Curator, Ann Temkin: During the fall of 1911, Duchamp, in his early twenties, living in Paris, is keeping up with Cubism. This style is most associated with Picasso, but Duchamp’s two brothers, who were also artists, made work in a Cubist style. One of the things that the Cubists wanted to invent was showing something not fixed, but fractured. Duchamp wanted to take that to show the act of movement. And this was actually informed a bit by photography showing stop motion. And he thought, why can’t you do that in painting?
So here, you actually see this one woman repeated five times. It’s someone, he said that he encountered on the street, and he’s showing this person as she’s walking by.
Curator, Michelle Kuo: He was fascinated in the fourth dimension, and in the idea that time and space are not necessarily linear in the way that had been conventionally thought. So rather than just a passive representation of the world as it is, this painting becomes a tool for looking at the world in a different way.