Few artists have sparked more critical response than Marcel Duchamp—the subject of a big MoMA retrospective on view April 12 through August 22. Even Picasso’s legacy finds in the Frenchman’s conceptual practice a divergent and influential foil. While Cubism and collage revolutionized pictorial space and its aesthetic offshoots, Duchamp upended the very premise of aesthetics. In his wake, objects and images appear no longer as ends unto themselves, but rather vectors of unresolved questions.  Marcel Duchamp Recently revised and expanded, this insightful 2021 survey examines Duchamp’s achievements chronologically, from his early interpretations of Cubism to latter-day replicas of signature works. Even as they distill Duchamp’s trajectory to its key gambits, coauthors Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins don’t shy away from strong arguments; the legendary Fountain, they contend, performs a critique of nationalist chauvinism in its (literal) inversion of American plumbing. The authors take seriously Duchamp’s formative contributions to Conceptual art, gender performance, and art history while resisting the hagiographic tendency to cast him as a sui generis genius. The light they shed on …