MoMA's Duchamp Retrospective: The Return of Art’s Ultimate Disruptor

LHOOQ, 1919. Pencil on postcard (rectified readymade), 7 ¾ x 4 ⅞” (19.7 x 12.4 cm).

Marcel Duchamp spent the final 25 years of his life living in an apartment at 210 West 14th Street, secretly working on his final piece of art, Étant donnés—a peepshow installation of a nude woman in a landscape. In 1973, five years after Duchamp’s death, MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) co-organized a survey of the great provocateur's work.

Fifty-three years later, New York will finally get another proper look at the man who basically invented the middle finger as high art. Next spring, MoMA will present Marcel Duchamp, a sprawling retrospective that promises to remind us why Duchamp remains the patron saint of every art student who ever wanted to flip off the establishment.

Running April 12 through August 15, 2026, in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, the show will include 300 works spanning six decades of Duchamp's gleefully subversive career. 

Duchamp (1887-1968) was the ultimate art world anarchist. He famously declared "I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting" and spent his career doing exactly that—turning everyday objects into art, questioning authorship, and generally making curators' lives infinitely more complicated.

Ann Temkin, MoMA's Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, gets straight to the point: "Contemporary artworks often prompt viewers to ask, 'Why is this art?' It is virtually impossible to answer this question without referring to the work of Duchamp." Michelle Kuo, Chief Curator at Large, adds that Duchamp "upended conventional oppositions between hand and machine, original and copy, intention and chance, and matter and idea."

The exhibition will launch with Duchamp's early work—those pre-revolutionary drawings and salon paintings that show an artist still playing by the rules. Also included: Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), the Cubist masterpiece that scandalized New York's 1913 Armory Show and hasn't been seen at MoMA since 1974. Critics at the time called it "an explosion in a shingle factory," but it became one of the most famous paintings in American art history.

Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Oil on canvas, 57 ⅞ x 35 ⅛” (147 x 89.2 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Then comes the readymades—Duchamp's revolutionary decision to take ordinary objects and declare them art through sheer audacity. While the original Fountain (1917), that infamous urinal signed "R. Mutt" that nearly broke the art world, is lost to history, the exhibition will gather surviving examples of what Duchamp himself called "the most important single idea to come out of my work."

Marcel Duchamp. Fountain, 1950 (replica of 1917 original). Porcelain urinal, 12 x 15 x 18” (30.5 x 38.1 x 45.7 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

MoMA plans a deep dive into Duchamp's Dada period, featuring the image that launched a thousand art history lectures: L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), where he gave the Mona Lisa a mustache and goatee. The title, when pronounced in French, sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul"—roughly translated as "She has a hot ass." Even his titles were acts of rebellion.

The exhibition's centerpiece will focus on Box in a Valise (1935-41), Duchamp's "portable museum" containing miniature reproductions of his life's work. This marks the most extensive presentation of these deluxe editions to date, including never-before-exhibited preparatory materials. Duchamp created these during World War II while living in New York, essentially creating the first artist's retrospective in a suitcase.

Marcel Duchamp. Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy), 1935-41. Leather valise containing miniature replicas, photographs, color reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one “original” drawing [Large Glass, collotype on celluloid, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (19 x 23.5 cm)], 16 x 15 x 4” (40.7 x 38.1 x 10.2 cm). MoMA, New York

After MoMA, the exhibition travels to the PMA (October 10, 2026-January 31, 2027), then to Paris's Grand Palais in spring 2027—a fitting global tour for an artist who spent his career crossing borders, both geographical and conceptual.

MoMA and PMA have a longstanding history with Duchamp’s work. MoMA was the first museum to acquire a work by Duchamp, in addition to including his work in early landmark exhibitions such as Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) and The Art of Assemblage (1961). The PMA is the largest repository of his oeuvre, as the home of the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection and the permanent site of two monumental works, The Large Glass and Étant donnés. Sadly, neither will leave Philadelphia for the MoMA exhibition.

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951(third version, after lost original of 1913). Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 51 x 25 x 16 ½” (129.5 x 63.5 x 41.9 cm). MoMA, New York

The accompanying catalogue promises extensive documentation and archival materials, though anyone who's spent time with Duchamp knows the real story lives in the spaces between the official narrative—in the chess games, the aliases, the elaborate jokes that took decades to pay off.

More than 50 years after his death, Duchamp remains art's most elegant troublemaker, the guy who proved that sometimes the most radical act is simply asking, "What if?" This retrospective isn't just a museum show—it's a reminder that art's best moments happen when someone decides the rules don't apply to them.

Marcel Duchamp opens at MoMA April 12, 2026. Tickets and additional information at moma.org.