walking downstairs, fusing Cubist fragmentation with the Futurist obsession with movement.
He submitted it to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1912, and the catalogue listed it as number 1001, revealing the title to the public even though the picture never hung there. Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, sent by the committee, asked their brother to paint over the title; Cubists such as Albert Gleizes thought it too close to Italian Futurism and complained of a literary title. Duchamp took it back. It went on show that spring in Barcelona, at the Galeries Dalmau.
Real notoriety came at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. A New York Times critic, Julian Street, likened it to an explosion in a shingle factory, cartoonists lampooned it, a parody called Food Descending a Staircase appeared, and American Art News offered prizes to anyone who could locate the nude. Roosevelt, writing after his visit, called it A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.
San Francisco lawyer Frederic C. Torrey bought it at the show, commissioned a full-size copy, and in 1919 sold the original to Louise and Walter Arensberg. Their bequest brought it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1954. Its echoes run from Tom Stoppard's play Artist Descending a Staircase to a Calvin and Hobbes strip and a Chuck Jones duck.
Source: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
