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Dude Descending A Staircase (Stanton Warriors Vocal Club Mix Radio Edit) Other Versions (5 of 11) View All. Cat# Artist Title (Format) Label Cat# Country Year; SSX 14CD: Apollo 440 Feat. The Beatnuts: Apollo 440 Feat. The Beatnuts - Dude Descending A Staircase (CD. Dude Descending a Staircase is the fourth studio album by the British band Apollo 440, released in 2003. The Japanese release has two additional tracks on the first disc, 'Make My Dreams Come True'.
Entrance to the New York City Armory Show, 69th Regiment Armory, New York City, 1913 The group that organized the 1913 exhibition called themselves the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. The sprawling exhibition also included American art and no doubt the organizers hoped that they might promote the work of an American vanguard in the company of illustrious European modernists. All that was quickly forgotten however, as it was Duchamp’s painting that captured attention as the exhibition toured the country. The Armory Show also had the unfortunate effect of showcasing the provincialism of American artists who seemed to paint as if nothing had changed since the Realist and Impressionist movements of the nineteenth-century.
In the face of this realization, the American artist, one of the exhibition’s organizers wryly lamented, “we have not yet arrived at a National Art.” 1. Detail, Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912, oil on canvas, 57 7/8 x 35 1/8 (151.8 x 93.3 cm) (Philadelphia Museum of Art)As the exhibition toured the country, Duchamp’s painting captured widespread attention for its unconventional rendition of the nude. He positioned the figure—its upright stance reiterated by the vertical orientation of the canvas—in a descending diagonal from upper left to lower right. A tangle of shattered geometric shapes suggest the stairs in the lower left corner of the composition while rows of receding stairs at the upper left and right frame the strangely multiplying female form as she descends. But what a descent!
The figure recalls the whirling of a robot promenading down a set of stairs as if in some sort of futurist movie, or perhaps a magic lantern show—a popular form of image projection in the years before the development of cinema. Eadweard Muybridge, Walking and Carrying a 15-lb. Basket on Head, Hands Raised, c.
1887, collotype, 16.8 x 41.8 cm (National Gallery of Art)However unresponsive the reception for Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) was in France, it became a charged symbol of the modern in America. The female form had, of course, suffered avant-garde assault for some time in Europe reaching as far back as (1863), which showed a nude female reclining across a flatly painted interior. Matisse and his followers had even in their fauvist paintings. But in America, the lingering traces of the classical style with its idealizing forms still prevailed even among more contemporary painters. Duchamp turned a venerable subject—the female nude, and all it embodied about western culture and traditions of beauty—into something monstrous and worse, something machine-like.
As in his later —which turned ordinary commercial objects into works of art—Duchamp embraced the very thing art was supposed to reject: the cold logic of industrial production.Notes1“The American Section The National Art, An Interview with The Chairman of the Domestic Committee, W.M.J. Glackens,” Arts And Decoration, vol. 2 (March 1913), p. 159.2.Additional resources:Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company), 1996.