Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp in the Museum of Modern Art, August 2007

Marcel Duchamp. (American, born France. 1887-1968). Bicycle Wheel. New York 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913). Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 51 x 25 x 16 1/2" (129.5 x 63.5 x 41.9 cm). The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection.

Gallery label text
Dada, June 18–September 11, 2006

Although Duchamp had collected manufactured objects in his studio in Paris, it was not until he came to New York that he identified them as a category of art, giving the English name "Readymade" to any object purchased "as a sculpture already made." When he modified these objects, for example by mounting a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool, he called them "Assisted Readymades." Duchamp later recalled that the original Bicycle Wheel was created as a "distraction": "I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace."



Publication excerpt
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 87

Bicycle Wheel is Duchamp's first Readymade, a class of artworks that raised fundamental questions about artmaking and, in fact, about art's very definition. This example is actually an "assisted Readymade": a common object (a bicycle wheel) slightly altered, in this case by being mounted upside-down on another common object (a kitchen stool). Duchamp was not the first to kidnap everyday stuff for art; the Cubists had done so in collages, which, however, required aesthetic judgment in the shaping and placing of materials. The Readymade, on the other hand, implied that the production of art need be no more than a matter of selection—of choosing a preexisting object. In radically subverting earlier assumptions about what the artmaking process entailed, this idea had enormous influence on later artists, particularly after the broader dissemination of Duchamp's thought in the 1950s and 1960s.

The components of Bicycle Wheel, being mass-produced, are anonymous, identical or similar to countless others. In addition, the fact that this version of the piece is not the original seems inconsequential, at least in terms of visual experience. (Having lost the original Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp simply remade it almost four decades later.) Duchamp claimed to like the work's appearance, "to feel that the wheel turning was very soothing." Even now, Bicycle Wheel retains an absurdist visual surprise. Its greatest power, however, is as a conceptual proposition.



Publication excerpt
Anne D'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973, p. 270

The original Bicycle Wheel was left behind in Paris when Duchamp sailed to New York in 1915. He made a replica for his New York studio around 1916, which later also disappeared.

Duchamp described this work in an interview with Pierre Cabanne:

"...when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool the fork down, there was no idea of a 'readymade,' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything."

And he remarked to Arturo Schwarz:

"To see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace."



Publication excerpt
Three Generations of Twentieth-Century Art: The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972, p. 48

The Bicycle Wheel was the first of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades and is probably the best known. Although, a year or two earlier, Cubist collage had introduced commonplace materials into art, the Readymades constituted a radical attempt to create anti-art. By the simple act of mounting a wheel on a stool, Duchamp reduced the heroic art-making process to one of mere selection: any mass-p