AUDIO DESCRIPTION
NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE
This is Marcel Duchamp’s painting titled Nude Descending a Staircase.
It’s the work most often mentioned when people refer to the 1913 Armory Show. Both visitors and critics were confused by what they saw and incensed that it was called art. One reviewer wrote quote, “ There is no nude and no stairway. Why under heaven should an artist want to paint such an object, and why should such a performance be called art?” Another said it looked like quote “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
Duchamp’s painting is a large oil painting on canvas, a vertical rectangle 3 feet wide and almost 5 feet tall, so the figure in it is almost life size. In essence it’s an abstracted human figure walking from left to right down a flight of 3 or 4 wooden steps. Here’s an audio interpretation of the painting.
ONE PASS DOWN STEPS
But the human walking down the steps is not the least bit realistic. The body is made up of flat shapes, like wooden slats, a mix of pale beige and green. These shapes represent the head, torso, arms, and legs. If there was one of these human figures people might not have been confused. But Duchamp has painted many versions of this figure moving down the steps and overlapped them.
So if we take the audio version of the single pass down the steps and overlap it many times, the painting is more like this.
LOOPED VERSION OF STEPS
In a speech many years later Duchamp described his painting this way:
Quote, The anatomical nude does not exist or at least cannot be seen. Since I discarded completely the naturalistic appearance of the nude keeping only the abstract lines of some 20 different positions in the successive action of descending.
What motivated Duchamp to do this painting? Two things: first, he was interested in Cubism, and the fact that artists could paint multiple points of view within one painting. Duchamp was exploring how to present multiple points of view AND multiple points in time within a painting. Second, Duchamp was fascinated by the cinema which was in its infancy. In fact, one critic in 1913 got it right when he wrote that the painting was quote “calculated to give one a sense of progressive motion, such as the succession of images in a moving-picture produce.”
So in a sense Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase is like a short looped film of a person walking down steps. But it’s as if duchamp took the individual frames of the film and laid them over each so that you see them simultaneously. So as long as you look at the painting, the activity of going down steps seems to continue without end as if the figure is in constant movement.
LOOP OF FEET....FADES OUT
NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE
This is Marcel Duchamp’s painting titled Nude Descending a Staircase.
It’s the work most often mentioned when people refer to the 1913 Armory Show. Both visitors and critics were confused by what they saw and incensed that it was called art. One reviewer wrote quote, “ There is no nude and no stairway. Why under heaven should an artist want to paint such an object, and why should such a performance be called art?” Another said it looked like quote “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
Duchamp’s painting is a large oil painting on canvas, a vertical rectangle 3 feet wide and almost 5 feet tall, so the figure in it is almost life size. In essence it’s an abstracted human figure walking from left to right down a flight of 3 or 4 wooden steps. Here’s an audio interpretation of the painting.
ONE PASS DOWN STEPS
But the human walking down the steps is not the least bit realistic. The body is made up of flat shapes, like wooden slats, a mix of pale beige and green. These shapes represent the head, torso, arms, and legs. If there was one of these human figures people might not have been confused. But Duchamp has painted many versions of this figure moving down the steps and overlapped them.
So if we take the audio version of the single pass down the steps and overlap it many times, the painting is more like this.
LOOPED VERSION OF STEPS
In a speech many years later Duchamp described his painting this way:
Quote, The anatomical nude does not exist or at least cannot be seen. Since I discarded completely the naturalistic appearance of the nude keeping only the abstract lines of some 20 different positions in the successive action of descending.
What motivated Duchamp to do this painting? Two things: first, he was interested in Cubism, and the fact that artists could paint multiple points of view within one painting. Duchamp was exploring how to present multiple points of view AND multiple points in time within a painting. Second, Duchamp was fascinated by the cinema which was in its infancy. In fact, one critic in 1913 got it right when he wrote that the painting was quote “calculated to give one a sense of progressive motion, such as the succession of images in a moving-picture produce.”
So in a sense Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase is like a short looped film of a person walking down steps. But it’s as if duchamp took the individual frames of the film and laid them over each so that you see them simultaneously. So as long as you look at the painting, the activity of going down steps seems to continue without end as if the figure is in constant movement.
LOOP OF FEET....FADES OUT