art: Marcel Duchamp even more significant

While at MOMA for Serra, I went through the collection galleries. Picasso was quite the lad. I didn't realize how his periods overlapped, for example in 1921 he made both the cubist Three Musicians and the chunky Three Women at the Spring. Overall, I think SFMOMA lays out its collection better.

I knew Marcel Duchamp blazed new trails with his readymades, like the "R. Mutt" urinal and the Bicycle Wheel (1913), a bicycle fork and wheel mounted to a chair (MOMA has a remake). The latter is also arguably the first kinetic sculpture.

But he's so much more 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-1914) is pure conceptual art. "A straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases and creates a new image of the unit of length." Prefigures everything Sol LeWitt (recently died, RIP) and others have ever done.

Network of Stoppages (1914) with its grid and letters and overpainting seems to prefigure everything that Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, and John Baldessari have done.

And the joking around with names like Rrose Sélavy is amazingly prescient.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) is a darn nice cubist/futurist work, though he painted it about the same time as those movements.

Incredible.