This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited in New York in February 1913 at the historic Armory Show of contemporary art, where perplexed Americans saw it as representing all the tricks they felt European artists were playing at their expense. The picture's outrageousness surely lay in its seemingly mechanical portrayal of a subject at once so sensual and time-honored. The Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed from its remarkable aggregation of avant-garde concerns: the birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the Futurists' depiction of movement; the chromophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins; and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers. The painting was bought directly from the Armory Show for three hundred dollars by a San Francisco dealer. Marcel Duchamp's great collector-friend Walter Arensberg was able to buy the work in 1927, eleven years after Duchamp had obligingly made him a hand-colored, actual-size photographic copy. Today both the copy and the original, together with a preparatory study, are owned by the Museum. Ann Temkin, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 307.

Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) sparked a storm of controversy at the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the National Guard 69th Regiment Armory in New York in 1913. The painting was perceived by the majority of art critics to be utterly unintelligible, and it soon became the butt of jokes, jingles, and caricatures. The American Art News offered a ten dollar reward to the first reader who could "find the lady"¹ within the jumble of interlocking planes and jagged lines, and newspaper cartoonists had a field day with the painting, lampooning it with such titles as "The Rude Descending the Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)" and the memorable "Explosion in a Shingle Factory." When Duchamp learned of the scandal, he was delighted, and the widespread notoriety that the painting brought him encouraged the French artist to move to New York two years later.

Duchamp reduced the descending nude to a series of some twenty different static positions whose fractured volumes and linear panels fill almost the entire canvas. The faceted disintegration of the mechanized figure and the monochromatic tonality are typical of Cubist painting of the time. However, the serial depiction of movement goes beyond Cubism in its attempt to map the motion and energy of the body as it passes through space. Duchamp's interest in plotting the static phases of a moving subject has often been compared to the work of the Italian Futurists, who were obsessed with notions of velocity. Another precedent for the work can be found in the time-lapse photography of Étienne-Jules Marey in France and Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins in the United States. Muybridge's book Animal Locomotion, of 1887, which included a sequence of twenty-four images of a naked woman descending a flight of stairs, possibly served as a source for Duchamp s landmark painting. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 27.

Note:
1) American Art News, vol. 11, no. 21 (March 1, 1913), p. 3, and vol. 11, no. 22 (March 8, 1913), p. 3.