Prelude to MoMA’s 2026 Duchamp retrospective

To look without flinching: in 2026, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opens a definitive Marcel Duchamp retrospective. If any artist reset the terms by which modern art is judged, it is Duchamp; criteria that once felt secure become provisional in his wake. As a prelude to MoMa’s 2026 Duchamp exhibition, this piece narrows its gaze to two hinge works, The Large Glass and Étant donnés, asking how glass, light, sign and memory make looking an act of thought.

A small, studied display at Tate Britain focuses on The Large Glass, full title The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915–23, and sets out Richard Hamilton’s full-scale reconstruction from 1965–66. It offers a London vantage on Duchamp’s methods while New York gets ready for its moment.

Marcel Duchamp’s career can be read as a journey from seeing to thinking: materials and images set in play so that ideas do the real work. What follows considers two seminal works that bookend that journey, looking at how light, glass, sign and symbol shape our reading, and how the viewer’s own memory and judgement complete the piece.

Of course, Étant donnés encapsulates womanhood as did The Large Glass, and it is of note that both these seminal Duchampian works come at the beginning (here meant when Duchamp registers and puts the stamp on his progressively conceptual journey away from retinal expressions), and the end of his life.

Both works encapsulate much of the style and thinking in the broadest sense of each period in which they were created. The hyper-schematic phraseology and symbolic nomenclature that pervades The Large Glass is symptomatic of the early C20th. and particularly the Imperial European countries locked into the First World War at the tail end of the Victorian period. Signification, meaning status, hierarchy, etc. were communicated in a majorative manner through sign and symbol. In The Large Glass Duchamp marries that through a clear glass plane, a window perhaps, with a hint towards the moralising and storytelling that church stained-glass windows express. There is a conduit here with the lead and linear construction that becomes part of the way we read stained-glass windows, the lead holding the coloured panels in place also assists in leading our eyes around the storyline being presented in each case. The light coming from behind illuminating the ecclesiastical shapes and their story, it isn’t too far-fetched to say the compositions are brought to life by the light of truth, God’s light itself.

These arterial lines of lead outline the inner shapes, enforce the pattern as a 2D rhythmical vision that embodies worldwide meaning and currency.

Not just historically but in the present, the materiality of the lead, a corporeal, inert presence that heightens the light figurative shaping style and sets the exactness given the storyline. That much of this is based on the human condition, the family, social intercourse…. Hierarchical position and the emblematic symbols that act as universal signposts to importance and standing that we recognise and give importance to between men, women, religion, politics and the order of the day.

Duchamp’s The Large Glass functions using the above methodology in a compelling installation that is immersive in any environment it is placed into, not least because of several factors outlined as follows.

First comes the narrative of man’s interaction with woman in the biological sense, the chase and the journey, intuitively understood by most. Then follows the purposeful way man constructs his status in order to achieve that success. In an ordered society this is acted out through due process, the groom or masculine incentive being channelled with legal codes to adhere to. Overseeing all is the expanded battlefield plan, where position, biological function and societal necessities are laid out, interlocked and fused with the ‘proper’ schema that law and order insists upon.

The clear large glass is both a window to peer at and peer through, with the latter becoming part of the environment it is placed into. This ambivalence is reflected and gives importance to the questioning of where our limits of understanding are perceived to start and stop, the questions why and why not sets bars and patterns of self-questioning.

People, objects and space behind the glass become immersed into its visualisation as seen from the ‘front’, as its schema of nine Malic forms (Moulds), and the celestial cloud of the ‘Bride’ become like traced votive linear forms transferred onto the passers-by behind the glass. Almost by positioning it thus, there is a transference of message and meaning from the ‘Glass’ onto the visitors behind, of the universality of the message in perspective laid before us, and it universally underpinning all of our lives.

The two Duchamp works I examine lay bare a strategy for thought to achieve a positive result, much the same as in a game of chess. A chase to capture the Queen and mate the King.

Duchamp’s clever factoring in of meaning through composition, materials, and style begets the other major work at the latter end of his life Étant donnés. Here universality, memory and signification are further embedded into the composition, making its meaning even more personal since the artist insists that to see it and see it alone, its viewing is through a keyhole in a chunky formidable door that Duchamp had seen and brought to New York from Cadaqués. The artist is emphasising that sight is one-sided and your response is unique since no one else can see the installation at the same time as yourself. Equally its emphasis on ‘your point of view’, another pun on a keyhole viewing since you cannot debate your understanding of the work with everyone standing alongside and seeing the work at the same time. It is therefore your memory and mind’s set interpretation that Duchamp puts all viewers into as recall. There are further significations embedded into the composition through the feminine presence in innumerable ways. Not least among them is the clever use through association of the reclining female who holds aloft a torch (gas-lit) as lighting the way, and symbolically as in The Statue of Liberty lifting aloft the flame of righteousness, honour etc. and like a lighthouse marking the territory for all others to see. And symbolically as in The Statue of Liberty dispatching darkness and heralding a new future lit with meaning, social integration, a new life where equality, success and justice reign. The fact that Duchamp wants us to see the feminine spirit broken and discarded in a wasteland of nature, where even the naming of water is waterfall, causes the viewer on reflection to note double meanings, and all that is seen may not be the artist’s intention on first glance! The fallen woman may be hoisting the flaming torch in order ‘to see the way ahead’ that she quested for but failed to win or achieve, but the quest will go on for others? The keyhole takes on another mission then, to spotlight the importance of the quest without it being diluted by too many extraneous images or issues.

Duchamp plays with not only how we see things but how we use language and personal and social inherently learnt values embedded in them to name things and how we recognise and remember them in other contexts. Duchamp gives the viewer room to manoeuvre their thoughts and viewings without spelling out his intentions, and without the artist’s written statement rolling out alongside his works. I feel grown up in the company of Duchamp’s works, he makes the viewers of his works believe in their opinions as valid mature points of view! This gives a richness and plurality of meanings, both visual and ontological, and gives the mental thought processes a chance to expand on and enrich the initial visual encounter.

This embrace gives meaning to Duchamp’s statement and importance to his ‘of it being in the mind’!

It is sometimes worth comparing the works of other artists who worked at the same time as Marcel Duchamp and compare their works of the same dates as his. It gives a better perspective to the originality and creative genius that Duchamp was and went through to achieve these startling, progressive and magisterial creative works that in collective style have been emulated and stimulated further by many artists and interpreters that have followed.

Taken together, the works discussed here propose a way of looking that is also a way of thinking: a window that lets the world in and a keyhole that asks for privacy and concentration. Glass, light, symbol and memory are the means; the viewer’s judgement is the engine. That is why the argument still feels current: what we see is only the start, and what we make of it is the point.

Seeing Duchamp well is less a matter of eyesight than of patience. The Large Glass and Étant donnés teach a steady habit of attention, the kind that converts looking into thought and thought back into looking. You come away with the sense that the artwork is complete only when the viewer does some work too.

Duchamp at MoMA’s 2026 exhibition will allow you the rare luxury of testing that idea against the full span of a career. Reproductions and descriptions are useful, yet they flatten exactly what Duchamp keeps springing open. In person, the glass is truly glass, the keyhole truly a keyhole, and your own judgement is the hinge.

If you can, go. Take your time, twice if you can. Look steadily, without flinching, and come back to London seeing the work and the world a little differently.

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