{"product_id":"marcel-duchamp-apropos-philadelphia-museum-of-art-1987","title":"MARCEL DUCHAMP — Philadelphia Museum of Art  — Apropos of Marcel Duchamp 1887\/1987,","description":"\u003cp\u003eIssued by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1987 for Marcel Duchamp's centennial, this folded programme — 12.5 × 16 cm folded, 25 × 16 cm unfolded — catches an extraordinary reversal. Duchamp had spent much of the twentieth century testing where art begins and ends: readymade or commodity, artist or chess player, original or reproduction. By the time of his centenary, Philadelphia had become perhaps the most concentrated institutional home his work could have.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat relationship had been decades in the making. In 1950, Walter and Louise Arensberg gave their extraordinary collection of modern art to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including what became the world's foremost institutional concentration of Duchamp. Duchamp was not simply represented by it: he had advised the Arensbergs and, in 1953–54, worked with museum staff on the installation of their collection, positioning \u003cem\u003eThe Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)\u003c\/em\u003e at its centre. Then came the final move. Duchamp secretly worked on \u003cem\u003eÉtant donnés\u003c\/em\u003e from 1946 to 1966, leaving instructions for its eventual transfer and reconstruction in Philadelphia. It was unveiled there in 1969, a year after his death. The museum therefore did not merely collect Duchamp retrospectively: parts of Duchamp's own practice had been organised around ending up there.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe museum's exhibition \u003cem\u003eApropos of Marcel Duchamp 1887\/1987\u003c\/em\u003e ran from 1 October 1987 to 3 January 1988, but this programme reveals that Philadelphia's tribute was already spilling beyond a single exhibition. Its interior announces events across the city — from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to Nexus Gallery, the Please Touch Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Duchamp, born 28 July 1887, had effectively become a citywide proposition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd yet the object refuses the solemnity usually reserved for a centenary. On the cover, Duchamp's photographed profile is partially veiled by translucent paper and interrupted with a bright red moustache and goatee — a graphic return to the irreverence of \u003cem\u003eL.H.O.O.Q.\u003c\/em\u003e The dates 1887 \/ 1987 repeat down the page like an administrative error or a score being kept. Portrait, typography and quotation remain visible through one another. Open it and Duchamp appears again, larger, but the photograph is sliced by overlapping silhouettes and translucent layers. Turn it over and the portrait gives way almost completely to chess: a red-and-grey board populated by scattered pieces and Duchamp's famous proposition that not every artist is a chess player, but every chess player is an artist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat detail is more than decoration. Duchamp's relationship with chess was sustained and serious; he competed, wrote about the game and repeatedly treated its abstract structure as adjacent to artistic thought. By putting the chessboard on the outer panel, the museum allows one of his most persistent complications of artistic identity to become the brochure's visual conclusion.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA museum commemorating the centenary of one of the twentieth century's most institutionally disruptive artists could have produced a respectable anniversary leaflet. Instead it produced an object built from quotation, transparency, repetition, appropriation, chess and a moustache drawn over an already famous face. The institution has canonised Duchamp, but the graphic design keeps misbehaving. By 1987, so many gestures that Duchamp had once made dangerous — the found object, displaced authorship, reproduction, linguistic games, the collapse between art and everyday systems — had become basic vocabulary for several generations of contemporary artists. The centennial therefore marks more than the survival of an individual reputation. It records the moment when Duchamp had stopped being merely influential and become infrastructure. Philadelphia understood that earlier than most.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: very good vintage; translucent stock with gentle overall age toning consistent with age. Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Philadelphia Museum of Art","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54257651515730,"sku":"DUCHAMP-PMA-CAT-1987","price":145.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Duchamp_Marcel.AproposofMarcelDuchamp.1987.jpg?v=1786681454","url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/products\/marcel-duchamp-apropos-philadelphia-museum-of-art-1987","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}