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Today "Nude Descending Staircase" is considered a masterpiece. Has that always been the case? What did Duchamp bring to Cubism that had not previously been seen?

Answer 1

No — it was not always hailed as a masterpiece. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) it provoked ridicule and outrage, especially at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where critics and the public found it shocking and incomprehensible. What Duchamp brought to Cubism that was new was a strong sense of movement and the passage of time: instead of only fragmenting form into simultaneous viewpoints (as Picasso and Braque had done), he layered repeated, machine‑like shapes to show a sequence of motion (influenced by chronophotography and Futurism). In doing so he fused Cubist fragmentation with temporal dynamism and a mechanized aesthetic, creating a radically different way to represent the human figure.