Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés

For twenty years Marcel Duchamp let the art world believe he had given up art for chess while he built Étant donnés in secret, and this is the book that finally opens the door on how he did it.

Published in 2009 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Yale University Press for the exhibition marking the fortieth anniversary of the work's unveiling, Michael R. Taylor's volume runs to 448 pages with 343 colour and 117 black-and-white illustrations. It reconstructs the making of the tableau between 1946 and 1966 across two New York studios, reproducing Duchamp's Polaroids and the colour photographs from the First Manual of Instructions, Denise Browne Hare's 1968 portfolio and the letters to Maria Martins. Conservation essays by Andrew Lins, Melissa S. Meighan and colleagues report on the materials, and a closing section traces the work's afterlife in art by Les Levine, Hannah Wilke, Robert Gober and Marcel Dzama. The catalogue received the 2009 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award.

Duchamp (1887-1968) spent his last two decades apparently at leisure, and Étant donnés was revealed as a permanent installation in Philadelphia in July 1969, the year after his death. Its peep-hole voyeurism and trompe-l'oeil realism reversed the conceptual austerity his admirers had assumed was final.