In April, the Museum of Modern Art will open its first comprehensive Duchamp retrospective in over 50 years—a show that, more than a century after Nude Descending a Staircase scandalized the 1913 Armory Show, still promises to make people uncomfortable. That’s exactly the point.
The Scandal That Saved Art
When Marcel Duchamp unveiled Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 in 1913, critics descended on it like vultures. The painting was called vulgar, incomprehensible, a fraud—one critic memorably compared it to “an explosion in a shingle factory.” What they were actually reacting to wasn’t obscenity but disruption: Duchamp had taken the most classical subject in Western art—the idealized female nude—and fragmented it into something that looked almost like a machine.
The painting wasn’t erotic. It was strange. And strangeness, as it turns out, is far more threatening to the status quo than sexuality.
The Armory Show brought Nude Descending to New York, where it became instantly notorious. Duchamp, who was not yet 26, understood that he’d found something true: the nude in art is never just about beauty or the body. It’s about ideas—about movement, about technology, about what we’re willing to see when we look at the human form.
From Figure to Concept
Duchamp’s genius wasn’t that he painted a naked woman; it’s that he made nakedness strange again. Before him, the nude was frozen in classical idealism. After him, it became impossible to paint the nude without acknowledging that the act of looking—and the context in which we look—changes what we see.
This is the foundation of modern and contemporary nude art. When photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe later pushed boundaries, they were extending Duchamp’s insight: the real controversy isn’t the body itself, but who gets to depict it, in what context, and what we’re allowed to feel about it.
Why the MoMA Show Matters Right Now
Duchamp died in 1968. Why does his retrospective, 58 years later, matter for conversations about nude art in 2026?
Because the same arguments that greeted Nude Descending in 1913 are still happening on Instagram, TikTok, and museum walls today. Social platforms censor artistic nudes with the same logic that critics once used to condemn Duchamp: confusion between nudity and sexuality, between body and obscenity. What counts as “art” vs. what gets flagged as “adult content” still hinges on context, presentation, and who’s making the call.
The MoMA retrospective is a chance to experience how Duchamp transformed not just what the nude looks like, but how we think about looking. His legacy isn’t a style—it’s permission to ask uncomfortable questions.
For NALA: A Lineage Worth Claiming
Nude Art LA sits at the tail end of a tradition that traces directly back to Duchamp: the insistence that nudity in art is not a proposition about sex, but about seeing. The artists, photographers, and performers who show their work at NALA are doing something Duchamp started—making us see the familiar human body as something we need to reconsider.
That’s harder than it sounds. It’s easier to shock people than to make them think. Duchamp did both. He knew that when you fragment the nude, when you make it mechanical, when you refuse to let viewers coast on aesthetic pleasure, they have to engage. They have to defend their discomfort or move past it.
The MoMA show runs April 12 to August 22, with a second venue at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in October. If you’re thinking about what nude art can be, what it should ask of viewers, and why institutional spaces matter for this work—it’s a masterclass.
The Real Legacy
Nude Descending a Staircase is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art collection, where it’s one of the most beloved works of the 20th century. The scandal is historical. The painting looks almost tame by today’s standards.
But Duchamp’s actual legacy—the insistence that the nude is never “just” the body, that context is everything, that we need to defend artistic freedom precisely because it makes us uncomfortable—that’s still urgent. Still controversial. Still necessary.
And that’s why NALA exists.
Want to support nude art that challenges, questions, and makes space for the human body as subject—not object? Get involved with Nude Art LA →