Curator, Michelle Kuo: Duchamp famously said that he stopped making art and just played chess for decades. But actually, between 1946 to 1966, he was secretly making a work that would be Étant donnés.
Curator, Ann Temkin: What we have here are the polaroids that Duchamp took as he was making it, and then these larger photographs were taken by a friend. They show his studio on West 14th Street here in New York, where this secret project was underway.
Artist, Jacqueline Humphries: I think it was really the shock of seeing Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that I got more invested in understanding Duchamp.
You walk into a room, and there’s an old farm door, and the door is closed. But then you notice there are two eye holes, so you look through, and on the other side is quite a shocking arrangement. It’s a scene, but you can only see part of it, and it’s a woman’s naked body with her legs spread. She’s holding in her hand a gas lamp. And then in the distance, you see a landscape, and there’s a waterfall.
Immediately, my experience was to become hyper-aware of the space behind me, that maybe somebody was looking at me, looking at this forbidden image.
Ann Temkin: After he died in 1968, the whole world was startled to see that Duchamp had been working on this thing for two decades, and that it didn’t look like anything anybody would’ve ever predicted Duchamp would come up with.
Michelle Kuo: So to have this very disturbing, final disruption lodged within the museum—that was Duchamp’s most provocative goodbye.