Bottle Rack

~Duchamp, Apollinaire, and Picabia left Paris for Jura about October 20, ten days after the opening of the Salon de “La Section d’Or,” the major independent exhibition of the Puteaux Cubists and a culmination of the group’s activities. On September 2, 1912, Gil Bias had announced that Marcel Duchamp would submit a painting entitled Section d’Or. The works shown, however, were Portrait of Chess Players (fig. 15), Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (fig. 12), The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (pl. 2), Duchamp’s watercolor and gouache study for the Swift Nudes painting (fig. 24), as well as two works listed simply as Peinture and...

Modernist sculpture, which could roughly be defined chronologically as work produced after Rodin and before the shake-up of sculptural practice in the 1960s and early 1970s, had in its own time, and continues to have, an oddly uncertain status. There is no denying the pervasiveness of the modernist desire to create a new kind of object that would offer a radical alternative to the classicising and monumentalising tendencies of traditional sculpture, and would parallel the rethinking of picturing …