04/27/2026
Join us this Wednesday, April 29th for the launch of author John Strausbaugh's new book, Duchamp Takes New York!
6:30p at City Lore Gallery
Artist, anti-artist, joker, trickster, shape-shifter: Marcel Duchamp broke with tradition and pushed the avant-garde decisively forward. When his work exploded like an art bomb in New York in the 1910s, American art was still mired in the nineteenth century. Duchamp, bored with tradition, reimagined what art could be, what it was for, and how it might be made—hanging a snow shovel from the ceiling, inverting a urinal, “painting” with dust and bits of string between panes of glass, and reducing his entire oeuvre into a briefcase of miniatures. Duchamp Takes New York traces this bold, playful energy, showing how the city inspired and staged his avant-garde experiments.
Duchamp’s offhand gestures reshaped the course of twentieth-century American art, laying the groundwork for nearly every major movement that followed. And then, at the height of his influence, Duchamp appeared to walk away—declaring himself finished with art and devoting his energies to becoming a chess champion instead. Only after his death did it emerge that he had spent two decades secretly working on one final, unsettling work, leaving the world to try to comprehend it without explanation—his ultimate prank.
John Strausbaugh, a longtime chronicler of the city, puts New York at the center of Duchamp’s story. Fleeing the comforts of French bourgeois life—“wives, three children, a country house, three cars!”—Duchamp found New York instantly liberating. It was here that he produced much of his most radical work and eventually settled for good, once declaring, “New York itself is a complete work of art.” Duchamp’s art simply can’t be pinned down, without first recognizing his relationship to New York.
Bio: John Strausbaugh is an author, historiographer and journalist. His most recent books include three deep explorations of New York City history. The Village, his epic history of Greenwich Village, was hailed as “rare and refreshing” in the New York Times. City of Sedition (2016), his history of New York City during the Civil War, won the Fletcher Pratt Award and the Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies. Victory City (2018), was praised as “a compulsively engaging read” (Washington Post). He is a former editor of the legendary downtown weekly New York Press, and has been a contributing writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.
