The Marcel Duchamps That Got Away: On Collecting His Work And The Sprawling Moma Show

A set of 14 Marcel Duchamp readymades that once struggled to find buyers is now being reframed by museums and galleries as foundational to modern art. The shift is striking because the same works were offered in 2002 at Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg, where the market response was far cooler than their current status might suggest.

The group, editioned through Arturo Schwartz in 1964, included some of Duchamp's most familiar objects. Fountain brought $1.2 million. Bicycle Wheel sold for $1.7 million. Bottle Rack and In Advance of a Broken Arm were bought in. Other works, including Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?, Traveler's Folding Item, With Hidden Noise, Apolinère Enameled, and Fresh Widow, traded in the $200,000 to $300,000 range. Air de Paris, Trébuchet, 3 Standard Stoppages, and Comb barely cleared their reserves.

The sale reportedly totaled about $5 million against a rumored $10 million guarantee, leaving the auction house with a substantial loss. In retrospect, the set looks like a missed opportunity for anyone willing to take the long view. The author later acquired the Bottle Rack and shovel privately, at a loss, and Joseph Kosuth's Duchamp shovel eventually hammered for $2.5 million at Christie's after once being privately offered at $7 million.

That reversal says as much about taste as it does about price. Walter Hopps's Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 had already signaled the artist's importance to a generation of artists and collectors, but the market took far longer to catch up. Today, The Museum of Modern Art's Duchamp exhibition is being described as encyclopedic, exhaustive, and exhausting, while Gagosian is showing a full set of readymades.

Duchamp's market has always moved in uneven cycles. What once seemed dry, difficult, or even absurd now reads as central to the story of 20th-century art - and the institutions surrounding it have made that case with unusual force.

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