In his famous "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" (1912) Marcel Duchamp used a limited cubist palette and faceting of forms but completely contradicted the cubist esthetic in his choice of an ironic title and stress on actual movement. When this painting was exhibited at the Armory Show in New York City in 1913, it created an uproar and was the focal point for derogatory criticism of the show (one critic described the work as "an explosion in a shingle factory").
             In 1912-1913 a radical change took place in both Duchamp's life and art. Together with the writer Guillaume Apollinaire and the painter Francis Picabia, he began working out a highly original and mocking concept of art. Duchamp sought out methods of making art in which the artist's hand would not be stressed (using chance and mechanical methods of drawing and painting). Increasingly language and the nonvisual side of art became important to him. As he later said: "I am interested in ideas--not merely the visual products. I want to put painting once again to the service of the mind."
             In 1913 Duchamp created his first "ready-made," the Bicycle Wheel. This was the first of a limited number of everyday objects that Duchamp chose (sometimes making minor additions), rather than made by hand. In these he questioned conventional ideas about the artist's role in the creation of art and about original and unique artistic products, and he brought up issues as to the value of art, the market, and the art gallery. In the next few years he turned out a small number of ready-mades; the most famous was his Fountain, which shocked the American public in 1917 when they saw an ordinary urinal displayed in an art exhibition.
             About 1915, Duchamp began work on a construction on glass, the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, commonly called the Large Glass. It was left incomplete in 1923, and the glass was cracked in 1926. Duchamp used many original and complex processes in it...