Whereas in his earlier Cubist works Duchamp captured motion, in The Passage from Virgin to Bride he depicted transformation. For the Surrealist artist Roberto Matta, a great admirer of Duchamp, the work “attacked a whole new problem in art, and solved it—to paint the moment of change, change itself.” The painting also marked a significant step in Duchamp’s development as an artist: He later told Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of MoMA, that it reflected “my own passage from something into something else.”
Marcel Duchamp, April 12–August 22, 2026
Provenance Research Project
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1912 - 1915 The artist
1915 - 1945 Walter Pach, New York (Gift of the artist)
1945 The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Purchased from Walter Pach)
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Marcel Duchamp
American, born France. 1887–1968 188 works onlineWhen Marcel Duchamp created his most famous work—the industrially produced urinal Fountain —it was largely ignored. Fountain was the high point of Duchamp’s campaign to dismantle and expand the boundaries of what constitutes a work of art; it had begun four years earlier, when he asked, “Can one make works that are not ‘of art’?
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