Nude Descending a Staircase

Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting depicts a descending figure through overlapping, repeated forms that suggest motion. Its fractured geometry combines Cubist analysis with an interest in movement and time.

Cubism: An early twentieth-century art movement that represented subjects through fragmented forms and multiple viewpoints. Duchamp adapts Cubist fragmentation to depict a figure changing position over time.
Marcel Duchamp: A French-American artist whose work challenged conventional ideas of art, authorship, and artistic skill. He painted the work while moving away from traditional representation toward experimental forms.
Jacques Villon: A French painter and printmaker, and Marcel Duchamp’s elder brother. As a member of the Puteaux group, he was among the Cubist peers involved in the painting’s early controversy.
Roto Broil: A 1915 American advertisement that parodied Duchamp’s painting to promote a cooking appliance. It turned the painting’s descending figure into a comic image of a roasting chicken.
Chronophotography: A photographic method that records successive phases of movement, often as multiple exposures on one image. Its sequential images offered a visual precedent for Duchamp’s repeated figure.
Salon des Indépendants: An annual Paris exhibition founded in 1884 that accepted works without a jury or prizes. Duchamp withdrew the painting from its 1912 exhibition before it was shown there.
Raymond Duchamp-Villon: A French sculptor and Marcel Duchamp’s elder brother, associated with the Cubist Puteaux group. His artistic circle included the Cubists who objected to the painting’s unconventional title and approach.
Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (after Duchamp): A 1966 work by Shigeko Kubota that reworks Duchamp’s painting as a video sculpture. Kubota translated its repeated movement into a sculptural arrangement of video monitors.
Eadweard Muybridge: A British photographer known for sequential photographs that analyzed human and animal locomotion. His motion studies made successive phases of movement available as images.
Armory Show: A 1913 exhibition in New York that introduced many Americans to modern European art. The painting became a sensation there, provoking both ridicule and serious attention.