Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), oil painting created in 1912 by French artist Marcel Duchamp. The painting created a sensation, but Duchamp painted only a few more works, notably The Large Glass. Despite his ambivalence toward art, Duchamp came to be regarded as a master and precursor of several 20th-century art movements.

Duchamp was born into an artistic family. After moving to Paris, he experimented with every major contemporary trend, from Post-Impressionism though Fauvism to Cubism, the latter of which he found to be too static, and he then began moving toward a nonobjective expression of movement.

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) was the painting that launched Duchamp into the realms of notoriety, although it took months to find its way into the public gaze. Intended for the Paris Salon des Indépendants show of 1912, it appears to have been too “independent” for the committee to approve and was vetoed. Duchamp looked elsewhere and the painting traveled abroad, where it was seen at an exhibition in Barcelona, Spain, before being moved on to New York City’s Armory Show in 1913.

At the time, many critics were shocked by their first glimpse of a Cubo-Futurist painting. Cartoonists even ridiculed the piece in which motion is depicted by successive superimposed images. The stark colour and harsh angles are suggestive of an aggression that many viewers found unsettling. But despite its Futurist overtones, Duchamp later said that while painting it he was totally unaware of the Futurist style.