<MoMA Plans a Retrospective for Marcel Duchamp, the Dada Artist Who Was Unimpressed With His Own Masterpieces — Art News
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museum exhibitions calendar_today Friday, April 3, 2026

MoMA Plans a Retrospective for Marcel Duchamp, the Dada Artist Who Was Unimpressed With His Own Masterpieces

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York will open a major retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in April 2026, marking the first U.S. retrospective for the artist in over 50 years. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works, including a 1968 replica of his infamous 'Fountain,' spanning his experiments in Cubism, Futurism, film, photography, and his pioneering readymades.

This retrospective is significant because it reassembles Duchamp's radical and wide-ranging body of work, which fundamentally challenged definitions of art and authorship in the 20th century. Despite Duchamp's own professed disdain for traditional exhibitions, the show positions his output as a crucial narrative thread for understanding modern art's evolution, emphasizing his enduring influence on conceptual art and his role in shifting artistic value from creation to perception.